There were rays of sunlight coming across the early morning lake. Even in late spring there was a chill to the air while the sun came up and the day settled itself over the shore. With the cool air the pollen was less and the boy could take deep breaths without sneezing.
Ahead his father was making his way through the thickened brush along the banks, the thorn bushes reaching out to snag his cap. He beat them away and with a flick of his wrist cast out the yellow jigger at the end of his line. The dark water rippled away where the jigger had landed. The boy watched him reel it in very slowly with only a little bounce to the tip of the rod. Even when the jigger drew very close he still did not bring the jig up but slowed his reeling further.
When the fish struck the rod bent very suddenly and the water near the shore churned and broiled. The reel creaked with the pressure and the boy’s father maneuvered the fish into the shallows where he let it fight until it grew tired.
“It is only a small bluegill!” the boy said when it had been landed.
“He is one of the good fighters,” his father said.
He showed the boy the sharp spikes on the dorsal fins and how to gently collapse them with your hand.
“We toss them back,” his father said. He was removing the jig from deep in the mouth of the fish with the pliers. “We are good to them.”
The bluegill dunked back in the water with a wet swallowing noise.
“We are good to them,” the boy agreed. “They are nice.”
***
The man stepped off the train into the dying halflight and heaved his pack over his shoulders before setting off down the faded wet boardwalk to the little town lying beyond. The sun was setting over the mountains looming on the horizon through the parting dark gray clouds above. He could taste the sulfur in the air and also felt its heaviness and knew he had just missed the afternoon showers.
In the town a few of the shop-owners were just starting to come out into the streets with wary and weary greyheads to see the sky above. The wet street glistened rainwater and was empty.
Inside the corner deli the air was clear and cold. He ordered three sandwiches from the pale blueeyed girl at the counter and she brought him a courtesy extra basket of tomatoes.
“Where are you going?” she asked him, packing the sandwiches under the cloth of the basket.
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Oh,” she said. “I hear that’s great this time of year.”
He left. Outside was hot and humid under the dull-lit sunset. The white moon hung vaporlike, fizzing in the water of the bluing sky. Near the outskirt of town he found a public fountain and filled his plastic gallon bottle with the lukewarm water. He slung it through the loop in his pack and picked up the basket with the sandwiches and headed down the dusty road leading out of town and towards the foothills ahead.
The forest was in the mosaic of its latesummer bloom. Leaves trickled down off the edges of the trees with gusts of the light wind and crunched underfoot. He picked up a trickling streambed not very far into the wood and followed it down its sandy banks as it rolled over the pebbly shallows and collected in bubbling pools beneath tiny waterfalls. He used the larger rocks lining the banks to keep his trek dry and to avoid trampling through the thick beds of hepatica and wildflower covering the immediate shore. Through the bushes ahead he caught a fleeting glimpse of a red fox turning away from the noise of his shoes pushing off the mossy wet rocks to disappear into the bushes beyond.
The stream soon emptied into the riverlike creek, twenty feet across, the clear shadows deepening and darkening into the rapids at the center of the creek.
From the main creekside path he could see up the high rock cliffs overlooking the gorge. He followed the path down until he could see the edges of the campground and then continued until they were invisible again around the bend of the gentler rapids. A shorter trail ran off the side of the creekside path and up along the steep wall of the rock cliffs. The trail soon vanished and he blazed his way up the steep embankment, digging his fingers into the grass, pulling himself up using uncovered roots and sticks as leverage, his feet scrambling for a foothold.
At the top he hiked through the woods until he reached a small clearing overlooking the creek that was good. It would be a good place for the tent. He looked out once more to be sure that the campground could not be seen, before taking out his fishing rod and jogging back down the steep wall. He would have to hurry if he meant to catch the last light of the day.
*
The next morning he woke to the angry chirping of morning birds nestled in the yew of the trees above his tent. He crawled out to the dewy grass and walked gingerly down the path he had beaten the night before to the rocks where he had left his shoes. Above the sky was purpling as the morning light struggled to make its way through the dark clouds of the starless night.
