Martin

My object

My object of choice is a French civilian musket which was invented in 1717 and brought to New France shortly after. Although it wasn’t the best musket to be had, it was reliable and relatively cheap. The musket that I will be writing about was found in what seems to have been a field by archeologists and was seemingly buried there along with a skull. Although there weren’t any pictures from the dig site there were pictures of the rifle itself.

Pre-story

Martin was born in 1720 in the town of Nouveau Metz. His most beloved relative was his sister, Remi who was born in 1723. They had hard lives working long days on the farm and never really liked it there. Every day after Martin’s tenth birthday he would have to get up at four in the morning and do chores regarding the animals, hard work which he didn’t like. But there were things to look forward to like glimpsing the people in the woods who lived there. Martin would fantasize about going with them and starting a new life in the beautiful forest beyond the farm and the smelly town. He would also play with his sister and with his eight other brothers and sisters although most of them also had their own chores. Remi, Martin’s favourite sibling would often play with him. they’d climb trees and throw rocks into the woods, hoping they’d hit a squirrel. She was more or less the only joy in his farm life. Once when they were throwing rocks, they hit a skunk and it stunk there for two weeks. One of the other children had seen it and had ratted them out to their parents, who beat both Martin and Remi for hitting it. So when Martin turned 15, he had had enough, and this is where the story starts.

Story

It was my birthday today and I’m happy with what I got, my parents say that I can go hunting now and I think that that’s gonna be lots of fun. Remi also got me something, she got me a slingshot so that we can bother the neighbours a bit better. I think it’s gonna be fun, especially with our new neighbour who’s annoying as hell. Because it’s my birthday I’ve also got the day off, finally! I hope that by some miracle the clouds clear up but it seems more like a storm, and it’s getting late. Well I still want to try out my new slingshot. “REMI! Come on, let’s go! “
Martin and Remi ran out through the trees and behind their neighbours house. As usual he was feeding his geese.
“When is he ever gonna get rid of those geese, they’re more work and taste worse than chickens, and they don’t have as much meat as pigs.” Martin never liked the geese. It was most likely because he always got chased by them when he was small.
“That’s why I made you this slingshot, now you can really do some damage”, Remi said.
But by that time it had already started to drizzle and the downpour was going to come at any minute so they went back inside where they ate some stale bread for dinner and went to their room. They then pulled out their plan for how to make a nice home away from their accommodation. You see Martin and Remi may have had their differences but one thing that they really did agree on is that they wanted to settle down in a place that didn’t smell like a toilet and pigs, and was instead in the middle of nature, near a creek or a lake although a lake would be to obvious. So that was why on the evening of Martins 15th birthday they started packing.
“You know, I think we should take one of dads muskets. It’ll be easier to hunt with and we could sell it to the Indians once we run out of ammo”.
“But we’d have to take it on the day we go so that mum and dad aren’t suspicious.”
“Alright”
Martin and Remi had already packed their stuff and were going to go on the next Sunday. That would be one of the best times to go because Martin’s birthday was on March 19th and around March 26th was when the nights got warmer than freezing.

The next morning was like any other, and so was the next week, but you could tell something was up by the way they acted. Then on Sunday morning they stole the musket and left. Martin knew that no one was going to be awake that early on a Sunday morning and so he was surprised when he saw someone through the trees. He whispered to Remi: “Hey, look over there, who’s that?” “I don’t know” she said, “looks like some Indian” “Yeah” After the encounter Martin and Remi jogged as far out as they could. They then hiked even further. “This is further than I’ve ever been before!” Martin exclaimed “Hey look! That’s a nice cave!” Remi had found a cave which looked like with some cleaning it might just make a nice house. And so as the morning turned to noon they started to set up camp. At the start of the day it had looked like it would be sunny but now it looked more like rain and Martin made an effort to get all the stuff in the cave before the downfall. That night they had a nice sleep and the next morning they started organizing their stuff and building up the cave entrance. While Remi organized, Martin cut down the surrounding trees to build a makeshift wall and door. They also decided that it would be mutually beneficial if they plucked the feathers off some geese from the nearby pond and made a bed using them. As the days passed by, their cave looked more and more like a nice house. Something out of those tales about Hobbits that the old tall Irish man with the long grey beard had told them. Martin started building traps around their house and tried to go hunting once, although he missed both shots. Remi started building fish traps in the creek near their house as well. After about one month Martin was out exploring like he usually was if he wasn’t hunting or mapping out the area. He had discovered some salmon berry bushes which he planned to use to make the food nice and sweet. As he walked further out, keeping close track of where he was going he found something, a Native Village. So he spied on the people there for a little while until he turned around and ran to tell Remi about his discovery. Remi contemplated doing some trading with the Natives but decided against it because they didn’t have anything to trade.

