by Michael Rudolph
I remember the first leafy bushes that sprang out among the boulders. And ahead, worth a laugh of excitement, living trees, weathered though they were, crowned the escarpment before us. The dense needles were short and flat and each wooden petal of the cones was tipped with a thorn. We knew no name for them.
In the days that followed the terrain grew more rugged, and descent of the far side of the ridges we crossed proved a painstaking navigation of sharp volcanic rubble and the sun-bleached remains of long-dead trees interspersed with the living. We were gaining altitude all in all; the trees came a little closer and thus, we left the Great Basin, bane of thirsty travelers.
In the days that followed the terrain grew more rugged, and descent of the far side of the ridges we crossed proved a painstaking navigation of sharp volcanic rubble and the sun-bleached remains of long-dead trees interspersed with the living. We were gaining altitude all in all; the trees came a little closer and thus, we left the Great Basin, bane of thirsty travelers.
In my memory the morning of November fifth is a hard hike uphill with the horses breathing hard. Spindles of sunlight stabbed through the sequoias at our backs and warmed the fresh autumn air as the sylvan life began to stir. The branches would shudder now and then with the departure of some enthused jay or swallow that would then flit across our path to some other perch. It had been beautiful. Near the top I caught a glimpse of movement on my flank, and a second glance revealed a black-horned ram, already disappearing back the way we had come.
“You know that feeling, when you are alone?" Livingston asked.
"When you hear the twig break but nothing is there when you look," I said.
"Yes, yes! If you seen them it's only by their decision. So many tiptoe away within a yard or two of you and you’d never know that they were there.”
I laughed a bit and, patting the muzzle of my horse, I said, “I can feel them now.”
At the top Livingston got to searching for a clearing. It didn’t take him long to find and scramble up some monolith peeking from the dirt and dust of the forest floor. To the west it hung over a sheer drop to the downward slope on the other side, the treetops of which were below our feet when we stood there to look out over the land.
Under the bluest of skies those woods rolled on from ravine up to the crests of ridge after ridge and down again and above it all climbed a white-capped peak, crowned with wisps of steam. Further and dimmer to the north and south stood its sister peaks, hardly real but beautiful all the same.
“Do you think they have a name?” And his head came up with squinting eyes. He took a long look up the panorama of our view.
“Not unless they’ve seen it from the sea,” he said, smiling. After a quick meal we mounted and made our way north down the tapering length of the ridge onto a wide grassy flat. On all its nearest sides it was surrounded by trees and I could just make out the path of a winding stream that emerged from them and crossed it, heading east towards the Great Basin to offer what enrichment it could.
“Serene, isn't it?” Livingston said, but some weight held my tongue. My eyes were drawn into the woody thickets from which the stream emerged. I felt the presence of some peril for which I had no knowledge, a dread that not even the trickling of this winsome water could eclipse. Like a lullaby from the lips of a monster it enhanced it.
As we rode along its fringes the shadows of the wood began to creep from between the trunks of trees and under the brambles and fallen leaves. The very waning penetration of my gaze into its depths drew my eyes. The shadow overtook us. The eastern sky paled and on my skin I felt the touch of cooler air. A long finger of cloud reached across the zenith of the sky above us. So far our November had been a warm one, but I could feel the approach of winter.
“We should make camp, Ben."
"Not here. The woods call out to me after so many days of treading desert."
“The sun dipped behind the hill some half hour ago,” I protested. "We'll be making camp in the dark."
And in response he began watching for a clearing through which his horse could pass. "It's just that I can feel our journey ending, and it spurs me on. We have time."
The day was dying, but I knew that the days would grow shorter still. My anxiety had been replaced by a vague curiosity and fatefully, we plunged between the trees a final time.
A fear again took hold, for the wood by twilight is wholly different. Sadly compliant, our horses plodded up the long slope. I could feel the lungs of my beast as they swelled and released, hear the mellow breathing of ours both. I was trying my best, in the absence of light, to savor the fresh smell of the air, when the sudden flurry of a little bird before us startled me out of some distant tangent of thought and its frenzied silhouette vanished once more.
