CUYAHOGA RIVER RIDERS: THUNDERBIRD'S WAR
Written by Lee Fanning
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After escaping a British raid, Thunderbird-- masked leader of the Revolutionary War heroes the Cuyahoga River Riders-- must survive a dangerous journey to bring an infant to her family in the heart of war zone.
HOW THIS ADVENTURE MAKES YOU SMARTERSCIENCE
HISTORY
LANGUAGE ARTS
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“This child should be with family!”
The shrillness of the tattered old woman’s voice surprises Rebecca, which isn’t easy, considering she’s just endured the greater part of a British siege-- but she doesn’t let on. While still in persona as the Thunderbird-- cloaked in black with a startling white mask, a scraggly, bird-like skull design scrawled across it-- she has to stay calm. Nothing surprises Thunderbird. “Where are the parents?” she asks, blunt and cold, turning her mare-- a brown paint horse with large white spots-- slightly closer, eyeing the swaddled infant in the shivering woman’s arms. “Were they killed in the raid?” “The mother, yes,” the panicked woman sobs. “The father fights with the Colonial Army-- and we’ve not a clue where, nor if he’s even still alive! But this child needs her family!” Musket fire draws Thunderbird’s attention back to the flames of the settlement they have just fled. For a moment, there’s a flash in her memory-- a painful familiarity-- before she shakes it off, unrattled. Nothing rattles Thunderbird. |
“Then who’s left? You don’t expect us to deliver the babe to the Colonial Army.”
“NO!” the woman blurts, frustration overtaking her trembling fear. “An uncle, in Richmond--”
“Richmond?” Thunderbird asks sharply, again covering her surprise. “That’s a week’s ride.”
“Is that this child’s fault? I can’t keep her and there’s no longer any place for her here! Her uncle just wrote last winter-- he’s leaving Richmond the last day of May! You can still catch him!”
“That’s in five days. Impossible.”
“No! Not if you believe the cause is worthy!”
Thunderbird considers-- until she’s alerted by hoof beats behind them. She flinches, a moment, though so slightly most wouldn’t notice, until she confirms it’s friends-- Dispatch and Banshee-- or Frederick and James-- her two lead generals and comrades at arms in the motley collection of war orphans who’ve banded together in a crusade to help patriots on the Western Frontier, known to those they help as the Cuyahoga River Riders.
“The militia men are fleeing,” breathes Dispatch, his booming voice matching the pure blacks of his costume and severe mask.
“But the civilian survivors are on a path to safety,” concludes Banshee. The scarlet sewn into his costume-- and framing the long white half-moon-like design on his mask-- makes for a welcome change from the drab blacks and whites of his compatriots. “We should go Thunderbird,” he continues, “lady, follow us--”
“NO!” the lady protests. “This isn’t about me-- this babe deserves her family!”
“Is her family with the survivors?” Dispatch asks.
“No,” says Thunderbird, again considering, “an uncle in Richmond.”
“Richmond?” scoffs Banshee, not hiding his surprise at all. “Surely some of the survivors can take care of--”
“This babe belongs with family!” again echoes from the lady’s desperate voice.
“I’ll take her,” says Thunderbird plainly.
“What?” puzzles Banshee. He muzzles his horse closer to steal her ear. “Rebecca, that’s a week’s ride. We have other places to be-- they’re expecting us at Fort Henry--”
“I think we can handle that, Banshee,” Dispatch declares. “Ahote is meeting us.”
“That’s through Shawnee territory,” warns Banshee.
“They were our allies once-- and we’re not a threat to them. It’s the British that’ll kill us on sight.”
“You’re not going?” asks Banshee, but it’s more a statement.
“I’ll take the babe,” Thunderbird declares. “I need the name and location of this uncle.”
“Bless you!” proclaims the woman, offering the babe into Thunderbird’s arms. “You’re saving a precious life!” She follows with an offer of folded parchment. “His letter has all the information you’ll need to find him, so long as you are in time!”
The babe, startled, begins to wail. Thunderbird eyes her. She pulls back her glove, feels the crown of the infant’s head.
“This babe is warm. Is she ill?” But the woman is gone-- fleeing to join the other survivors. Dispatch and Banshee share a glance with each other, then to Thunderbird, who simply looks back down and considers the child.
