Tranziltor Park: branches (5/7)

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

     The gutted cabin refused to come back to life in his mind.  The frenzied, maniacal timbers; askew as though they had been alive and trying to escape the searing flames.  He couldn’t help but see them as dead, charred bodies, tumbled upon one another in a moment of final panic.  He dropped his musket.  
     “Solo,” he said, almost breaking.  “Solo,” for that had been his dog, left on the bed to guard the furs.  The bountiful traps fell from his broad shoulder and his long, hard legs propelled him to the ruins.  They as yet smoldered, but last night’s rain had doused them.  
     “Solo!” he cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed to the east.  Then the west, and waiting heard not the familiar bark of the wolfhound.  “Dead,” he gave in.  
     There had been no lightening for the past week, no storm, no gales.  No lantern had been left alight within the cabin, and certainly Solo could not have struck a match himself.  Someone had done this.  Someone had burned his home and murdered his only companion.  How many days had he trekked up to this place?  Twenty?  Thirty, and at that mostly by canoe, across the myriad of rivers that trickled through this fur-laden land of the great, white North.  Winter would not come for another three months, and of that he was grateful, for it gave him enough time to erect another dwelling.  But would not that be destroyed as well?  Certainly, in which case his very survival depended on finding he...or they...who had committed the act.
     He constructed a crude lean-to of pine boughs, his dark, hairy arms splicing limbs and shedding needles with practiced precision.  A meal of beaver contended his massive, hungering body, and after a quick draught of cold stream water he prepared his musket and sent himself to tracking.  The rain meant finding clues would be more difficult, but his eagle eyes did not miss the slight indentations in soil that bare feet caused.  And such tiny feet!  A child’s, and he couldn’t find any other tracks besides them.  Perhaps a passing party of injuns, covering their trail as they always did with remarkable effectiveness...overlooking this small child’s movements.  The pattern indicated the perpetrators had moved north, up beyond the waterfall where the salmon ran every third spring.  He clenched his jaw, squeezed his fists, and set to the hunt.
     By the time he reached the waterfall his powerful frame was close to exhaustion.  He rested in the shade, for the day had grown hot, and then beneath a gentler surge of the waterfall he refreshed and cleaned himself.  He foraged for salmonberries, as he knew grew by the river, and once satisfied with a mouthful of red sweetness, pressed onwards, ever north.  As far as he could tell the trail had died.  No further foot prints could he find, but his silent anger compelled him forth.  In his mind he wrestled as to what he would do once he found the murderers.  Injuns were warriors, after all, and not easy to kill.  But he had a musket, and in that fact he assured himself he could overtake them.
     Night came, and no injuns.  He built another lean-to and braved the darkness without a fire.  Sleep would not come, so he took to counting stars, and by and by, after the fourth shooting comet, he crawled into the lean-to and dreams stole him.
     They were not pleasant dreams, but ones of bloody tomahawk and dripping scalp.  His scalp.  And blazing pyres, and glistening, brown skin, feet stomping, drums echoing, Solo’s skull being shaken by savage hands at the moon -- they were calling on curses, bringing up the dead, and he saw a fleeting ghost skirt their stifling camp, a shifting presence that resembled all too well his own visage.
     His eyes burst open to the last reverberation of someone’s high-pitched wail.  Breaking the lean-to, he snatched his rifle and tore through the rampant bush.  North, north, somewhere north, they were running from him north.  The exhilaration of knowing he was the predator pushed him beyond eating, beyond sleeping even.  The night passed over again, and only on the rarest occasion did he pause for a handful of water.  The injuns were not facing his anger anymore, nor his justice.  They were facing a calm, driven beast, a mountain of a man with ravenous intent.  He let his growing hunger twist him, break him, slice away his rationale to get to the core of his animal heart.  He shed his clothing, sliding now through the trees bare-chested, silent, an unrelenting wind.
     He let out an unbidden growl when he came upon two, tiny footprints.  They descended into a shadowed glen, and down there he ripped through the vegetation until he came upon the black mouth of a hidden cave.  Inside he could smell them.
     Then she came out.
     He leapt at her.
     Her face cracked in grief, she turned, ever so slightly, and he fell onto the ground.  The hard landing released him from his blind rage.  Just this girl?  That was it?  One small girl?
     But no ordinary child.  She had spider-web hair, with silver dots of light in it, and a cloak of red leaves, her eyes black, flashing now blue, then green.
     “Where are the injuns!” he demanded, rising to his feet, towering over her menacingly.
     “I burned that grave of yours,” she answered defiantly.  Her voice tinkled, and he thought of breaking glass.
     “You mean...my cabin?”
     “Grave,” she rejoined.  She walked confidently around him, inspecting him in contempt.
     “You killed my dog,” he accused, half question, half hope.
     She ceased her movements, her eyes flared a brilliant red.
     “You do not have children, do you?”
     The question caught him off guard.  He found himself answering “no” before he could do elsewise.
     “One day you will.  And on that day think of them taken from you.  Think that I came and cut them down.  I chop off their arms and their legs, I decapitate them, then pile them all together in neat rows and lay their hair down as a roof over them.  I fashion a doorway and live inside them, eat inside that gory hovel, sleep there in the running blood and sickening stench.  Think that, on the day they are born!  Would you not, upon finding such carnage, wish to erase the horror that they have become?  Would you not want to destroy such a terrible home?  You would burn it away, you would set it ablaze, for then they would be whole again, consumed by fire, brought to ashes!”  Tears touched her ivory face, sparkled, he crumpled under her attack.
     “I-”
     “Would you not kill the thing that murdered your children, James?”
     And he gave her a sobbing “yes!”, she knowing his name had done that,  he bowed his head in shame.  “Kill me,” he offered up his neck with his eyes telling her it was okay to strike.
     “No,” she shook her darling head -- silver seed wisped into the air.  “You are a pawn.”
     “A what?”
     “A puppet, James.  That,” she pointed behind him, “is your enemy.”
     He spun on his knees, and from behind an oak trunk peeked the most appalling face.  An old woman’s face, fat and wrinkled beyond measure, horribly accentuated with blue, red and black paint, with some sort of pink, tubular funnels curling her thin hair.  She grimaced, flared her bulbous nose, and scampered up the tree to hide with the squirrels.
     “What in hell...?” a fear seized him.
     “Yes.” the girl quivered.   “She is Hell.”


copyright (c) JMD, 2006