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Benjamin Nathan Tuggle ADVENTURER
Daniel Boone and the Settlement of Boonesborough, Kentucky
By Russell Lunsford
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Russell Lunsford
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-3360-6
Chapter One
Now, I'm not saying I'm a time traveler or nothing like that. It's just that sometimes strange things happen that take me back in history to places right when things are happening.
Confused? Well, that's how I felt my first time. I'm just a farm boy from eastern Kentucky. I've never been out of the state, much less out of my place in time.
There may be others who can do the same. You may be one, but we can talk about that later. I'm just talking to you about me right now. Who am I? Why, I'm Benjamin Nathan Tuggle, of course, traveler and adventurer.
I live on a small farm with my mom and dad outside Irvine, Kentucky. If you've never heard of Irvine, it sits on the Kentucky River right where the mountains kiss the bluegrass. My dad likes to say it's the best of two worlds-the beauty of the mountains and the fertile flatlands.
Did I mention my older brother, Blake? I didn't? Well, we'll just leave it that way for right now. Why ruin a friendly conversation, I like to say.
You should have already seen my self-portrait, a pencil representation, if you will, of yours truly, standing next to my grandpa's pickup truck. I like to say I got my pa's good looks, my mom's intelligence, and my granddad's pleasant personality.
I've always fancied myself as quite an artist. Some of my friends say the pictures I draw of Mr. Polk, our principal at middle school, are the funniest drawings in any public school classroom in Estill County. My reputation as an artist has grown to the point that whenever someone puts a mark on a bathroom wall, yours truly is blamed: "Ben Tuggle, report to Principal Polk's office, Ben Tuggle, report to the principal's office immediately."
As a true artisan, I don't work in public bathrooms, but that hasn't kept me from being accused of such. On more than one occasion, Ms. Miller, my art teacher, saved my hide by telling Mr. Polk the drawings on the bathroom stalls were just too childish to be the work of Ben Tuggle. I gotta like that Ms. Miller.
But back to the point of my story. I'm Ben Tuggle, adventurer. Did I say that already?
All I have to do is hold something old or something made by a person who lived and died years before I was born, and suddenly, zippity do da, I'm there at that time in history. I've stood next to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War, run alongside Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad, and sat in council with the Cherokee chiefs long before our ancestors ever set foot on the North American continent.
I'm actually there, visiting places I've only read about in history books. I thought I was dreaming the first time it happened, but I found out real quickly that I was awake. One hundred, two hundred, even three hundred years or more, I end up in the middle of whatever was happening.
I've never tried to push the limit on how far back I can go. I guess I could go back a far piece if I chose to. Just by taking hold of a dinosaur bone, I'd go back to the days before man, but I'd probably get eaten by one of those big meat eaters. Then I'd be dinosaur poo in some swamp, making oil for Mom's station wagon or Mr. Orbey's school bus.
No sir, traveling through history is serious business. I like to think I have control; but the fact is, I don't plan my little trips, they just happen in a spontaneous kind of way.
Mom says I've been a spontaneous kind of kid since the day I was born. I just happened.
What! You don't believe me? Let me remind you that some things in life require a little faith. Like the faith I have that, in spite of myself, my parents like me ... most of the time. Well, that's not really a good example. How about the faith that my grandparents love me no matter how goofy I act? That's what I'm talking about, that's the faith I have when I leave the here and now and travel back ... back to the there and then. I have faith that I will survive all that history and get back to my time. I've met some real interesting folks on my adventures-some nice and some not so nice. It's always a hoot, and I bring a lot of learning back with me.
You may have doubts, so sit back and listen. Let me tell you about my first adventure, my very first trip back in time. It happened last summer, the day I turned twelve. My family spent a long weekend at Grandma and Grandpa's farm in a little community called Redhouse, just outside the big city of Richmond, Kentucky.
I stood out in Grandpa's field, down by the spring, and my older brother was being his usual rude self. You could say my first trip back in history was a field trip. Mrs. Dabney, my sixth grade teacher, says I got a way with words-field trip. I amaze myself.
Chapter Two
"What you doing, bonehead?" yelled my brother Blake as he walked down the hillside toward me. "Grandma says supper is ready. Go wash up."
"I'm not hungry," I responded as I picked up a fresh chunk of plowed dirt and hurled it at Blake. He was walking toward the putt, putt sound of Grandpa's tractor somewhere over the hill. He easily dodged the clod and turned to give me a mean look.
"Mom don't care if you're hungry, she just wants you at the table. Your stomach will do the rest," shouted Blake. "You ever hit me with one of those, you're a dead man, bonehead!"