About a half mile away and half an hour later, three riders rendezvous before heading their separate ways. In the distance, the fires and smoke of the small settlement-- another casualty of this war for independence-- terrorize an otherwise calm night. Again, memories crawl through Thunderbird’s thoughts as she dulls them with chores, securing the struggling and still wailing babe to the back of her saddle. Thunderbird-- Rebecca-- is no nursemaid, and has little idea how to cool the babe’s temperament.
“Sounds like you’ll have a fun week,” teases Banshee-- now James, with his mask removed, revealing pale, aristocratic good looks.
“He’s right, Rebecca,” agrees Dispatch-- now Frederick-- a strong, yet gentle-faced man of African descent. “Riding with a child that young will not be easy.”
“I’m open to other ideas,” Rebecca bites, getting none in return. Without her mask, her dirty red hair frames her high cheeks and attractive features nicely, but she still carries a stern demeanor that commands effortlessly.
James smirks. “What’re you going to do when this war ends and there’s no one left to save?”
Rebecca’s response is a blank, scolding stare. James darts embarrassed eyes to Frederick, who just smirks in reply. They put their masks back on.
“We’ll head east-- hopefully draw any sentries our way,” Frederick, now Dispatch with his mask on, suggests.
“I’ll meet you at Fort Henry in a fortnight,” confirms Rebecca, knowing that if she didn’t, they knew the protocol. Banshee and Dispatch nod and ride off.
Rebecca looks back at the babe, still crying. She takes a deep breath, and returns her own mask, again becoming Thunderbird, and ready to return to her war.
She darts through twilight quickly. She was born to ride. She hopes heading wide southwest she can maneuver around the British invasion force that’s now split into platoons in pursuit of the retreating militia.
But she’s wrong. As she enters the first clearing, three sentries, maybe fifty feet away, wait. The wailing child and the full speed gallop give her up instantly.
“One of the riders! Fire!”
Musket fire explodes. For an instant she fears only for the babe. Then, only for the mare. She feels no fear for herself-- until the bullet cracks into the back of her right shoulder, dropping her arm limp.
She screams, but grinds her jaw to muffle it. Thunderbird doesn’t feel pain either.
She doesn’t slow a beat, but half angles back from her fleeing horse and with her good arm takes out her own loaded pistol, aims, and fires-- knocking one of the sentries from his horse, and sending him colliding with the two others. It’s a good shot— she’s a good shot— especially with only one good arm, and it’ll buy her the time she needs.
Though the horse seems unharmed, the babe wails louder and louder. It’s impossible to know without stopping if the child is simply startled or has been hit herself. But Thunderbird can’t stop now.
Hours later, she finally feels safe enough to camp. After preparing a fire-- which proves challenging, with only one working arm-- Rebecca tends to the babe.
The child is indeed unharmed, at least from the musket fire-- though to the touch she now feels even warmer. Rebecca can offer little help for that besides sleep. Satisfied, she turns to her wound. The bullet’s embedded in her right shoulder, and though it’s left only an entry wound, she’s still lost plenty of blood, which has soaked through her undergarments, clothes and outer cloak. She’s already feeling lightheaded.
After cleaning the wound in the nearby creek-- hoping to prevent gangrene-- she rips shreds from what unstained undergarments she has left for a bandage. She then loops a brown scarf around the bicep of her right arm, and uses a stick to fasten a crude tourniquet. With the last of the fabric, she fashions a sling for her right arm, mostly pinning it immobile. It’ll do for now-- but she’s not sure it’ll keep her through to Richmond.
The next day is a hard yet eventless ride, but by night’s camp, Thunderbird is less concerned about making Richmond in time, and more about making Richmond at all. The babe has quieted, and her fever seems increasingly worse; and still losing blood, Rebecca’s dizzy spells are stronger and more frequent. She’s dehydrated, and her skin has paled, and as her shock wears off, she can feel her arm again, but it’s mostly an intense pain. She has cold sweats, aching muscles, and short breaths.
By her calculations she’s still, best case, almost four full days from Richmond. She’d have to ride hard to keep that pace, if she even had that much time.
There are options she can turn to for help, of course-- forts and settlements sympathetic to the River Riders, with medicine, food and shelter. She needs to rest-- not ride-- and it’s likely the babe needs the same. But any deviation from her present course-- a straight shot through Virginia’s contested frontier into the heart of the raging war-- and the child’s uncle would be gone. What would she do with her then? And did this child not deserve to be with her family?
