Deserter by Paul Bagdon

replace all the natural sounds of the forest. Footing was dangerously slippery and Jake was weary from his wrestling match with his horse, and from the aftereffects of the adrenaline surge.
    Jake stroked his horse’s neck, marveling at the resilience—or perhaps the innate stupidity—of the equine species. A very few hours before, the mare was doing her best to run herself to an almost guaranteed broken bone or perhaps worse, in a state of abject terror. Now Mare was none the worse for the experience. Beyond shaking her head a bit more than usual because of flies pestering her tender left ear, she had apparently forgotten the entire episode, with no repercussions.
    Jake wasn’t quite as fortunate. He stopped early to make camp, scrounged about for an hour seeking dry wood for a fire, and found none. It was as if the entire planet had been submerged in a vast ocean and nothingremained dry. After unsaddling and hobbling Mare, he ate a few pieces of jerky from his diminishing supply, drank a few swallows of water from his canteen, and leaned back against a tree, resting, his thoughts as bleak and lifeless as the soaked and saturated world around him. He dozed on and off through the late afternoon and into the night, but never entered into a deep sleep. A sensation in his right hand—not pain, actually, more of an itchy tightness, a sense of heat—nagged at him like a hangover headache. The passing of time seemed sluggish, but in the many times Jake jerked awake from a doze, he noticed that the length of the shadows generated by the moonlight had changed, as had the position of the moon itself.
    Near dawn he found himself shivering as if he were sitting naked on a block of ice. His teeth clattered together with such force that jolts of pain ran through his jaw, and his entire body shook in a frigid palsy. Bizarre snippets of dreams and images flickered in his mind: the rainstorm, Ferris grinning at him, saying something Jake couldn’t quite understand, a Union officer standing for a moment before he toppled, his chest gushing blood, a wrathful President Davis, his eyes a fiery red, cursing Jake, Uriah’s bodiless head resting among a pile of severed arms and legs.
    When Jake awakened the next time, he was drenched in sweat, disoriented, not able to separate what was real and present from the panorama his mind had unfolded. Dawn was hours past and the sun high when he struggled to his feet and fought off the dizziness that threatened to drop him. He shook his head to clear the floating red shards that blocked his vision. His hand throbbed in unison with the pulse heheard in both his ears. He raised his hand to his face and inspected it. It was swollen, but not hugely so, and without much difficulty, he flexed his fingers and formed a loose fist. He held his knuckles under his nose and sniffed: There was none of the sickly sweet stench of infection. Still, the dull red trailers from the tiny lacerations bothered him.
    â€œ
It wasn’t a cottonmouth, Pa. I’m sure of that. It wasn’t anything more than a big old grass snake. I stepped on him and he bit at the back of my leg. I grabbed him and looked at his mouth—he had those little snake teeth but no fangs at all. Just a grass snake. It was my own fault for stepping on him. I let him go on his way.
”
He grinned at his father. “If somebody tromped on me, I guess I’d bite him, too.
”
    Pa didn’t smile. “When was this, Jake?”
    â€œDay before yesterday, early morning, I was going to the barn for my chores.”
    â€œAnd you noticed the redness—those red lines—just today?”
    â€œYessir. Doesn’t hurt so much as it itches. It itches like crazy, Pa.”
    â€œIt’s infected, son. I’m going to send a rider for Doc Turner. I want you in your bed and staying still until he gets here.”
    â€œPa—”
    â€œDo as I say.”
    Jake’s father wasn’t a man