We meandered upwards, sometimes turning parallel to the ridge where its grade hindered us, switch-backing our way as the blackness bore in on us from the thickets and brush. Now and then I could see, like a vista between the trees, the teasing lightness of the high western sky at the peak of the ridge.
It was some time before the ground began to level off, but with the lifting of one curse came another. The soft forest floor had turned to a loose layer of treacherous rocks that were terrible to the horse’s hooves and soon the earth inclined again, this time with hoof-holds that would shift beneath us and go tumbling through the underbrush; down the hillside before us.
The susurruses of invisible, slinking creatures surrounded us and unseen twigs cracked in the darkness. Now, I should say that such is to be expected of the dusk of any wilderness, but I resented it all in that wary state. Livingston also felt uneasy. Such fear, one might say, is the product of human imagination, and futilely I had tried to convince myself of such a fact. Still, each little sylvan disturbance sent a tremor of fear resounding through my chest. Then, to our trepidation the horses came on edge as well. I could feel the suspicion in every step that mine took. I could dimly see its large round eyes, darting to and fro, so anxiously as to forewarn me of the approach of some abysmal and loathsome thing. The hair stands up on the back of my neck even as I recall. My hands were shaking on the reigns, and to my right, Livingston, in an attempt to whisper to me, was murmuring almost inaudibly.
Then, at once, a hush descended upon the wood. The creepings ceased and both horses froze in their tracks. A surge of hot terror flew through me; suddenly it seemed as though the very air was clenching at my shoulders. I could see nothing and I dared not seek a glimpse of whatever nightmare beheld us. Livingston threw his head around, his arms tight, yanking the reigns, but his animal had turned to stone. Its hoof-hold gave way and the sharp little rocks went tumbling down the bank. For a moment, then two, its leg bobbed there above the slide, and with a cry so spine-chillingly shrill as to send my own steed stabbing, with rigid strides, through the forest, it reared and kicked and flung itself over the edge. In an instant, dreamlike, I was roaring back with my only consciousness the cadence of pounding hooves. It seemed I scanned the trees but the shadows betwixt defeated my eyes.
Eyes!
Eyes!
What horror my eyes beheld as I leapt from my steed, sliding with a torrent of stones after my friend down that abominable hillside. Still as I pursued, the horse was thrashing down with a heap of dust and stones for the darkest depths of those woods. And only when the corpse came to rest did I distinguish Livingston among it all: broken and still as the night. But alone, he did not rest with the desolation of his animal.
His face was in the rocks. His clothes were in tatters about him. I had my hands on my head, too spineless to act- to touch him! Tears streamed down my face and at last I took him in my arms, but when I turned him I heard not his waning breath, or last words. Far above us I perceived of my horses neigh, and then of frantic hooves and then a cry, a whimper and then silence.
“Ben, don’t you move,” but he could hardly wince. From above a little stone came bounding past, as if to taunt me in my plight, as if to appeal to all the fear and the curiosity within me but night had fallen and there were only shadows from hence it came.
Livingston groaned and I looked down his body, to the little twist above his knee where, soaked in blood, the shattered bone protruded from his flesh. With no choice but to disregard his pain I wrapped it with my outer layers as best and as tight I could and lifted him.
“Where is there to go?” I had thought, “To flee from darkness into darkness?” I climbed down past where streaks of blood marred the stones and past the fallen horse into the trees without the slightest idea of where I might have gone. That night I carried him as far as I could with the adrenaline in my veins. Red-faced and breathing hard, so that if I had stopped to rest exhaustion would have staid me, I penetrated the wood. Deeper and deeper with every stride down the little glen, swimming through scratching thickets of undergrowth. Hours it seemed before I began to slow, but fatigue had overtaken me. I laid Livingston down in the brush and laid my face in the dirt. My lungs heaved, my limbs seem to recede and all that I could feel were the gushes of air through my mouth and the damp earth on my cheek. Then the forest left me and I sank into the world of dreams.
I stood then atop a drift of snow on that very spot, so deep that the forest was gone and only its highest branches protruded from the plane of white. I took a crunching step in that world so deathly still, and saw the swirling billows of the sky just above my head. I realized that I was utterly alone. Some noise pattered quietly behind my thoughts.