After the first few days nothing much happened and for the next month they’d just build up their home as well as the area around it while still covering their tracks as well as they could. When May started to go by Martin had a peek at the Native village and the salmon berry bushes he had seen earlier. While he was there he almost encountered someone but he managed to get out of sight quickly enough for them not to see him. When he got back he told Remi about it while they checked their traps for any new animals.
“You know, since the summer’s coming up and so we might be able to plant some things so we don’t have to rely so much on animals”
“But we don’t have any seeds”
“We could steal from the natives, I bet they’ve got what we’re looking for”
“But what if they catch us, they probably know where we live, and you’ve heard the stories”
“Come on, they’re just stories and aren’t true anyways.”
“I hope so”
They then finished checking all of their traps and went inside where they ate. They then prayed to their makeshift shrine and went to bed. The next morning there was a storm and they had to stay in because they didn’t have any clothes which they could go into the rain with and get wet. At around noon, the sky cleared up and they saw that the stream was flooding a bit so they had the idea that they could use it to their advantage.
“Hey look at that stream, isn’t it a bit too high?” Said Martin.
“I guess we could use the dirt from when we cleaned our cave to build a levee.”
“No that’s not what I meant, couldn’t we do what they did with the fields by the ocean where they had the rivers flood them every once in a while and then they had water”
“Or have some aqueducts so the crops would always have water”
“You know what, that could just work!”
“But we don’t have any seeds”
“You know what? Maybe we could just ask the Natives for seeds and they’ll give some to us”
“Ok, but first lets relay and check the traps on the small river for any fish.”

So they went to the small river, now medium which was a two hour hike away from their cave house. They then crawled on the log that they had cut so that it was more of a bridge and checked their traps for fish. There were three fish in them so instead of putting the traps back into the river they placed them on the log.
“We’ll lay the traps when we run out of fish.”
“Maybe we could trade a fish for the seeds”
“Good idea, and we’ll just leave the other two here and pick them up on the way back. Hopefully a bear doesn’t eat ‘em”
So for another four hours they went happily through the trees and to the native village where they managed to make a deal for a few wheat, wild strawberry, and wild onion seeds. While they were at the village, Martin spotted a beautiful girl who was just a year older than him and by some natural force moved towards her. Luckily for him Remi tugged at his shirt and got him to go.
“C’mon they were all staring at you and no wonder, you were staring at that girl like she was a God or something.”
“I bet you’d have done the same thing were there some hot guy!”
“It’s just a girl, come on it’s gonna get dark.
They went back to their bridge and picked up the other two salmon where they also picked some salmonberries as a snack for the way home and then went home. Once they were at home they put the salmon onto a smoking rack and let it smoke for a few hours before eating their dinner of rabbit from the previous day and going to sleep, they were too tired to pray.
For the next three weeks life continued and they made work on the levees and the fields which were coming along nicely. They also planted the wheat because they knew it was a late season plant and by June they had a nice plot of healthy farmland with a bit of young wheat plants on it.
At the start of July Martin hunted down a deer with his rifle and used the bones to make a nice hoe which he used for the farmland. But by this time Martin and Remi where running into a problem which was that they couldn’t keep their home hidden and it was

