Dangerous Dreams: A Novel by Mike Rhynard Read Free Book Online Page A

to crosscut larger trees and split them lengthwise to obtain the required number of posts. Lieutenant Waters, who directed the project, calculated the task would require around five hundred oak and walnut trees, each split into two or three posts and a few cross braces, for a total of about twelve hundred posts. Without problems a thirty-man crew
might
complete the task in a little over two weeks, a length of time that troubled his maturing military mind because it meant a dangerously long period of vulnerability for the colony.
    Initially, two men chopped on each tree until it was about to fall, then one man delivered the final blows after the second man removed himself from the fall line to avoid being crushed. The cutters controlled the direction of fall by making their cuts at different heights, on opposite sides of the tree. The lower cut, on the fall side of the tree, notched into the trunk about a third of the way to the tree’s center and was overly wide to make space for the tree to collapse into; while the upper cut, on the opposite side, went almost to the center. The undercut notch gave the tree space to collapse in the desired direction, avoiding hang-ups with other trees and providing easier access for the sawyers and splitters. The sawyers then cut the felled trees to length, and the splitters used wedges and mauls to split them into the desired thickness. The posts were then dragged or carried to the palisades, where another crew worked on digging a continuous, four-foot-deep set trench all the way around the village perimeter, on lines laid out by Lieutenant Waters. After enough adjacent posts were stood up in the trench and buried to ground level, horizontal cross braces, ten to fifteen feet long and six to eight inches thick, were mounted across the top and bottom on the inside of the wall to bind the logs together and provide strength. The braces were joined to the logs by long, hand-hewn wooden pegs about three inches thick, driven from the inside of the wall by large hammers into hand-bored holes that went completely through the braces and four to six inches into each post. The top brace was mounted a foot or two below the top of the wall, and the bottom brace, about two feet above the ground. While no step in the process was easy, the most exhausting was that of boring the gun-barrel-sized peg holes, which required countless, forceful twists of the crossbar handle on the end of the eighteen-inch metal auger bit.
    Waters, a relatively inexperienced young officer, had been trained both as an engineer and an infantryman and compensated for his inexperience with enthusiasm and a precocious degree of professional bearing and common sense. Educated and from a wealthy family, he knew he’d suffered a serious lapse in judgment when he’d questioned the governor’s order yesterday; but like most young officers, he was sensitive to the fact that sergeants and conscripts generally had little respect for young, newly commissioned officers, regarded them as a threat to their survival. He was also aware thatsuch fears were often well founded; and for that reason, he’d made it clear to the men that he’d stood up for them by resisting the governor’s assignment of improper duties, wanted them to know he wasn’t afraid to risk his own skin on their behalf. Foremost, he’d wanted to make that point with his sergeants: the non-commissioned officers, the implementers of orders, the buffers between officers and men, the battle-hardened survivors rich in the experience and credibility young lieutenants lacked, the gritty, up-from-the-ranks leaders who ultimately won or lost battles.
    With his point hopefully made, he intended to redeem his indiscretion with White by throwing his mind and spirit, and even his muscle, into erecting as impregnable a fortress as was possible with the materials at hand. In anticipation of the possibility that there were no existing palisades, he’d taken the initiative of completing