When I remembered Livingston I found that I was watching myself as I frantically dug through the snow, and the pattering grew louder. The little figure looked alone on that vast scape of white as he sobbed. Snowflakes began to fall towards him, towards the Earth with the stamps of sound playing through my thoughts. It began to overtake them, a blackness replaced the snow and then I felt the cold spots of rain falling on my neck. The rain pattered in the darkness of the forest and Livingston breathed shallowly beside me.
Through that night I struggled on with Livingston as he slipped in and out of awareness. All my energy went to pushing myself, but when I thought it was always of him. His leg disgusted me, but the prospect of some unseen, and far more perilous, injury within his head or back pained me more. I was terrified for my friend.
“Find me,” he would say, as though locked within the spell of fever. “Find me! I want to be found.”
When rain began to patter down through the foliage of the trees and onto us he opened his eyes and spoke reasonably, without recollection of his other words.
“How will I survive, I do not think the odds are in my favor,” he moaned.
“But what are odds?” I asked. “The only odds are that I will carry you to the Mississippi River if I have to. This is not the end.” And I sensed the contortion of his face as a long wince passed through it. By the end he breathed hard and his eyes were bloodshot.
“My leg feels like it is being crushed,” he said, but I couldn’t see him in my arms. The darkness blinded me and the rain rolled down my face.
I labored on through the darkness, guided only by the chattering rain. There it beat the muddy earth, there it streamed from the leaves of the undergrowth, here it dripped down the rugged bark of a pine.
At some indefinable point during that night, my memory having been twisted and blurred by fear, the blackness began to sharpen into blue-gray shapes. Once I thought I could see a faint bit of light in the distance but soon it was missing, veiled by a catacomb of trees. My imagination may have been deceiving me, except that when the pale light reappeared its hue had warmed, at times appearing red and at others orange. On the night’s breeze came the sound of wooden chimes in the rain.
I made for it with all my endurance, with everything I had. In fact there was some light filtering through the forest, and through the rain, what I could not yet tell, but something was out there. I remember passing the last of the gargantuan trees and, with Livingston over my shoulder, reaching out and letting my hand feel the roughness of its skin. Through the twisting poles of smaller plants and the silhouetted spindle-shapes of leaves points of light would emerge, starred apart by the water in my eyes. I waded through the shriveling underbrush, pushed aside the last woody branches and stepped through the ferns and found around me a village of low earthen mounds, so foreign that at first I took the sight for a trick of my light-starved eyes, smoke holes cast with the flickering glow of fires within.
Near that spot I collapsed and remembered nothing more until morning revealed us to our unwitting hosts.
“You know that feeling, when you are alone?" Livingston asked.
"When you hear the twig break but nothing is there when you look," I said.
"Yes, yes! If you seen them it's only by their decision. So many tiptoe away within a yard or two of you and you’d never know that they were there.”
I laughed a bit and, patting the muzzle of my horse, I said, “I can feel them now.”
At the top Livingston got to searching for a clearing. It didn’t take him long to find and scramble up some monolith peeking from the dirt and dust of the forest floor. To the west it hung over a sheer drop to the downward slope on the other side, the treetops of which were below our feet when we stood there to look out over the land.
Under the bluest of skies those woods rolled on from ravine up to the crests of ridge after ridge and down again and above it all climbed a white-capped peak, crowned with wisps of steam. Further and dimmer to the north and south stood its sister peaks, hardly real but beautiful all the same.
“Do you think they have a name?” And his head came up with squinting eyes. He took a long look up the panorama of our view.
“Not unless they’ve seen it from the sea,” he said, smiling. After a quick meal we mounted and made our way north down the tapering length of the ridge onto a wide grassy flat. On all its nearest sides it was surrounded by trees and I could just make out the path of a winding stream that emerged from them and crossed it, heading east towards the Great Basin to offer what enrichment it could.