By the muddy bed of the creekbank he ran, along the little handcarved path between the celery stick wheatgrass, through the campground and the parking lots and over the little red covered bridge which crossed the stream and led up the road towards the ranger’s office. The incline was gradual and he ran smooth, comfortable, watching himself, thinking about the heat, brushing a palm at the moistness over his forehead. He felt itchy, not quite ready to sweat, feeling the cool edge to the air that the rising sun had not quite had enough time to take away yet.
He looked back down the incline to the creek as it began to vanish behind the trees. The glens cut icy clear through the muddy banks, running in swirls and eddies over the mossrocks and dark sandstone floors. From above he could see the rock bass and assorted panfish collecting in the clearer waters farther from the falls near the bridge, the torsion of their fins moving against the current and their keeping. Slowly they grew less distinct and finally the creek disappeared.
The morning was very quiet. The lights were out in the ranger station when he ran by, the RV parked beside it as silent as the rest of the campground.
Away from the ranger station the road turned and steepened and he started breathing. He took the first promising trail he found, a narrow redclay hillside which shot up straight into a tunnel of towering oak trees made of hairy and fraying brown bark. He tried easing into it, keeping his effort even and controlled, checking himself, but felt another rhythm coming from without, gently pressing on him to let go, to cede his control. He found himself fighting it until he could no longer feel it, and he was alone again.
On the trail there was the feeling of all the bad left behind: the bad feeling, the bad headaches, and it did not hurt to think anymore.
After he crested the hill the path ran at a downward slope for a stretch and then down into a gully over which crossed a small bubbling stream. He hopped softly on the slickened rocks across and pushed off the bank on the other side. Ahead there was a sign by the side of the brush marking the start of the equestrian trail. It would be too early for the horses, he knew.
The equestrian trail was rocky and uneven and still muddy from the night rains. His shoes sunk into the mud with a sucking squishing noise and then ripped out, his high backkick splattering mud on his shorts and lower back. When he concentrated on the mud he could not see very much else through the trees so he was glad when the ground hardened on the other side of a small rise. The path was always climbing even though the land dipped down and up into little gullies and divots in the earth.
Still there were no other noises in the forest save for the twitter of the morning birds and the constant background of the bullfrogs croaking by the sidestreams that trickled through the hills and down to the creekbed far below. The other sounds, the sounds of the highway and the sounds of the railroad were gone. They were still there at his tent even now but here up in the hills they were gone.
Out off the top of the delta which offered the first clear view of the river valley he slowed slightly, half jogging for a moment to see, blood rushing back to his body and the thick soreness pleasantly evaporating from his chest. He felt slightly exhilarated and did not wait long, dashing down the other side of the escarpment, grinning in a manic sort of way and thinking greedily to what remained uncovered ahead. The greenery dashed by him in a blur of pastels as he ran, trees bending in the soft morning light with the newfallen leaves and hints of creatures unknown scampering through the bushes. He coughed every so often to break the silence, to give fair forewarning to the animals ahead, to hear the impact of sound on the flat-silent birdchirping forest.
The trail soon morphed into switchbacks which split and forked at almost every turn and he took the ones that hinted at some kind of depth. Twice he turned back and looped into a trail which the other hidden part of him had told him was the right one. He always followed the grade of the land when he could, as if obeying some instinct to move upwards, to reach some inevitable endpoint on the far off horizon where there would exist some kind of reward or award for championing alone the remote enforested climb.
Very soon the horse hoofprints in the dirt vanished. They vanished much sooner than he had thought they would.
II
The fence was rusted and overgrown with weeds and tangled plants. At the top the boy paused and looked back down to the others watching him on the field. Then he let go and landed amidst the bushes.
The boy could only just see the others through the fence. He stood up carefully and picked his way through the trees and plants. The ball had jumped off his bat when he hit it and he’d turned on it. The problem was it had been a line drive and it could have rolled another hundred feet after sailing over the tip of the fence.
