In which the scribe records the doings of the company, oldest first, with as little exaggeration as a reenactor can manage. Photographs, when we have them back from the drugstore, are shown at the next drill.

Fourteen of us on the captain's back pasture, in a wind straight from the northwest. Ice in the canteens at dawn. We drilled in the morning, and in the afternoon the lieutenant walked the company through Morgan's arrangement of his lines at the Cowpens, with the militia out front and the Continentals behind, using fence rails laid on the ground for the lines. Fredrick Saunders can make a fence rail look like a regiment.

Keri, our fifer, played her first event, at fifteen, with her fingers so cold she could barely feel the holes, and played every call right. Supper was a stew of beef, turnips and onions that Jennifer Johnson started at noon in the big iron pot. Nobody has ever been so glad of a turnip.

Not an event, strictly, but the best day of the spring. Eleven of us drove up to Greensboro in modern clothes and walked the battlefield park two days before the anniversary, from the position of Greene's first line, where the North Carolina militia stood behind a rail fence at the edge of the woods, back through the second line in the woods to the third line on the rise near the courthouse. At each stop I read aloud from the accounts of men who were there, which is what a history teacher does when he is let out of the classroom. Vernon Daly, who is a surveyor, paced off the distances between the lines and found them a good deal shorter than he'd pictured. Jerry Kowalewski said the woods made him understand why the second line held as long as it did. We ate lunch at a barbecue place on the way home and argued about it for two hours.

Two hundred and eighty fifth graders, in six groups, on the playing field of an elementary school in York County. Glenn Georges and Dale Taggart did the clothing station (Dale dressed a volunteer from each group from shirt to hunting shirt, while Glenn explained each piece). Nicole Partlow had the food station, with parched corn, johnnycake and a slab of salt pork the children were invited to smell and declined to taste. I talked about the war in our own county, on the ground they were sitting on. Corporal Staten fired one blank charge for each group, from fifty yards away, after explaining every step. Six cheers, six groups.

The question of the day, asked in every group: "Did they have lice?" Yes. Yes, they did.

Eighteen of us marched in a town parade behind Jesse on the drum and Keri on the fife, between a high school band and a convertible full of beauty queens. At the reviewing stand the company halted, faced to the right and fired a feu de joie, a running fire from one end of the line to the other, the way soldiers of the period celebrated good news. Every child on the street jumped, and then every child on the street cheered. We fired it twice more by request.

Our summer encampment, two days before the anniversary, on a farm in York County not many miles from the ground where the real thing happened. About 150 visitors came through. In the afternoon we fought a small skirmish against a visiting company from North Carolina who kindly agreed to portray the Loyalists, coming at their camp at the edge of the woods from two sides, as the militia did at Williamson's Plantation.

It was brutally hot. Corporal Staten sent two men off the field to the shade and water in the first ten minutes, over their protests, and he was right to. Nobody went down, and that is the point. Floyd Nelson says wool in July is the closest thing to time travel he knows of, because you understand immediately why everybody in 1780 was so irritable.

Twenty-two members at the captain's farm, plus three recruits, the best turnout for a drill in years. Corporal Staten inspected every musket in the company, flints and all, ahead of Kings Mountain, and turned back two for a dirty touchhole and one for a loose frizzen spring. The recruits drew loaner hunting shirts and hats, learned to roll cartridges at the table under the oak, and stood in the rear rank for the afternoon's drill, where they did better than I did at my first. Captain Kuhns read the orders for Kings Mountain weekend.

After drill, Stanley Dillon and Jeffrey Legette drove a pickup truck full of bottled water, canned food and blankets, collected from the company, east to a church that was gathering supplies for the families flooded out by Hurricane Floyd in eastern North Carolina. The company passed the hat for gas and filled it twice.

Next entry: Kings Mountain, the second weekend of October. Huzzah!