Uncertain Justice

Chapter 48

For a week after the confrontation with the bear, he stayed close to the cavern and always on this side of the river. With plenty of meat and no particular needs to fill, he kept close to home.

When he did venture across the stream two weeks after the battle, he watched carefully for anything out of the ordinary. There were no tracks indicating the presence of another bear, nor any that he could attribute to a wolf, or a cougar or one of the other big cats but he resolved to not let the lack of sign interfere with staying alert. He worked hard on making it an instinctive habit, wanting to know of the presence of large predators before they knew about him.

He killed an elk three weeks after the injury and field dressed the carcass in record time, pausing often to get to his feet and look in every direction. When in the stream spearing fish, he found it impossible to keep his attention on the water ... he kept glancing around to see what was behind him. At first, he drew his g*n at every unexplained noise in the brush, holding his breath until it went away or revealed itself as harmless. The feeling of being stalked by unseen beasts was slow to fade.

§

Gradually, vigilance born of apprehension transformed itself into a deep, but effortless awareness that stayed with him day and night. It deepened. Consciousness of his surroundings built to an intensity that would have amazed him had he stopped to wonder. He'd dealt with life and living in the wilderness effectively for a while now, and would probably have continued to deal with the wild without the enhanced understanding resulting from the confrontation with the grizzly.

But now ... now he felt he was in harmony with the forest. Instead of moving through the wild country as a traveler, he was a part of it.

It seemed for the first time in his life, where he looked ... he saw with unbelievable clarity and heard the smallest sound when he listened. He was astounded at the increasing sharpness of his vision. He found he could see each feather on the wings of a hawk flying high in an updraft. The smallest depression in the soil, the tiniest displacement of a blade of grass caught his attention.

Using only his ears, he tracked a field mouse as it made it's way along the edge of a clearing. He heard the wind whispering through the extended wings of a great owl diving to capture the mouse. Sitting quietly, he listened to the sudden rustling and trembling silence as rabbits scurried for cover at a bobcat's advance.

Odors began to mean something more than pleasing or repulsive. He could detect and identify an elk long before he saw the big buck striding arrogantly through a stand of trees. The world held a wealth of sensations he perceived and used with ever increasing dexterity.

Facing the big grizzly and triumphing over the fierce predator had touched Miles on a level much deeper than he first realized. Before he fought the bear, he'd had to fight through a panic so mesmerizing ... so deep and paralyzing it nearly swallowed him whole. With arms and legs deadened, the effort to lift the spear and fight had been the hardest thing he'd ever done.

Even when he'd found a way through the morass of panic, the battle with the bear had hardly been trivial. He could have easily died in combat with the huge beast--the odds had been against him from the start.

Terror, though, had been the more potent adversary. Once conquered, it lost its power and it could never dominate him again. In its place was a reservoir of self-assurance no longer overlaid by doubt.

He reflected on the fact that he'd killed the grizzly with little more than a sharp stick ... one of mankind's most ancient weapons and he discovered an ever deepening empathy with the ancient hunters who found ways to kill beasts far more powerful than themselves. Fear and outrage, coupled with the violence of the thunderstorm on the night he'd decided to flee from persecution, had cut a slit in the tenuous barrier between reasoning decision and pure animal instinct.

It had been that new understanding of his primitive human instincts that gave him enough courage to escape from the trap in which he found himself. Once away from the immediate danger though, he'd let it lay undeveloped. Confronting and killing the huge bear with mankind's most primitive weapon brought it to the forefront again.

Deliberately, he composed himself in meditation deeper and more complete than he'd known was possible. He steeped himself in the sensory impact of the world he found around him ... the physical part he could see and hear about him every day ... and a tantalizing fringe he'd not been aware of before. Even now, he could only dimly perceive it but there were times when he was so completely in tune with the universe, he imagined he could leave his corporal being behind and roam the world on the wind.

He was at peace, troubled only by the occasional flicker of visions at the edge of awareness. Someone or something beckoned, but whatever it was faded when he turned to look. Frustrated, he strained but could find no one there.

In the solitude of the small valley, he went mad ... or found a new truth.

§

With nothing pressing, Miles decided to make a day hike as far as he could to the north and east to see what was beyond that bend in the river curling around the northern extent of the big eastern ridge.

It was summer by his reckoning. He was only guessing. Other than using the sun as his guide, he didn't even know the time of day ... and didn't care. He'd lost track of the date soon after he entered the wilderness. It just didn't matter.

He began the trek at sunrise so he could travel a fair distance before the heat of the day made walking a chore instead of an adventure. The afternoons were uncomfortably warm, even at this altitude, though nowhere near as hot as the southern Texas heat of his youth.