Away from the field and the pool everything was very quiet. The twigs snapped underfoot and his feet sunk into the leaves and the brush past his ankles. He scratched at his legs.
The ball rested at the base of an old oak tree. It was colored a sandy yellow from the many games that it had seen played. He picked it up and fired it over the trees and back onto the field in the distance. There were muffled shouts of joy which only just reached his ears.
He scampered back through the forest, excited about the game and his home run. He was just feet away from the fence when he caught the edge of a stump and went lurching forward, landing facefirst in a thick green patch of plants. He rubbed his eyes and his face to clear the dirt away. When he looked up one of the other boys was just staring at him through the fence.
“What?” he asked him.
“Do you know…do you know what you’re lying in right now?”
He looked down at the forest floor and did not respond.
“That’s poison oak, man!”
The boy sat there for another moment, looked at him, felt the mark on his face where he’d rubbed his hands. Then he stood up and leapt over the fence and jogged back into the game.
***
The forest was growing stranger. The sun was fully risen now and the man could feel the heat of it against the back of his neck. He had not been running long enough to feel it in the other places that would slow him down more but he knew it was still early and that the sun still had much time to do its work.
He thought of many things while he ran. He thought of the little tentsite he had made against the clearing a hundred yards up the hill from the lake. He thought of the pale blueeyed girl behind the counter at the deli in town who had given him extra tomatoes with his sandwiches. And he thought of how he did not need to think of anything beyond that because all that really mattered very much here were the things that you decided mattered.
Several times he glanced at his watch as he ran but the slowly changing numbers offered him no advice. The watch was there to help, he knew, but it could not run for him. Sometimes he convinced himself that it could. Both the watch and his shoes too.
He began looking ahead to the next turn with increasing desperation and an increasing feeling of the endlessness of it all. As he climbed the trees became thinner but he did not take very close note of the wider land opened up before him.
When he looked up he saw on the trail ahead a squirrel, balanced precariously on the edge of an uncovered root. It watched him approach, eyes miffed and frozen, tail jutted high and haughty behind him, acorn or nut held in its paws stopped halfway on the journey to its bared fangs. Time seemed to slow and he was no longer concerned with the end of the hill but only the brief uncoverable stretch of redclay hillside trail lying before the motionless squirrel. Uncaring now he ran straight for him until half an agonizing step away when the squirrel darted off the trail to follow some unknowable instinct-path through the brush.
The tingles ran all over his body. It had been a good fall.
When the burning began to leave him he turned over his wrist to check his watch. Dirt and sweat and blood covered his wrist and the watchface and he cleared it off with his fingertips.
It was blank. Down the center of the screen was a single jagged crack.
III
The morning was warm and wet in the woods by Oak Valley Pond. The boy picked his way carefully through the underbrush with his fishing rod. The thorns yanked at his shirt and his skin. He was not sure of where he was. In the branch of a tree ahead a yellow warbler let out a sudden exclamation and it startled the boy so thoroughly that he nearly jumped.
Unlike the open road or the flat plain or the gently undulating forest path, the switchbacks of the foothills offered no sightlines. There was no looking back. He could look out through the trees at the crest of the rises and see the next stage of the route laid out before him. But each step backwards had to be covered in legs, in carefully measured out portions, nothing could be seen of a mile back until a three-quarter mile stretch was covered. Against him too was the sameness of the greenery rushing by him, there was little distinct in the oaks and pines and the shrubberies crowding their foundation here from where he had first entered upon the trail. How was he to tell where he had come in, which path would lead him back? It had not seemed so important before, when he was ascending, when the wind rushed cool by his face and the early morning sun was rising with his stride, that there were so many little offshoots and sidepaths, and that he had only taken one route, and that there was only one route that would take him back to food and shelter and everything that came with it. Those words were beginning to have a meaning now after many miles through the Vondergreen.