“Serene, isn't it?” Livingston said, but some weight held my tongue. My eyes were drawn into the woody thickets from which the stream emerged. I felt the presence of some peril for which I had no knowledge, a dread that not even the trickling of this winsome water could eclipse. Like a lullaby from the lips of a monster it enhanced it.
As we rode along its fringes the shadows of the wood began to creep from between the trunks of trees and under the brambles and fallen leaves. The very waning penetration of my gaze into its depths drew my eyes. The shadow overtook us. The eastern sky paled and on my skin I felt the touch of cooler air. A long finger of cloud reached across the zenith of the sky above us. So far our November had been a warm one, but I could feel the approach of winter.
“We should make camp, Ben."
"Not here. The woods call out to me after so many days of treading desert."
“The sun dipped behind the hill some half hour ago,” I protested. "We'll be making camp in the dark."
And in response he began watching for a clearing through which his horse could pass. "It's just that I can feel our journey ending, and it spurs me on. We have time."
The day was dying, but I knew that the days would grow shorter still. My anxiety had been replaced by a vague curiosity and fatefully, we plunged between the trees a final time.
A fear again took hold, for the wood by twilight is wholly different. Sadly compliant, our horses plodded up the long slope. I could feel the lungs of my beast as they swelled and released, hear the mellow breathing of ours both. I was trying my best, in the absence of light, to savor the fresh smell of the air, when the sudden flurry of a little bird before us startled me out of some distant tangent of thought and its frenzied silhouette vanished once more.
We meandered upwards, sometimes turning parallel to the ridge where its grade hindered us, switch-backing our way as the blackness bore in on us from the thickets and brush. Now and then I could see, like a vista between the trees, the teasing lightness of the high western sky at the peak of the ridge.
It was some time before the ground began to level off, but with the lifting of one curse came another. The soft forest floor had turned to a loose layer of treacherous rocks that were terrible to the horse’s hooves and soon the earth inclined again, this time with hoof-holds that would shift beneath us and go tumbling through the underbrush; down the hillside before us.
The susurruses of invisible, slinking creatures surrounded us and unseen twigs cracked in the darkness. Now, I should say that such is to be expected of the dusk of any wilderness, but I resented it all in that wary state. Livingston also felt uneasy. Such fear, one might say, is the product of human imagination, and futilely I had tried to convince myself of such a fact. Still, each little sylvan disturbance sent a tremor of fear resounding through my chest. Then, to our trepidation the horses came on edge as well. I could feel the suspicion in every step that mine took. I could dimly see its large round eyes, darting to and fro, so anxiously as to forewarn me of the approach of some abysmal and loathsome thing. The hair stands up on the back of my neck even as I recall. My hands were shaking on the reigns, and to my right, Livingston, in an attempt to whisper to me, was murmuring almost inaudibly.
Then, at once, a hush descended upon the wood. The creepings ceased and both horses froze in their tracks. A surge of hot terror flew through me; suddenly it seemed as though the very air was clenching at my shoulders. I could see nothing and I dared not seek a glimpse of whatever nightmare beheld us. Livingston threw his head around, his arms tight, yanking the reigns, but his animal had turned to stone. Its hoof-hold gave way and the sharp little rocks went tumbling down the bank. For a moment, then two, its leg bobbed there above the slide, and with a cry so spine-chillingly shrill as to send my own steed stabbing, with rigid strides, through the forest, it reared and kicked and flung itself over the edge. In an instant, dreamlike, I was roaring back with my only consciousness the cadence of pounding hooves. It seemed I scanned the trees but the shadows betwixt defeated my eyes.
Eyes!
Eyes!
What horror my eyes beheld as I leapt from my steed, sliding with a torrent of stones after my friend down that abominable hillside. Still as I pursued, the horse was thrashing down with a heap of dust and stones for the darkest depths of those woods. And only when the corpse came to rest did I distinguish Livingston among it all: broken and still as the night. But alone, he did not rest with the desolation of his animal.
His face was in the rocks. His clothes were in tatters about him. I had my hands on my head, too spineless to act- to touch him! Tears streamed down my face and at last I took him in my arms, but when I turned him I heard not his waning breath, or last words. Far above us I perceived of my horses neigh, and then of frantic hooves and then a cry, a whimper and then silence.