Family. What does that even mean to Rebecca anyway? Are the River Riders her family now? The only real constant in her life, it seems, is Thunderbird’s war.
The second day is when she sees it. It’s above her-- a vulture, she thinks, at first, maybe-- attracted to her stench, or the feverish smell of the child-- death does seem near. But a longer look decidedly reveals it’s not-- it’s a bird of prey-- a hawk. It looks like a nightmare, with a wide, towering wingspan closer to that of an eagle’s than of any breed of hawk she’s seen before. It’s dark and silent-- but follows true.
For the rest of the day’s ride, it stalks them. For the first hour, Thunderbird thinks little of it-- hawks aren’t generally dangerous to humans. But its persistence becomes unnerving. There’s something about them that has this raptor fixated.
On day three, the visions start. At first, they’re just shadows in the corners of her eyes, but soon they warp into full-fledged, overwhelming illusions-- of redcoats, firing down on her-- phantoms from a previous trauma-- or fires raging in the forest all around. Loss of blood and fatigue are taking their toll.
It’s possible, she thinks, that the pursuing bird is also an illusion, a harbinger of the others. But as she attempts to cut from the forest to a welcome open road-- one that would assure an on-time and decidedly easier ride to Richmond-- the bird dives and attacks. Thunderbird reacts quickly enough, the raptor missing them entirely. It glides to a nearby limb and watches its prey. The babe.
Thunderbird readies her pistol and with her good arm aims and fires-- but widely misses. The bird doesn’t even flinch.
The openness of the road allowed the bird to attack. The road would save her considerable time and energy-- both of which she has very little of-- but in her current state she can’t protect the child from a mad animal. She returns to the forest, where the coverage there seems, for now, to keep the bird at bay.
The bird follows.
She makes bad time the rest of the day. The forest is merciless, the visions are overwhelming. She blacks out twice. And the babe, still on fire, makes no sound, and shows few signs of consciousness. And all the while, that hawk keeps its vigil. Exhausted, Rebecca camps early, before dusk.
They’re both dying, and she knows it. If she can make the road, she can still make it to Richmond just in time. The ease of the ride might also be enough to keep her alive until they got there. But, with the babe, that isn’t possible.
But she can not continue like this.
As she bathes the child in a nearby stream, she confirms a pulse, and limited consciousness. Though the babe is alive, is she too far gone? Rebecca wipes the child’s brow with the cold water and considers her options. She eyes up-- and even in the dusking night, she can spot the hawk watching from above.
She holes up in a cave that night and sleeps with the swaddled child in her lap, the pistol ready in her hand.
Her dreams that slumber are feverish, and especially incoherent, even for dreams. But one clings to her as she wakes. Images of a forest, carved down by a two-man saw, men working either side. It becomes clear these two men are familiar-- men she’d not seen in many years.
It’s her father, a former colonial colonel, killed at the Paoli Massacre years before. Sometimes when she closes her eyes she can still see those flames raging. With him-- her brother, Gavin-- a soldier in the Colonial Army with whom she’s not heard from in years. As far as she knows, he is likely dead as well.
They cut down tree after tree after tree-- leaving a forest of stumps; which is suddenly consumed by wildfire. She doesn’t remember anything after that.
She wakes with thoughts and feelings of her father, whom she’d lost to a British bullet-- the tragedy that had made her an orphan, and led her to this life, and to her own suffering and seemingly certain death by a British hand.
Her arm feels worse, phasing constantly from pain to numbness and back again-- somehow feeling more painful and more numb each phase.
The babe no longer responds to food or water, and her fever is somehow even worse.
And of course, a shrieking call above. The hawk remains.
Rebecca stumbles to collect the child and her strewn about things. She stops as she looks over the babe’s miserable suffering form. This barely born, almost dead thing is an orphan now. That’s a hard life. Rebecca knows that first hand.
But still-- doesn’t she deserve to be with her family?
But Rebecca isn’t with her family. And she never would be again. Her mother and father dead-- and her brother lost to the war. Who knows if she would-- if she even could-- see him again.
And the Riders aren’t family. She’s not really Thunderbird-- that’s just something she needs to survive the war. Something she can get lost in. If anything, the war is the closest thing to family she still has.
The Riders do serve a purpose, but after the war is over, what’s left for them? Can any of them really have normal lives?
For a moment, she considers what, only a few days before, would’ve been unthinkable.