I reached down and picked up a softball-sized clod and took aim at Blake as he stumbled over the plowed rows of dirt. As I reared back to hurl the clod at his backside, I felt a hard object in the dirt-something "undirt," if you will. Breaking loose the dirt, I found a metal object about five inches long. I don't care to tell ya, the thought that I might have actually hurt Blake was a bit unsettling. Not that I'm against inflicting him with pain, I'm just against the pain Pa would inflict on my backside.
I bent down and washed the thing off in the spring. I figured it was part of a disk or some other piece of farm equipment that had broken off one of Grandpa's or maybe even Great Grandpa's farm machinery a long time ago. There's no telling how long it had been buried in the dirt next to the spring. As the water washed away the dirt, I was shocked to find it had a golden luster.
"Gold!" I whispered excitedly.
My mind raced. Now maybe I could buy that shiny red bike in the front window of Western Auto in Irvine.
I washed faster and realized I was holding something much more valuable than gold, something every young boy in America would trade his best Mickey Mantle baseball card for. I was holding a genuine American Indian tomahawk head!
It had a brass pipe on one end, the middle was brass, and the sharp tomahawk head on the other end was made of iron. I had struck it rich!
My brother Blake had a small arrowhead collection that he had gathered from around the farm. He often found arrowheads when Grandpa plowed a field, especially after a hard rain. I was secretly jealous of his collection, but he had nothing as good as this.
I felt as though my horse had won the Kentucky Derby or that I had hit the mother lode. This was the mother lode of all Indian relics, the ... uh oh ... my mother was going to kill me if I didn't get up the hill to the house ...
But I didn't care. Not one bit 'cause Blake was going to wet his britches with envy when he saw my tomahawk. Heck, I nearly wet on myself. My heart was racing; my knees were weak. Along with my hide scraper and three broken arrowheads, this new find would be the centerpiece of my collection.
I gripped the tomahawk head in my hand, closed my eyes, and screamed out a loud, "Ahhhhh!"
When I opened my eyes, I was someplace else!
This is where things get kind of complicated. I was still standing by Grandpa's spring, but I was in a different time. The spring was now surrounded by a forest of giant trees-no milk barn up in the barn lot, no open field, and no putt, putt, putt of Grandpa's tractor on the other side of the hill.
The whole thing was so creepy that I dropped the tomahawk and, suddenly, I had returned to the here and now-the plowed field and the putt, putt, putt sound of the tractor just over the hill.
I stared down at the hunk of brass and iron lying in the dirt. To nobody in particular, or at least that is what I thought, I said, "What the heck was that all about?"
"That was the sound of Mom whoppin' your butt with her hairbrush," cried out Blake as he walked up toward the barn. "I'm going to enjoy watching her wear you out."
Being the educated man that I am, I felt it best to ignore his insensitive remark. Once again, he had confirmed my suspicion that he had been adopted.
Looking down and staring wide-eyed at the prize in the dirt at my feet, I wondered what had just happened.
Maybe I was hungrier than I realized. I had heard of people seeing things as they starved to death. Maybe I was having one of those out-of-body experiences my Uncle John spoke of when he drank too much moonshine.
I bent over and picked up the tomahawk head, trying to remember exactly what I had done just prior to my strange moment and talked myself into doing it again. Only this time, I would not cut the trip short by dropping the tomahawk just when things were getting interesting.
I closed my eyes and squeezed the tomahawk head. I was surrounded by silence. I opened my eyes and, once again, I was standing in the giant forest. I looked around in amazement, dazzled by the size of the trees. These were monsters, not the garden variety big trees you might see today. I'm talking giants; the trunks were three and four feet across, a couple a hundred feet or more tall. Real whoppers!
I spotted white, red, and black oaks. There were beech trees that a guy could build a tree house in and live in for the rest of his life. Right next to me was a chestnut tree that three grown men could reach around and never touch each other's fingers.
My grandpa had told me stories about the giant chestnut trees he saw when he was my age. His pa cleared them off the farm and piled them at the edge of the field to rot.
"There was plenty of timber to go around back then, Benji," he had said. Grandpa never called us by our given names.
Grandma would call out to me from her big porch, "Benjamin Nathan Tuggle, you come here this instant!" Of course, I was usually hiding from her right in the space under the porch and literally right under her feet.
Grandpa would quietly say, "Benji, come out from under there, boy, before you get a tick on you." He really liked to throw in "boy." Grandpa can put things in a way you understand probably 'cause he was a boy once too. And he was right; I could get a big tick that would suck all the blood out of me. Once you start stumbling around with a big, fat tick the size of a marble behind your ear, the next thing you know, nobody will get close to you or let you pet their dog.
Grandpa had told us that all the giant chestnut trees died from blight in '37, which is his way of saying 1937. The ones we have now are no bigger than a tall bush.
