The Americans Are Coming Read Free Page A

just like Palidin and Dryfly to be watchin’ a lad havin’ a dump,” he thought. “They’re prob’ly tryin’ to scare me.”
    “All right boys, come out! I know you’re there!”
    He heard the sound again, but this time it had moved – it was more to the left.
    Without giving what he thought was Palidin and Dryfly any chance to flee, he dashed into the bush, thinking he would take them by surprise.
    There was nobody there.
    He listened once more. “Palidin? Dryfly?”
    The song of a bird came up from the brook. He could not identify it.
    “When I get my hands on you lads, I’m gonna introduce you to the rough and tumble!” he shouted. He hoped he sounded like the Lone Ranger.
    There was a bit of a clearing ahead of him, where the sun
    had nourished the ferns to waist height. He thought he saw an unusual movement in their midst. He went to check it out.
    Nothing.
    “Must’ve been a bird,” he thought.
    “The hell with yas!” he yelled, turned and headed back to where he thought the family would be.
    He walked for half an hour, realized they couldn’t be that far away, turned and walked for an hour, came to a barren and realized he was very lost.
    He zigzagged back and forth for several more hours, calling, “Mom! Palidin! Dryfly! Naggie!”
    Occasionally he got an echo, but that was all.
    He grew warm and panicky; his pace quickened; he scratched his arms and legs on dead limbs and brush. The flies found him.
    At dusk, he found himself at the barren’s edge once again. He didn’t know if he was on the near or the homeward side of it.
    When you step into a barren, your foot sinks ankle-deep into a wet, moss-like vegetation. When you wander into a barren, you’d better mark your point of entry, for once you get in a few hundred yards, everything starts to look the same – look down, look up and you’re lost.
    Bonzie thought he saw something on the barren. Bonzie was already lost and had nothing to lose – he headed towards the something.
    It took him a half hour to get to what he was looking at, and it turned out to be a huge boulder. Exhausted, he sat on the boulder to watch the stars as, one by one, they appeared. He cried for a long while, slept for a little while, then cried some more.
    He heard something walking, splush, splush, splush, off to his right. He held his breath, for better hearing. He prayed a silent Hail Mary.
    Splush . . . splush . . . splush – whatever it was, was passing him by.
    At first he thought it might be a bear, or a moose, but he wasn’t sure.
    “It could be a man. It could be a man looking for me. I got nothin’ to lose,” he thought.
    “Whoop! Over here!”
    A game warden found the fly-bitten, crow-pecked body of Bonzie a month later, back of the barren.
    As a result of Bonzie getting lost, Dryfly feared getting lost more than anything else in the world. The thought of being alone in the woods to battle the flies horrified him. He even had nightmares about it. The flies – the more you battled, the more you attracted – would be the worst thing of all. And to die and have your body exposed to the woods . . .
    Years later when Dryfly was asked the whereabouts of Bonzie by an elderly, absent-minded teacher, he replied, “He went for a shit and the crows got him.
    *
    Dryfly was giving way to slumber when Shirley passed through the curtain that served as the bedroom door to stand before him at the foot of the bed.
    “I’ve made up your lunch, Dry,” said Shirley, “and wrote an excuse to the teacher fer ya. I’m gonna need you home tomorrow, Dry, so’s I want ya to go to school today. I got yer lunch all packed.”
    The emotional cloud over Shirley was thick and black and it spread over Dryfly as if instructed by a magic wand. His heart quickened, his stomach fluttered and tears of defeat commenced to flow.
    “But I can’t, Mom!” he sobbed.
    “You might have to stay home tomorrow, Dry. We’ve run out of grub, so’s I want you to go today.”
    “But