The yellowing sky filtered brilliant through the trees and reflected sharply off the dewsoaked branches which rustled like rain and soaked him with cold water when he brushed against them. The cold felt good against his hot and sweating limbs which burned from the sun. The trail was still angling uphill but it was not very steep anymore.
Feeling the greenery rush by him he caught an edge of the stronger fatigue that was now lurking, brought by both time and the sun. The start of each run set off an invisible timer that counted down the time for which his body would be able to continue running. The starting numbers on that timer were different every morning. Sometimes it was the weather and sometimes it was something he had eaten but most of the time it was just the will of some force that he could not quite name that would decide just how much energy to give him on that day. Of course there were other variables like sleep and diet that he could control, but nothing weighed so presciently in his mind as the little prayers and rituals of bartering with the running gods that would come even when he tried to stop them from coming. For now he staved off the urge to trade for anything and only ran.
Above the canopy of trees had thinned extensively and a hint of the skyblue sky was visible through the shining yellow light of the sun. The trail was winding up again, steeper but not as steep as before. As the treeline cleared he made out a dark gray cloudcover moving closer in the distance.
The man allowed himself the brief respite of jogging around the flattened capstone of the foothills. His breathing settled and he could feel his legs tightening already even as he moved about the perimeter. He liked to be able to just look straight up to the sky and see nothing but the pureblue of the morning sky glistening yellow with a few gulls flying white and throaty and glinting as white specks against the background and imagining that truly nothing else existed and that he was floating free suspended in the midair blue over nothingness. From the corner of his eye the dark gray clouds were inching closer.
When he turned back to reenter the trailhead, he found that he did not know where to go. The path was unfamiliar and he knew very quickly that he was on the wrong trail. He returned to the summit and circled around the washed sandstone again. In corners and crevices he examined every path and unthinking ran down them all partway before returning to the summit in a breathless fear. Above him the clouds had finished darkening and it began to rain.
Swanson came by in the R.V. to pick them up for the trip. They packed only what they could carry in their backpacks plus food. Swanson and the others had outfitted the recreational vehicle heavily: a full refrigerator, two made-up kingsized beds, a television, a bathroom, a kitchen with a dishwasher, a set of iPod speakers.
“Swanson,” the boy said. “There’s a shower in this thing?”
“Not just a shower,” Swanson said. “It’s a bathtub.”
***
With sweatsoaked, mudlogged shoes he bounded down the path, glancing about into the forest in a concealed desperation. He remembered to be calm. He could feel the deepseated fatigue buttoning its way across him like a warning. He cursed silently. Usually it was the stitches in the stomach which did him in. His legs were strong and did not cramp and he trusted them to keep him moving forward. But this was a different kind of fatigue. He had been running hard for two hours at least, he guessed from the time he had broken his watch. Around nineteen miles was the start of the shutdown phase in a marathon. He’d gone farther before, gutted through worse discomfort, but always with a definite end point in mind, always when he knew exactly how much was left and exactly where he was going. Moreover there was the safety net of civilization, the people who would find his body should he faint. He imagined a hiker or a biker, some long lost neverknown cousin of his finding his body on an expedition weeks, maybe months later. What would they think, he wondered. He felt a passing sorrow for the helmeted biker with power gels taped to his arms and a water bottle belt strapped around his waist who would have to dirty his advertisement-suit to uncover his body from the pile of leaves which the wind would use to bury him on the mountainside. Poor bastard, he thought, and almost laughed without quite knowing why.
The drizzle was harder and now the morning sun was vanished, slipping behind the dull blanket grayness creeping across the sky. Underfoot the path became slippery and unsure and he took the turns so wide and careful that he ran off the trail into the poison ivy and thorn bushes just to stay on his feet. His right leg was covered in blood but he did not feel anything aside from the throb of his muscle tiring. All of the pain went to the tightening spreading up his chest and closing on his lungs and forcing his breaths deeper and deeper. The trail was leveling now, and had turned a dusky orange and he knew that it was not the right way. As the path swung back to the left and down a muddy incline he tried to survey the country ahead. Through the thick trees he could make out very little. The summit lay behind him, the valley to the east, the trails he had taken up the Vondergreen far beyond. In the foothills far beyond. He wiped a hand at his soaking hair to push the strands out of his eyes and felt his fingers pruning from the moisture.