The bird wants the child.
If she left it the child and saved herself she could make the road easy-- no one would ever know. She’d survive to fight another day. And she’d spare the world the burden of one more war orphan.
The hawk’s mad shriek calls from the outside sky, as if demanding for Rebecca to decide.
And she knows what she has to do.
The hawk watches, from branches above the cave, as Thunderbird delicately places a swaddled wrap of blankets on the ground. She looks up, as if to concede her surrender, and to bless the offering, before mounting and riding mad and guilt worn away.
The hawk watches a moment. It spreads its wings. It shrieks.
It lunges.
It grabs at the swaddled form with ferocious claws and digs hard into its prey as it starts to glide off-- but upon catching the fabric of the babe’s wrappings, it can’t seem to dig deeper. It can’t grab flesh.
The raptor attempts to soar back to the trees, but the collection of rocks which mocked out the form of the babe-- what deceived the bird-- weighs it down. Only for a moment. But it’s enough.
POWWWWW!!!
The pistol rings out, blasting through the bird, killing it instantly. Thunderbird steps up from her crouch by the nearside of the cave, where she’d jumped her horse and doubled back to wait for a close enough shot that even, mostly dead, she couldn’t miss. She was a good shot, after all.
She returns to the cave. She removes her mask-- again Rebecca-- and wraps it tightly around the naked babe. She caresses its smooth head.
This child did deserve to be with her family. And she was about to be.
They’re in Richmond before the next day’s dawn. She finds the child’s uncle, and the babe’s no longer an orphan.
Rebecca stays in the hospital for a little over two weeks, en route to a full recovery. Though the babe had left with her uncle some days ago, word from the nurses was she, too, would survive. Her fever had broken, and she was in full recovery. Her uncle promised, they said, that the child would one day hear about Thunderbird, the warrior that had saved her.
She’s missed her window to regroup with the other River Riders at Fort Henry, but she knows the protocol for a missed rendezvous-- head back home. It’s a three day ride, and as she mounts her horse, also now recovered from the sprint to Richmond, she’s stopped by a militia man, offering a parchment from the Office of General Anthony Wayne-- one of George Washington’s most trusted generals in the Continental Army:
“Thank you for your correspondence. Can confirm that Corporal Gavin St. Claire is alive and still honorably fighting for the patriot cause. He sends warm thoughts to his sister Rebecca.”
And for the next three days, Thunderbird-- Rebecca-- dreams of the end of the war, and being with her brother again.
“NO!” the woman blurts, frustration overtaking her trembling fear. “An uncle, in Richmond--”
“Richmond?” Thunderbird asks sharply, again covering her surprise. “That’s a week’s ride.”
“Is that this child’s fault? I can’t keep her and there’s no longer any place for her here! Her uncle just wrote last winter-- he’s leaving Richmond the last day of May! You can still catch him!”
“That’s in five days. Impossible.”
“No! Not if you believe the cause is worthy!”
Thunderbird considers-- until she’s alerted by hoof beats behind them. She flinches, a moment, though so slightly most wouldn’t notice, until she confirms it’s friends-- Dispatch and Banshee-- or Frederick and James-- her two lead generals and comrades at arms in the motley collection of war orphans who’ve banded together in a crusade to help patriots on the Western Frontier, known to those they help as the Cuyahoga River Riders.
“The militia men are fleeing,” breathes Dispatch, his booming voice matching the pure blacks of his costume and severe mask.
“But the civilian survivors are on a path to safety,” concludes Banshee. The scarlet sewn into his costume-- and framing the long white half-moon-like design on his mask-- makes for a welcome change from the drab blacks and whites of his compatriots. “We should go Thunderbird,” he continues, “lady, follow us--”
“NO!” the lady protests. “This isn’t about me-- this babe deserves her family!”
“Is her family with the survivors?” Dispatch asks.
“No,” says Thunderbird, again considering, “an uncle in Richmond.”
“Richmond?” scoffs Banshee, not hiding his surprise at all. “Surely some of the survivors can take care of--”
“This babe belongs with family!” again echoes from the lady’s desperate voice.
“I’ll take her,” says Thunderbird plainly.
“What?” puzzles Banshee. He muzzles his horse closer to steal her ear. “Rebecca, that’s a week’s ride. We have other places to be-- they’re expecting us at Fort Henry--”
“I think we can handle that, Banshee,” Dispatch declares. “Ahote is meeting us.”
