All True Not a Lie in It by Alix Hawley

permitted to leave the line.
    I sit back. My hat falls down my back at this moment and my aching head burns in the sun.
    I do not hear the shout, only the echo bouncing back. Then the doubled echo of four shots. Then more, running into one another so they cannot be counted. No human sound at first. I stand and I can see a mounted officer just ahead of the wagons and behind the marchers, stopped with his hand over his mouth and nose, as though a stink had hit him in the face. He turns back and I see his perplexed forehead. I climb up on the box: a half-mile ahead at the front of the train are hundreds of people like the Lilliputians in the story, miniature people appearing out of the trees and descending the bank. Where have they come from?
    My eye lights on a tiny man in a tiny French blue jacket separating himself from the pack. Quickly he knocks down one of our soldiers with his gun-butt and then kneels on him and knifes his head and peels off his scalp. I see the whole of this scene, the small arm waving the detached hair in the air and the tiny body on the ground. I seem to be peering into a strange world underground, perhaps in an anthill. I want to shut my eyes but I cannot. I am still standing upon the box. A dog cries with a desperate sound. More bodies on the ground ahead are scattered like fallen red birds. The officer now cries out: Unfair! I believe this is what he says. He orders the rear guard and the wagons onward, slashing his sword across the air. Urging their animals ahead, the first wagoners crash into the infantrymen and some of the mounted soldiers who have turned back to flee. I turn to try to see Findley, but when I look back I see only the moving line of blue jackets and painted skin making its way along our confused column. They chop as if scything through brush, as if we were thousands of thin trees in their way.
    Five wagons ahead they are already tearing into the white covering, slitting it like a belly and looking inside. I hear some words in French and then some of the Indians beginning to confer and topull things out. They know where everything is. They have been following us for days, perhaps for weeks.
    Dodd, the driver of that wagon, goes down with a sigh as the breath is torn out of him. I see him roll down the bank towards the water. By now the river is stuffed to the jaws with us, some face down, some splashing in feeble strokes, some standing up to their hips and holding their guns out, waiting for direction.
    It strikes me that people do not always run in the face of such danger, they do not believe in it when it opens its maw at them. They wait to see what will happen. I am not the only one. I think of it later in my life when I am standing in the snowy woods, not running.
    The French and the Indians sweep along the line, pushing between the trees. They want the horses, the oxen, the supplies. The scalps too. The French king buys them. I picture the French king in a suit woven of people’s hair, stroking his long sleeves.
    This is no fight, it is only killing, and killing is nothing after all, it is nothing, it is only dull and horrible. I want no more to do with it. Officers in their red sashes fall from their horses screaming. I turn again and see Findley is sitting on his box with his cloth over his forehead. My body is coiled tight. My gun is beside me. I do not know how loud I am or whether I speak aloud at all:
    —We had best be gone, I am going.
    I slash at the traces with my knife and one of the horses tries to bolt, one falls. I crawl onto the back of the one rearing, I cut him free and we run crashing down the bank into the Monongahela River up to his withers, where I throw myself into the water. I keep my head down and my eyes cracked open just enough to see. With my gun in both hands I push my way through the water to the other side, I hear muffled wet shouts and calls as I keep on, I feel terrible things that I do not think of.
    Others are with me on the far side. Not