He found himself near sprinting and he forced himself to steady. The fear was in control now and he fought it down. It was bad to let the fear take over. He made himself calm and said in his head that there was nothing to do but trust the trail he was on, so he did.
He trusted it but still he was wary. Perhaps he did not trust it very much, truly. He knew that he could not turn around again. He had lost his concentration and rushed down the hillside from the summit and had quickly lost himself in the fear. It had been such a stupid thing to do, to not pay more attention. Now look where you are, he thought to himself. Now look what your sentimentalism has done for you.
He tried not to be sentimental but it was hard as his body began to weaken under the strain of trail and time. He became very good at counting the things he had lost: the way, the girl, himself, the watch. He counted them again and again. Mostly he counted the watch because it had been a good watch that had always worked well for him and rose with him each morning for many years to run through the streets of the city where he had lived before the Vondergreen.
But it is gone now, he thought. It has left you alone. You are carrying a carcass strapped to your hand. A rotting carcass. It should start to decompose and rot soon. It will reek.
The man shook his head firmly. He was worried by his thoughts and how sentimental they were becoming. He knew he was very thirsty and the heat with all of the fatigue was not letting him think right. He would have to fight it if he hoped to find his way back. He would have to have a clear head.
The rain beat steady and hard and made gentle insistent slaps on the leaves of the trees and the scattered flowers and twigs over the soil of the forest floor. As he ran he kicked up mud and rainwater with his tired backkick and felt his lower back and shorts growing thick with the collected sediment. The trail was wet, the forest somehow more silent than before the rain, the other noises muffled now by the collective cover of the sky’s downpour.
There was a sudden rustle in the bushes off to the side of the trail, breaking the silence of the land. A pack of white-tailed deer began hopping manically across the wood, backs arched and proper, snouts nervous and stiff, eyes furtive and watching for a further break in the stillness of their forest. The air was instantly filled with the stench of wet dogs as the deer disappeared between the hemlock and mountain laurel lining the path.
The path bent and The man wondered when he had become too tired to be surprised. His senses were blurred now. You should probably stop and walk for a little ways, he thought. You probably should look for water. But he did not.
Around a turn the sandy trail opened into a small clearing where a fallen tree obstructed the path. The man hurdled the tree, ducked under the stillgreen branches obscuring the way, and found himself face to face with another of the deer.
He slammed on the breaks. The white-tailed was stiff and frozen, ears perked and attentive, covering most of the trail. The woods to the side of the trail were nearly impassable, thick with black birch and Canadian yew twinned together by thorn bushes and thistle. He knew he could not turn back, there was no place to go but miles and miles back up to the sandstone hillcrest where he had first lost the way.
He took a slow step back and paused for another moment so that both he and the deer were completely still. Then he feigned a sudden lurch forward and let out a bellowing shout that carried down the wet path and lost itself in the heavy rainsoaked pines in the distance. The white-tailed vanished in a flash, hopping lightning quick through the thorn tangled yews and dashing into the blurred misty cover of the forest.
Sluggishly The man began to run down the trail again, hitting by instinct the ‘start’ button on his broken watch. His fingers came away bloody.
The pause gave him recovery, but his legs tightened further and although the heat of the sun was obscured the rain made the slippery rock and muddy path even more treacherous and tiring to navigate. This is no hiking trail, he thought. The soil was lightcolored, loose and soaking muddy like a wet baseball infield, some of the rocks covered by puddles so that his ankles twisted on progressing steps and soon became elastic. He trusted chance that they would not crack or be twisted very badly because there was no other thing to trust, and because was concentrated hard upon assuring that the trail continued through its switchbacks to the east and the direction of the bottomlands ultimately leading to the gorge and the river valley beyond.