“That’s through Shawnee territory,” warns Banshee.
“They were our allies once-- and we’re not a threat to them. It’s the British that’ll kill us on sight.”
“You’re not going?” asks Banshee, but it’s more a statement.
“I’ll take the babe,” Thunderbird declares. “I need the name and location of this uncle.”
“Bless you!” proclaims the woman, offering the babe into Thunderbird’s arms. “You’re saving a precious life!” She follows with an offer of folded parchment. “His letter has all the information you’ll need to find him, so long as you are in time!”
The babe, startled, begins to wail. Thunderbird eyes her. She pulls back her glove, feels the crown of the infant’s head.
“This babe is warm. Is she ill?” But the woman is gone-- fleeing to join the other survivors. Dispatch and Banshee share a glance with each other, then to Thunderbird, who simply looks back down and considers the child.
About a half mile away and half an hour later, three riders rendezvous before heading their separate ways. In the distance, the fires and smoke of the small settlement-- another casualty of this war for independence-- terrorize an otherwise calm night. Again, memories crawl through Thunderbird’s thoughts as she dulls them with chores, securing the struggling and still wailing babe to the back of her saddle. Thunderbird-- Rebecca-- is no nursemaid, and has little idea how to cool the babe’s temperament.
“Sounds like you’ll have a fun week,” teases Banshee-- now James, with his mask removed, revealing pale, aristocratic good looks.
“He’s right, Rebecca,” agrees Dispatch-- now Frederick-- a strong, yet gentle-faced man of African descent. “Riding with a child that young will not be easy.”
“I’m open to other ideas,” Rebecca bites, getting none in return. Without her mask, her dirty red hair frames her high cheeks and attractive features nicely, but she still carries a stern demeanor that commands effortlessly.
James smirks. “What’re you going to do when this war ends and there’s no one left to save?”
Rebecca’s response is a blank, scolding stare. James darts embarrassed eyes to Frederick, who just smirks in reply. They put their masks back on.
“We’ll head east-- hopefully draw any sentries our way,” Frederick, now Dispatch with his mask on, suggests.
“I’ll meet you at Fort Henry in a fortnight,” confirms Rebecca, knowing that if she didn’t, they knew the protocol. Banshee and Dispatch nod and ride off.
Rebecca looks back at the babe, still crying. She takes a deep breath, and returns her own mask, again becoming Thunderbird, and ready to return to her war.
She darts through twilight quickly. She was born to ride. She hopes heading wide southwest she can maneuver around the British invasion force that’s now split into platoons in pursuit of the retreating militia.
But she’s wrong. As she enters the first clearing, three sentries, maybe fifty feet away, wait. The wailing child and the full speed gallop give her up instantly.
“One of the riders! Fire!”
Musket fire explodes. For an instant she fears only for the babe. Then, only for the mare. She feels no fear for herself-- until the bullet cracks into the back of her right shoulder, dropping her arm limp.
She screams, but grinds her jaw to muffle it. Thunderbird doesn’t feel pain either.
She doesn’t slow a beat, but half angles back from her fleeing horse and with her good arm takes out her own loaded pistol, aims, and fires-- knocking one of the sentries from his horse, and sending him colliding with the two others. It’s a good shot— she’s a good shot— especially with only one good arm, and it’ll buy her the time she needs.
Though the horse seems unharmed, the babe wails louder and louder. It’s impossible to know without stopping if the child is simply startled or has been hit herself. But Thunderbird can’t stop now.
Hours later, she finally feels safe enough to camp. After preparing a fire-- which proves challenging, with only one working arm-- Rebecca tends to the babe.
The child is indeed unharmed, at least from the musket fire-- though to the touch she now feels even warmer. Rebecca can offer little help for that besides sleep. Satisfied, she turns to her wound. The bullet’s embedded in her right shoulder, and though it’s left only an entry wound, she’s still lost plenty of blood, which has soaked through her undergarments, clothes and outer cloak. She’s already feeling lightheaded.
After cleaning the wound in the nearby creek-- hoping to prevent gangrene-- she rips shreds from what unstained undergarments she has left for a bandage. She then loops a brown scarf around the bicep of her right arm, and uses a stick to fasten a crude tourniquet. With the last of the fabric, she fashions a sling for her right arm, mostly pinning it immobile. It’ll do for now-- but she’s not sure it’ll keep her through to Richmond.