“Ben, don’t you move,” but he could hardly wince. From above a little stone came bounding past, as if to taunt me in my plight, as if to appeal to all the fear and the curiosity within me but night had fallen and there were only shadows from hence it came.
Livingston groaned and I looked down his body, to the little twist above his knee where, soaked in blood, the shattered bone protruded from his flesh. With no choice but to disregard his pain I wrapped it with my outer layers as best and as tight I could and lifted him.
“Where is there to go?” I had thought, “To flee from darkness into darkness?” I climbed down past where streaks of blood marred the stones and past the fallen horse into the trees without the slightest idea of where I might have gone. That night I carried him as far as I could with the adrenaline in my veins. Red-faced and breathing hard, so that if I had stopped to rest exhaustion would have staid me, I penetrated the wood. Deeper and deeper with every stride down the little glen, swimming through scratching thickets of undergrowth. Hours it seemed before I began to slow, but fatigue had overtaken me. I laid Livingston down in the brush and laid my face in the dirt. My lungs heaved, my limbs seem to recede and all that I could feel were the gushes of air through my mouth and the damp earth on my cheek. Then the forest left me and I sank into the world of dreams.
I stood then atop a drift of snow on that very spot, so deep that the forest was gone and only its highest branches protruded from the plane of white. I took a crunching step in that world so deathly still, and saw the swirling billows of the sky just above my head. I realized that I was utterly alone. Some noise pattered quietly behind my thoughts.
When I remembered Livingston I found that I was watching myself as I frantically dug through the snow, and the pattering grew louder. The little figure looked alone on that vast scape of white as he sobbed. Snowflakes began to fall towards him, towards the Earth with the stamps of sound playing through my thoughts. It began to overtake them, a blackness replaced the snow and then I felt the cold spots of rain falling on my neck. The rain pattered in the darkness of the forest and Livingston breathed shallowly beside me.
Through that night I struggled on with Livingston as he slipped in and out of awareness. All my energy went to pushing myself, but when I thought it was always of him. His leg disgusted me, but the prospect of some unseen, and far more perilous, injury within his head or back pained me more. I was terrified for my friend.
“Find me,” he would say, as though locked within the spell of fever. “Find me! I want to be found.”
When rain began to patter down through the foliage of the trees and onto us he opened his eyes and spoke reasonably, without recollection of his other words.
“How will I survive, I do not think the odds are in my favor,” he moaned.
“But what are odds?” I asked. “The only odds are that I will carry you to the Mississippi River if I have to. This is not the end.” And I sensed the contortion of his face as a long wince passed through it. By the end he breathed hard and his eyes were bloodshot.
“My leg feels like it is being crushed,” he said, but I couldn’t see him in my arms. The darkness blinded me and the rain rolled down my face.
I labored on through the darkness, guided only by the chattering rain. There it beat the muddy earth, there it streamed from the leaves of the undergrowth, here it dripped down the rugged bark of a pine.
At some indefinable point during that night, my memory having been twisted and blurred by fear, the blackness began to sharpen into blue-gray shapes. Once I thought I could see a faint bit of light in the distance but soon it was missing, veiled by a catacomb of trees. My imagination may have been deceiving me, except that when the pale light reappeared its hue had warmed, at times appearing red and at others orange. On the night’s breeze came the sound of wooden chimes in the rain.
I made for it with all my endurance, with everything I had. In fact there was some light filtering through the forest, and through the rain, what I could not yet tell, but something was out there. I remember passing the last of the gargantuan trees and, with Livingston over my shoulder, reaching out and letting my hand feel the roughness of its skin. Through the twisting poles of smaller plants and the silhouetted spindle-shapes of leaves points of light would emerge, starred apart by the water in my eyes. I waded through the shriveling underbrush, pushed aside the last woody branches and stepped through the ferns and found around me a village of low earthen mounds, so foreign that at first I took the sight for a trick of my light-starved eyes, smoke holes cast with the flickering glow of fires within.
Near that spot I collapsed and remembered nothing more until morning revealed us to our unwitting hosts.
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