V
The boy had known when they were lost for several miles now but he didn’t say anything to the others. They assumed he knew where they were and they followed him through the cornfields singlefile down the narrow paths. They came around a bend in the field and the row ended, blocked off by thick stalks. The runners bunched together in the tight space.
“Alright,” Mike said. “Where are we going?”
“Through the cornfields, and we’ll get to the shrine eventually.”
“Even if we do get to the shrine. We’ll be miles from the road. We’re going to wind up running fifteen miles if we’re not careful. Coach sent us out for eight.”
The wind blew cold over the tips of the stalks, tunneling down the rows and billowing amidst the thinly clad runners. They are cold, tired, and miles away from home, the boy thought.
“We’ve been talking about this for weeks,” the boy said. “Don’t you want to see where this leads? Do you really want to just go home a take a shower? Don’t worry about getting back, for once. Don’t look at your watch.”
The others fidgeted while they stood there watching the two argue. The boy began to jog. “Let’s go,” he urged them, moving slowly down the path.
“We have no idea where we are,” Mike said.
The others were beginning to reluctantly follow.
“That’s the point,” the boy said, running.
***
The green of the forest blurred with his sweat so that the pastels melted and he could not see very much of anything. Ahead he caught sight of a horse jogging on the path ahead, brown and wet in the rain, hooves punching the muddy terrain. He lurched after it.
The other faculties were failing him now. The Vondergreen had stolen the grace he had run with before. Now he hunched halfway over to stay the insistent stitch that worked at the corner of his stomach. His breaths came in careful gasps, his feet covered ground cautiously, awkwardly. The air sat heavy in his lungs which were burning from nothing to drink.
The rain was steadying now and he tried to not think of the cruelty that there was so much water around him but none of it for drinking. He did not know how long he had been running but he guessed it had been for far longer than he ever had been before. There had been once long ago when he had run for just over two hours. But two hours had come and gone many miles back and he could not bring himself to feel any happiness for the new record. Vaguely he wondered exactly what he had been thinking dashing up and down the foothills blindly, secretly hoping to be lost. He had known nothing of this pain then.
The horse reappeared and vanished from his vision with such frequency that he began to wonder if it were even real.
The trail curved sharply around a slick and muddy bend and his feet gave way from beneath him. He crashed down the hill in the mud and came to rest in the shallow waters of a small pebbly stream, flowing slowly along a flat bed of soil in the divot between two embankments.
Mudsplattered, bruised, he stood and squatted in the shallows of the stream and splashed the water up his arms and chest to clear the dirt away from the open cuts. The rain was a drizzle now, making tiny marks in the stream as it came down. The humidity began to resettle in the air as the rain slowed. He felt dizzy and cupped his hands in the water again.
He knew he was breaking a golden rule of human-wilderness interaction, but perhaps he was not so very human, after all.
The water rolled gently into his palms and he waited until it was completely full before he raised it to his lips and poured it into his mouth. Once he had a taste he did not hold back and had several more mouthfuls. When he was no longer panting he thought how it would be nice to also have a bit of chocolate or oatmeal raisin bar there because they always brought the feeling back to him after a run. But there was no chocolate, there were only the tiny lavabugs hiding under the log off the side of the path amidst the jewelweed.
His legs quivering, he stood straight and began to run again. He did not click the start button on the watch.
*
For a moment he imagined himself at his own funeral: closed casket, to be sure. The birds would have gotten to his caracass by the time bikeman found him.
He thought of being buried: some poor bastard amening and crossing and crucifixing over him.
He thought of what the nothing of being dead would be like: would it hurt, for there to be nothing? No, it could not hurt very much. It could not be so very different from living in the city. That was just a different version of the same thing.
He crouched in the mud when he came to a clearing and drew great big arrows towards each of the three trails that split off. One of them had to be the way back home. Not home, but the tent.