But that was not the case here. I reached out and touched the bark of the chestnut next to me and looked straight up its trunk to the heavens. The tree canopy was so thick that the sunlight couldn't shine through it. Then I looked down. The forest floor was clean, except for the leaves and me-I had found paradise.
A quick reality check reassured me that the spring was still bubbling and flowing down the hill. This water was a lot cleaner looking; everything looked a lot cleaner, more natural, if you will. The way God meant for it to be before we came and messed it all up with plowing up the ground and cows stomping around, leaving cow pies in their wake.
I had found a little piece of paradise and was taking it all in when it happened.
I wasn't prepared for it, but how could I have known what to expect? I'll bet you didn't see it coming either, did ya?
One minute everything around me was tranquil, a Garden of Eden, and the next moment all H-E-Double Hockey Sticks broke loose.
It started with a whoosh and a loud thump.
I turned and saw a brass-headed tomahawk, identical to mine, sticking in the chestnut tree next to my head. The handle, or haft, was still vibrating and the leather thongs and feathers that decorated the handle were blowing in the breeze. I stared back and forth from the tomahawk I had in my hand to the one stuck in the tree next to my head.
That's when I heard the scream.
"EEEEAAA!"
Things got ugly, fast!
The yell had come from up the hill. An Indian warrior seemed bent on getting to me real quick as he came down the hill through the trees on a dead run, pulling a big knife from his waistband. This was like something out of a movie. I froze, thinking maybe he hadn't seen me. When he was about thirty feet away, I realized he was looking straight at me with murder in his eyes.
Blake always got upset when I touched his play-pretties, so I held out my hand offering to return the old brass tomahawk head I had found. I thought maybe that Indian feller was angry that I had taken something that belonged to him.
I had just about given up the ghost when I felt a wind blow past from behind, followed by a great collision in front of me. The Indian and a woodsman-looking feller, as much as I could make out, collided in midair. Swearing and grunting, they fell to the ground in a heap, fighting fist to skull, and biting and swiping at each other with their big knives.
I could make out a few words the woodsman was saying. I'm sure it was words I'm not supposed to repeat, so I won't use them now.
The Indian was making Indian talk and, by the look on his face, I'd say he was swearing too. I'd try and repeat some of those Indian curse words for you, but if I did, you might accidentally let one of them slip in front of your mom, she'd tell my mom, and I would get a whoppin' for sure.
My mom doesn't swear, but she and the other moms do keep up with all the latest swear words so they'll know when us boys use them. I figure she knows them all: white folk, sailor, and Indian swear words alike.
Blake sometimes plays baseball with the older boys, comes home, uses a word he's heard on the ball field and wham! Mom smacks him upside the head and sends him to his room to think about what he said. Of course, he doesn't know for sure what he'd said that was bad, which is the beauty of it. But, back to my adventure.
Leaves and dirt were kicked up in the air as the men flung each other about.
I was rooting for the woodsman when suddenly the Indian kicked the knife out of his hand.
As I wondered how I had gotten myself in this fix, I put the tomahawk head in my pocket and got ready to make a run for it.
I thought, Oh man, this Indian feller has got us now. To my amazement, he spoke up and said as much.
"Good fight, Widemouth, but now I got you and your boy. You no run and hide in canebrake. You no jump off big cliff and land in treetop. You no get away anymore."
"Falling Hawk," interrupted the woodsman, "we have traded pelts and thee have stolen a few from me. I hold no ill-will toward thee, since the pelts sort of belonged to the Shawnee in the first place."
As the woodsman continued, he tossed his hands around like Brother Chris at a Sunday morning service. "I normally don't interfere with private disagreements, but I didn't feel right standing by while thou tried to scalp this boy. Thou mayest have a feud with him or his, but thou must surely understand that he is one of my kind, and I don't take such rudeness lightly."
The woodsman had just lost a life and death battle with the meanest Indian I'd ever seen, and he was cool as a cucumber. He was a talker and went on jabbering as he took a step toward me.
"This boy and I are meetin' thirty of my men from Fort Boone right here on this spot ..."-he paused and looked up at the sun-"just about now, so thou hast had better run along. My men won't be so polite when they hear about this mischief."
The Indian's eyes darted around, and he became jumpy like and nervous.
The woodsman took another step and stood next to me. "Thou art surely going somewhere, aren't thee, Falling Hawk?"
"I take you and boy to Chillicothe. You run gauntlet for Chief Blackfish. Stop talk and come now before Long Knives come."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Benjamin Nathan Tuggle ADVENTURER by Russell Lunsford Copyright © 2010 by Russell Lunsford. Excerpted by permission.
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