kind of obvious, especially to the people who live in it to which it seemed like they left their footprint (literally and figuratively) everywhere. So after Martin spotted a few French hunting not too far from their shelter they decided to move. Luckily for them, they had been planning it for ages and just not doing it because they were comfortable in their position. So they decided they would move all of their stuff to another cave which, although it had a bigger entrance and was bigger in general still was in a more hidden location, in a tiny valley, no bigger than a ship.
The location was no more than half a days walk away from where they were at that moment and was closer to the native village and further to their fish trap although now they had to walk east to get to their fish trap instead of west. The same happened with the native village, so they decided it would be easier to cut down another tree and use it as a bridge and to lay the fish traps instead of the one they were using already. They’d also reroute another stream for their farmland although the stream was further away. They’d use logs and spend one hour every day cutting into them so that they still used their time for better things.
So in mid July the moving started and the weather couldn’t have been better. Most of the time it was sunny and it barely ever rained. To move they used chairs they had made as backpacks and transported the majority of their things with the chairs and some ropes. Their system worker well because after a week of moving they had more or less all of their stuff at their new home. Now they’d have to clean up.
At the start of August they were still cleaning up their shelter and making it look more like a home. The nights were getting ever shorter now and it was dropping below 20º.
“It’s gonna be a cold winter” said Martin
“I know, and that’s why we’ve gotta hurry to make our shelter better”
“Hopefully we finish the walls before the first snow”
“What do you mean hopefully? Of course we’re gonna make it through the winter”
Martin and Remi were both trying to stay tough although they themselves were uncertain about the winter. The summer was quite warm and also came and went early so both of them knew that if the summer was early, the winter was going to be cold and most likely long.

And it was. It started getting below freezing in September and by November there was the first snow. Martin had built the walls of their house to the best he could muster but unless they ran a fire they were still cold at night. The cold, along with the dampness of the cave was the perfect scenario for sickness and it shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was when on one day in December Remi woke up one morning with a fever. It wasn’t too bad but throughout the days it slowly got worse and soon Remi couldn’t even do most of her chores. Naturally Martin didn’t want her to die and used all of his energy to bring wood, and hunt for food. But slowly they ran out of recourses and so Martin thought of no choice but to go to the natives for help. He though that maybe, just maybe they would let them in and give Remi some of their tea and soup so she would live. So on the morning of December the twenty fourth, a beautiful morning with the forest sparkling in the snow Martin took the rifle and brought Remi to the Native Village.
Using the little of their language he knew he spoke to them and asked them for help. He also gave them his rifle, as something which he could pay them for their help with.
Martin said “Hello. She” and then he played out a cough and actions that would describe sickness.
The person he had talked to seemed to understand and then led them to their Chief and explained to him that Remi was sick.
In the end they gave them a tent which they would share with some others and a bed in which Remi lay. While they nurtured Remi they sent Martin off to work. They gave Martin an axe and pointed to the very same girl he had seen about half a year ago and gave him a slight push as to say that he should go off towards her. He learned the system quickly and they were working efficiently in no time. He didn’t get why they had to go off and cut down a few trees instead of just cutting them all down but he accustomed to their customs and did as he was told. By sundown they had cut five small trees into timber and moved the logs to a dry area where the wood would inevitably dry.
A few weeks later and even with the Native medicine Remi wasn’t recovering and Martin was giving up hope. The girl who he worked with and, he realized he had a crush on saw it in his behaviour and tried to cheer him up. He decided that if his sister were to die

die he wouldn’t be able to survive on his own and embraced her, literally and figuratively with open arms. Midway through January Remi died. It was a sad event that not only stuck with Martin but also the man who had took such good care of her because of how young and bright she was. Martin mourned on his own in the darkest corners of his mind but took comfort in the girl. Over the next few months He got ever better and in February he had even managed to forget a bit about Remi. The native girls name, he learned was Koyna. In his perspective she was by far the smartest, most caring, and most beautiful girl in the village. They became close friends over the weeks, and around the start of April she moved into the tipi he was occupying. By that time he had almost fluently learned their language and on one evening he decided to do what he had wanted to do since he first saw her. “Koyna, I love you” Konya then said “I love you too” and kissed him. Then they then fell asleep, tangled in between each other and woke up with some bad neck cramps which they walked off. That day they went to what Martin used to call home and saw that it was still in good-ish shape, but Martin decided to stay at the village because he preferred it there and life in the village was enjoyable. At the start of April Konya started getting sick but no one knew what she was getting sick from. In the months that followed the initial sickness she got ever more sick until she died. The natives seeing Martin as the person who had brought all of the sickness to them exiled him from the village which brought him shame and sadness, so he took the rifle he had given to them as a gift and went to his home the next day he made the long trek back to his home in New France and arrived there in the evening. There he spied on his family from the bushes. In the later evening he went onto their field which was a bad choice because his mother who was just walking out onto the field to do something with the pigs saw him, silently grabbed a musket and shot him, right through the heart. Only the next morning did she realize who she had shot.

The End