James Rawles - Liberators

“I am with you now and if you’ll have me, I plan on marrying you the first chance we get. And as for now, what would you say to an extended camping trip in the Olympia State Forest—no phones ringing, no high-side e-mail to check, no disgruntled ex-wives’ club clicking their tongues around your cubicle space—how does that sound?”

Megan kissed Joshua. Then they got up, found their bearings, and located the carts. Getting the loaded carts up and over the rugged terrain was not easy and took most of the day. “This should make it more difficult for someone trying to pursue us, if it was this hard for us to get these carts up here,” Megan said.

“Well, maybe, but someone doesn’t need to bring very much with them to spell trouble for us up here.”

When they returned to camp in the midafternoon, they were completely exhausted, but the weather had changed. The air was wet and almost warm, the kind of conditions that were familiar to Megan or anyone else who’d grown up in cold country as being a precursor to snow. “The snow should cover our tracks and give us a clean canvas to know if someone has been in our area. Also, it’ll be easier to track game.”

Malorie had Leo and Jean on leaf and pine needle detail. They eventually had quite a thick pad of brush down for everyone to sleep on. The cave had a narrow entrance, and they had to stoop to enter. It was a classic karst water-carved cave, but at some point the limestone formation had gone dry, leaving a chamber that varied between four feet and eight feet wide, with a gentle upward slope. The height varied between six and twelve feet, before sharply tapering at the back. The cave lacked fancy stalactites and stalagmites, but the boys still declared it “awesome.”

They squeezed the deer carts into the back of the cave. There were spots wide enough for beds down the length of the cave, with enough room to walk by them. Joshua’s bed spot was closest to the entrance, then came Malorie’s, then Megan’s, and finally the boys’. Megan and Malorie helped set up the quarters as best they could in the space they had. Once a blanket was rigged to cover the cave’s entrance, they noticed that their body heat alone—when added to the sixty-two-degree ambient ground temperature—soon took the chill off the air in the cave.

Joshua set about improving the site in small ways, such as digging a slit trench for a solid-waste latrine, improvising an overwatch position, and making a range card for everyone’s use.

“We’re going to be here awhile, so we need to be able to defend it. It likely goes without saying, but our first defense is passive. That means that we remain unseen. We’re too small a force to ward off anyone, and it won’t take any time at all for the reports from our guns to alert anyone within earshot that there are people up here. People mean possible resources to exploit, which brings me back to the first thing that I said—passive defense.”

Malorie added, “I can see a real need to go out for water, to forage for food, or to hunt. I’m assuming that our chief liabilities as far as protection would be the children. That being said, one adult is likely enough to stay here and take care of them and ‘hold down the fort,’ but if anyone needs to go out, they should have at least one adult with them.”

“I like that idea,” Megan said. “What about weapons?”

“Yeah, about that.” Joshua took off his watch cap and scratched his head. “Handguns mandatory at all times—always within arm’s reach . I’m fine with long weapons slung around your body, but definitely at the ready anytime you’re leaving camp with another adult, like you said, Mal. I’m going to see what I can fashion out of some wood and 550 cord to put the .270 in the cave up off the ground so that it’s accessible and out of the way. I think that your carbines are decent for close targets as are both of the shotguns; we’d only need to use these to defend ourselves, because if someone is out far enough that we would need the .270—”

Malorie finished his sentence, “Then we’re to be quiet and unseen in a passive defense, right?”

“Exactly!” Joshua replied. “So for day-to-day storage, the .270 will be in the shelter out of the way. Besides, a shotgun is my preferred weapon anyway.”

Megan said, “I’ll do a thorough inventory of our food and set a rations schedule for us. We’ll be dependent on fishing, foraging, and hunting for supplementing what we have. I can’t think that we have anyone that we can trade with here, so we’ll have to make what we have last.” Joshua and Malorie nodded in agreement. “There must be houses around, so I think that we should probably set up deliberate two-person patrols to find out if there are others in our AO so that we can steer well clear of them. Anyone with a house nearby is likely going to be very keen on shooting first and asking questions later of anyone approaching their turf.”

“Joshua, do you have much hunting experience?” Malorie asked.

“Truthfully, I don’t. I have plenty of trigger time, so if a deer wants to hold the broadside pose I can hit it, but I know that there is more to woodscraft than that.”

“Megan and I had lots of hunting experience with our papa, so I think that we should set out to hunt/patrol at least three days a week.”

“Good idea, Mal,” Megan said.

“We can move slowly, take notes, and report back on what, if anything, we see. And if, I mean when, we take a deer we can quarter it, hang it up, and pack it out in two trips.”

“After we harvest the deer, we’ll have to find a way to smoke it since we don’t have nearly enough salt to cure the meat in order to preserve it. I’ll start thinking of how we can do that.” Malorie rubbed her fingertips across her eyes and said, “After our meat stock is good, we can certainly switch the patrol schedule around.”

“I think that any two-person party leaving needs to leave a plan behind: where they’re going, who’s going with them, what’s the intent, when they should be expected back, and what actions are to be taken if they don’t return by that time. This will all be critical since I can’t just take the boys with me to go get you or vice versa,” Joshua said.

“I agree, let’s do that,” Megan said. “Also, we have all of our eggs in one basket here. What do you think about taking the bug-out bags and stashing them in another cave under a tarp covered with leaves? Perhaps taking the compact valuables as well as the junk silver, my AR-7, or ammo and cache that somewhere else, too? This way, if we do get hit here we can escape and evade without losing everything.”

“I like it. It spreads out our attack liability,” said Joshua.

“Since this is ‘home’ for a while, we need to set up a watch around the clock. This is going to mean a lot of boredom and downtime on watch. I don’t mind taking the night shift provided that I can sleep during the day.”

“I have an idea,” said Malorie. “If everyone takes exactly eight hours with a small pass down at shift change then we’d be pretty much stuck on the same schedule all the time. But if we rotate seven hours or nine hours, then the watch will slowly change over time and no one person gets stuck.”

“Hmm, Mal, that might just work,” Megan said. “The other fourteen or eighteen hours could be divided up into sleeping or taking care of the camp, cooking, cleaning, looking after the boys, etcetera.”

“But for us to really make the most of our time here, we’ll need to hunt and do patrols as well. When it comes time to move in the spring, we’ll be familiar with each other enough on the trail to cover the ground to Bradfordsville with the best possible chance of avoiding detection,” Malorie said.