The first trail was one of the old equine trails again and the rocks were only meant for hooves to navigate. The path curved up and east, back towards the whitefaced hill summit. He knew it was wrong too when the bugs began to swarm the sweaty mass heaving in their midst and the path became so thickly overgrown that he was crashing through the underbrush.
With the remnants of his energy he tore back to the clearing to escape the bugs. At one point he chanced a glance behind him and saw a small black cloud in pursuit. He swung his palms through the cloud viciously and they scattered and regrouped and swarmed his head and his face where the sweat and the heat were.
Back at the clearing he wiped away the arrow and ran down the middle trail. The path was steep and downhill, free of rocks and slick from the rain.
For a time, he did not think of anything of at all.
Don’t you get sentimental, he thought, but there was a finality to it all that he did not quite understand but rusted. Even if there were more water to be found he doubted he could make the return journey to the clearing again. It would be too late for that.
There were more of the white-tailed deer in the trees and he tried to watch them closely. They did not scatter when he made a noise as before. Rustlings in the bushes did not follow him as he ran. The Vondergreen was not moving away from him, instead it was moving to catch him when he fell, to lay him down on the trail and let him become a part of the woods. He did not like the look in the eye of the deer, the look of bravery – where would that come from? What gave a deer strength of spirit? In answer to himself he slowed even more.
The deer know, he thought. They know what is to happen.
Still, he told himself, you will fight it to the end, if that is how things are to go. The forest will have to catch you when you collapse lifeless because you will not walk or stop or rest for not even one moment.
And don’t you pray, either, came the same voice. Don’t even think about it.
But it was too late for that.
"Please God,” he may have said, or thought it so loud that a sound came out.
Around the bend, there was the river. The rapids flowed by cool and gentle. In the distance the sun reflected off the windshields of the cars in the parking lot of the sheriff’s station. The glare caught his eye and there was nothing but whiteness.
*
That night he sat down on the grass outside of his tent with his sweatshirt spread out over the dew and he ate the sandwiches that the he had bought from the deli back in town. When he was done he ate the extra tomatoes that the girl had packed too. They were very good tomatoes, the more he really thought about it. Such tomatoes he had never had in his entire life. He might even go back and ask the girl only for the tomatoes and not even any sandwich at all. He might just do that.
When he was done eating he limped down the trail away from the tent and followed the darkened path to an overlooking vista of the river near the rocks where he had left his shoes to dry. The river chugged smoothly by, deft and deathly silent and held in the night embrace of its banks. The moon hung over the river full and white, a pearly ominous glow shining over the darkened water to the farther shore. The air was cool, fresh like a stream of clear and cold water.
With his hands he dug a small hole in the cold black soil and pulled from his pocket the broken remnants of the watch. Quietly he buried it and patted the disturbed soil together with his hands. From his knees he looked around for a sign of a gravemarker and scavenged a few rocks to form a circle upon the dirt. He rubbed his bare wrist.
By the delicate wildflowers there was a twisted and bent cross-like stick. He heaved it up and launched it down into the murky depths below.
He stood up to leave and checked his shoes once more before returning to the tent. It seemed as though they would be dry by morning.
THE END.
Song of the Day: To fit in with the nature theme, it was impossible to not go with 'White Winter Hymnal' by Fleet Foxes. This incredibly simple song somehow effortlessly captures the sticky heat of summer and the frozen tundras of winter through a expertly done choral repetition. Although the below version, a live video put together by the good people at La Blogotheque, is not quite a capella, the song largely relies on how closely the band can sing in unison. Aside from the beauty of the melody, the lyrics' attention to detail is almost literary: "I was following the pack, all swallowed in their coats, scarves of red tied 'round their throats." The simple and terse language is evocative of a Hemingway style - one he used very effectively in stories like Big Two-Hearted River, and one which I tried, and failed (butchered, some might say) in What the Forest May Whisper.
Soirée à emporter #2 Fleet Foxes
by lablogotheque
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