The Hollow Tree by Janet Lunn Page B

standing, gazing bemusedly down on all their faces, when someone cried, “Bear!” She looked up to see Bartlett lumbering towards her across the clearing as fast as he could, with George trotting along beside him. She heard a child scream. She saw men priming their muskets. She ran.
    “Don’t!” she cried. “He’s an orphan. He won’t hurt anyone. Please, oh, please don’t.”She threw herself to the ground beside the bear. She was no longer afraid for herself; all she could think was that no one was going to kill her bear.
    Amazingly Jem stepped forward. “Let the bear be,” he said gruffly. “Go ahead and shoot that wingein’ cat if you wants to, though,” he muttered, as he took his little sister’s hand and walked away. The crowd fell apart into tired families huddled by fires kept burning high enough all night to hold the wolves and catamounts at bay. But not the nightmares.

Camp
    P hoebe woke just before sun-up the next morning. She sat up and looked around her. She had been sleeping on a bed of pine needles under an enormous pine tree. It stretched its thick green branches over her, keeping away both the wind and the snow that had sprinkled the ground in the clearing beyond. Between the stumps, at a little distance from one another, small knots of people slept around the embers of camp-fires. Aunt Rachael, Uncle Josiah, and the boys were huddled together under a quilt a foot or two from where she sat. Anne was wrapped in her cloak with her back to them.
    Even in the dim light Phoebe could see that there were not nearly as many people as there had seemed to be the night before. She counted seven camp-fires, including the Robinsons’, and there looked to be no more than twenty-five or thirty people.
    She shuddered, feeling again the terror she had felt when those people had moved slowly towards her in the night’s half dark. They all hate me, she thought. They think I’m a rebel and a spy. I must leave, I mustn’t stay with them. Near her, Rachael stirred in her sleep. As dim as the light was, her features were clearly discernible and they looked so careworn, so sad, even in sleep, that Phoebe knew she could not leave, not without a word, not again.
    “How they must be worrying about you,” Peter Sauk had said. And last night, before she could roll herself in Katsi’tsiénhawe’s blanket beside Bartlett and George, Rachael had pulled her into her arms.
    “What Anne said is true,” she had whispered. “We all thought you were dead,” and Rachael Robinson, who had not wept for Phoebe’s father or for Gideon, not where anyone could see her, had had a catch in her voice and, even more astonishing, had kissed Phoebe on her cheek. Aunt Rachael was so reserved that the only time Phoebe could remember her actually offering physical signs of affection was when they had stood together by Gideon’s coffin and she had put her arm around her.
    Anne had refused to talk to Phoebe or to look at her. When her mother gave Phoebe a dish of the boiled beans she had cooked for the family earlier, Anne had walked away and notreturned until she had lain down to sleep — at a conspicuous distance. But, despite the fatigue that wearied them both, Phoebe and Rachael had talked long into the night. Phoebe had realized, as soon as she had settled safely by her aunt’s camp-fire, that she must tell about coming upon Gideon in Hanover and about the message in the hollow tree that had sent her across Vermont’s Green Mountains to Fort Ticonderoga. When she had come to the end of her story, Rachael had said nothing for such a long time that Phoebe had feared she would say nothing, ever, about what she had been told. It was not so. In a low voice, heavy with tears, Rachael had said, “There was never any dissuading Gideon from whatever he determined to do, not from the moment he was born. How well I remember him — he was only three then — stubbornly refusing to eat your mother’s fine gingerbread that he loved when