The next day is a hard yet eventless ride, but by night’s camp, Thunderbird is less concerned about making Richmond in time, and more about making Richmond at all. The babe has quieted, and her fever seems increasingly worse; and still losing blood, Rebecca’s dizzy spells are stronger and more frequent. She’s dehydrated, and her skin has paled, and as her shock wears off, she can feel her arm again, but it’s mostly an intense pain. She has cold sweats, aching muscles, and short breaths.
By her calculations she’s still, best case, almost four full days from Richmond. She’d have to ride hard to keep that pace, if she even had that much time.
There are options she can turn to for help, of course-- forts and settlements sympathetic to the River Riders, with medicine, food and shelter. She needs to rest-- not ride-- and it’s likely the babe needs the same. But any deviation from her present course-- a straight shot through Virginia’s contested frontier into the heart of the raging war-- and the child’s uncle would be gone. What would she do with her then? And did this child not deserve to be with her family?
Family. What does that even mean to Rebecca anyway? Are the River Riders her family now? The only real constant in her life, it seems, is Thunderbird’s war.
The second day is when she sees it. It’s above her-- a vulture, she thinks, at first, maybe-- attracted to her stench, or the feverish smell of the child-- death does seem near. But a longer look decidedly reveals it’s not-- it’s a bird of prey-- a hawk. It looks like a nightmare, with a wide, towering wingspan closer to that of an eagle’s than of any breed of hawk she’s seen before. It’s dark and silent-- but follows true.
For the rest of the day’s ride, it stalks them. For the first hour, Thunderbird thinks little of it-- hawks aren’t generally dangerous to humans. But its persistence becomes unnerving. There’s something about them that has this raptor fixated.
On day three, the visions start. At first, they’re just shadows in the corners of her eyes, but soon they warp into full-fledged, overwhelming illusions-- of redcoats, firing down on her-- phantoms from a previous trauma-- or fires raging in the forest all around. Loss of blood and fatigue are taking their toll.
It’s possible, she thinks, that the pursuing bird is also an illusion, a harbinger of the others. But as she attempts to cut from the forest to a welcome open road-- one that would assure an on-time and decidedly easier ride to Richmond-- the bird dives and attacks. Thunderbird reacts quickly enough, the raptor missing them entirely. It glides to a nearby limb and watches its prey. The babe.
Thunderbird readies her pistol and with her good arm aims and fires-- but widely misses. The bird doesn’t even flinch.
The openness of the road allowed the bird to attack. The road would save her considerable time and energy-- both of which she has very little of-- but in her current state she can’t protect the child from a mad animal. She returns to the forest, where the coverage there seems, for now, to keep the bird at bay.
The bird follows.
She makes bad time the rest of the day. The forest is merciless, the visions are overwhelming. She blacks out twice. And the babe, still on fire, makes no sound, and shows few signs of consciousness. And all the while, that hawk keeps its vigil. Exhausted, Rebecca camps early, before dusk.
They’re both dying, and she knows it. If she can make the road, she can still make it to Richmond just in time. The ease of the ride might also be enough to keep her alive until they got there. But, with the babe, that isn’t possible.
But she can not continue like this.
As she bathes the child in a nearby stream, she confirms a pulse, and limited consciousness. Though the babe is alive, is she too far gone? Rebecca wipes the child’s brow with the cold water and considers her options. She eyes up-- and even in the dusking night, she can spot the hawk watching from above.
She holes up in a cave that night and sleeps with the swaddled child in her lap, the pistol ready in her hand.
Her dreams that slumber are feverish, and especially incoherent, even for dreams. But one clings to her as she wakes. Images of a forest, carved down by a two-man saw, men working either side. It becomes clear these two men are familiar-- men she’d not seen in many years.
It’s her father, a former colonial colonel, killed at the Paoli Massacre years before. Sometimes when she closes her eyes she can still see those flames raging. With him-- her brother, Gavin-- a soldier in the Colonial Army with whom she’s not heard from in years. As far as she knows, he is likely dead as well.
They cut down tree after tree after tree-- leaving a forest of stumps; which is suddenly consumed by wildfire. She doesn’t remember anything after that.
She wakes with thoughts and feelings of her father, whom she’d lost to a British bullet-- the tragedy that had made her an orphan, and led her to this life, and to her own suffering and seemingly certain death by a British hand.