Wading across the river in his bare feet, its frigid fingers clawed deep into his groin as it always did. There was apparently an inexhaustible source of icy water because the flow didn't decline as summer advanced. When he got to the other side, he dried his feet and put his boots back on. He walked north, striding along at a comfortable gait.

The leg badly bruised in the fight with the grizzly seemed fine and he walked a good five or six miles, scrambling along the broken shoreline, before it tired ... but then, his other leg was fatigued also. A rest for a belated breakfast let his body recover and he put aside worries about the injury for good.

Here north of the eastern ridge, the river narrowed, running faster and deeper through a series of whitewater rapids where the water boiled and leapt high between the confining banks. A low roar emanated from somewhere in the distance. He wondered if the river dropped over a set of falls or whether more rapids lay downstream.

Abruptly, the river widened again. The current slowed ... but it seemed to have a hidden power now ... a repressed aggression. Miles sensed an impatient urgency in the reduced flow. Something yearned for release. The muted roar was still there, joined now by a faint trembling in the earth.

Ahead, he saw a series of boulders neatly placed side by side across the entire stream. When he came abreast of them, he saw they were in a perfect row extending from bank to bank. He studied them carefully.

The bridge ... for that was what it had to be ... was not natural. Nature doesn't have straight lines. The rocks had been set there for the specific purpose of allowing easy travel from one side of the river to the other.

He thought first of Zeb, but the mountain man had been alone and no one person, even with the three horses he referred to in his journal, could have hauled those big boulders to the river and worked them into such neat alignment. Four had obviously been shaped with tools to make the tops reasonably level. The gaps between the boulders were only a few feet wide--narrow enough for comfortable steps from one to another but there was plenty of space between them to allow a free flow of water. No, Zeb hadn't done this.

Following the line of stepping-stones across the stream with his eyes, Miles saw a well-defined trail beginning at the water's edge and zigzagging sharply up the rocky ridge for fifty feet or more. High above the river, the path ceased climbing and traveled horizontally a short distance below the crest of the bluff. It went around a bulge in the terrain and disappeared to the north and east, following the dips and contours of the ridge that loomed over the river on that side.

The scree on the lower reaches of the mountain that formed the eastern boundary to his valley came right to the water's edge downstream on this side of the river. Probably the talus slope covered the channel where the water had once run because the river made a radical change of direction here. It detoured north for a quarter of a mile around the rock fall before coming back south and then off to the east again. The tangled mass of large and small boulders on this side offered no hope of progress. If he wanted to go on, it would have to be across the river.

Miles scrutinized the rim high above, imagining it crumbling and sweeping down in a massive fall, exposing the granite heart of the mountain and piling up smashed stone, trees, and soil below. It had happened before; some angry god had dumped an immense load of crushed stone here in an ancient cataclysm.

§

Huge boulders fell from the sacred mountain, slamming down on the field nearby. Untold millions of tons of rock and earth crushed everything beneath a gigantic rock fall. Terrible concussions knocked him off his feet. Smaller stones and razor-sharp fragments thrown to great heights began to rain down and bombard his prone body while he choked on clouds of thick dust. He screamed as falling splinters of stone, sharp as the finest flint arrow points, cut open his back. Staggering to his feet he tried to run but his legs had no strength--they gave way beneath him.

The landslide flowed downhill and covered the terraced farms of maize and beans. The seemingly fluid earth chased him, surging ever closer to where he staggered across the bucking ground. The river crossing leading to the safety of the city was almost in sight and he struggled to run faster. He had to be there before the guards pulled the heavy, rough-hewn planks from the supporting boulders. They were there to remove the bridging in case of an attack and they would interpret all the noise and confusion as just that. An instant before the implacable swell caught him, he screamed again, his voice unheard in the hurricane of displaced air.

§

Miles blinked and shook himself, recoiling from the power in the vision of the massive avalanche of dirt and rock. He contemplated the river crossing. The choice was easy--cross over and continue exploring or turn back. But it was too early to go back. He'd planned a full day's trek and he didn't want to go home yet. Something pulled at him to cross the stream and walk the trail along the far ridge.

He checked the holster to make sure the pistol couldn't fall out, tightened the lashings on his fanny pack and canteen so they wouldn't slip, and stepped out on the first stone. It was getting hot; the birds and insects were quiet in whatever shelter they'd found from the sun's rays. The low rumble--it still sounded like water falling some distance away--was the only disturbance.

It was an easy crossing but, by the time he was halfway across, he was thoroughly irritated. The boulders were just too far apart for him to walk comfortably from one to another. He wound up getting a running start on each one to jump across the opening to the next.