Her arm feels worse, phasing constantly from pain to numbness and back again-- somehow feeling more painful and more numb each phase.
The babe no longer responds to food or water, and her fever is somehow even worse.
And of course, a shrieking call above. The hawk remains.
Rebecca stumbles to collect the child and her strewn about things. She stops as she looks over the babe’s miserable suffering form. This barely born, almost dead thing is an orphan now. That’s a hard life. Rebecca knows that first hand.
But still-- doesn’t she deserve to be with her family?
But Rebecca isn’t with her family. And she never would be again. Her mother and father dead-- and her brother lost to the war. Who knows if she would-- if she even could-- see him again.
And the Riders aren’t family. She’s not really Thunderbird-- that’s just something she needs to survive the war. Something she can get lost in. If anything, the war is the closest thing to family she still has.
The Riders do serve a purpose, but after the war is over, what’s left for them? Can any of them really have normal lives?
For a moment, she considers what, only a few days before, would’ve been unthinkable.
The bird wants the child.
If she left it the child and saved herself she could make the road easy-- no one would ever know. She’d survive to fight another day. And she’d spare the world the burden of one more war orphan.
The hawk’s mad shriek calls from the outside sky, as if demanding for Rebecca to decide.
And she knows what she has to do.
The hawk watches, from branches above the cave, as Thunderbird delicately places a swaddled wrap of blankets on the ground. She looks up, as if to concede her surrender, and to bless the offering, before mounting and riding mad and guilt worn away.
The hawk watches a moment. It spreads its wings. It shrieks.
It lunges.
It grabs at the swaddled form with ferocious claws and digs hard into its prey as it starts to glide off-- but upon catching the fabric of the babe’s wrappings, it can’t seem to dig deeper. It can’t grab flesh.
The raptor attempts to soar back to the trees, but the collection of rocks which mocked out the form of the babe-- what deceived the bird-- weighs it down. Only for a moment. But it’s enough.
POWWWWW!!!
The pistol rings out, blasting through the bird, killing it instantly. Thunderbird steps up from her crouch by the nearside of the cave, where she’d jumped her horse and doubled back to wait for a close enough shot that even, mostly dead, she couldn’t miss. She was a good shot, after all.
She returns to the cave. She removes her mask-- again Rebecca-- and wraps it tightly around the naked babe. She caresses its smooth head.
This child did deserve to be with her family. And she was about to be.
They’re in Richmond before the next day’s dawn. She finds the child’s uncle, and the babe’s no longer an orphan.
Rebecca stays in the hospital for a little over two weeks, en route to a full recovery. Though the babe had left with her uncle some days ago, word from the nurses was she, too, would survive. Her fever had broken, and she was in full recovery. Her uncle promised, they said, that the child would one day hear about Thunderbird, the warrior that had saved her.
She’s missed her window to regroup with the other River Riders at Fort Henry, but she knows the protocol for a missed rendezvous-- head back home. It’s a three day ride, and as she mounts her horse, also now recovered from the sprint to Richmond, she’s stopped by a militia man, offering a parchment from the Office of General Anthony Wayne-- one of George Washington’s most trusted generals in the Continental Army:
“Thank you for your correspondence. Can confirm that Corporal Gavin St. Claire is alive and still honorably fighting for the patriot cause. He sends warm thoughts to his sister Rebecca.”
And for the next three days, Thunderbird-- Rebecca-- dreams of the end of the war, and being with her brother again.
DID YOU KNOW?
There’s never been a reported case of a hawk hunting a human baby in the real world, but they are known to sometimes attack dogs, cats and other small pets, as they are similar in size to hawk’s natural prey: mice, rats, squirrels and rabbits. There have been some reported cases of hawks and other birds of prey (like eagles) getting into altercations with humans, though these usually only happen in the wild if a human accidentally comes too close to the hawk’s nest.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
During the American Revolution, travel and communication were significantly slower and more difficult than they are today. Think of how much easier Thunderbird’s journey would have been if she could have gotten on a plane and called the infant’s uncle with her smart phone! If you lived during the Revolution, how would the way you interact with your friends and the world be different, given this lack of communication and transportation technology?
EXPLORE MORE
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heroes featured
Rebecca St. Clair/Thunderbird
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Frederick Cain/Dispatch
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James Grant/Banshee
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