The land seemed stable beneath him, as though it and it alone of all the things in this world could not buckle or fail. It was but the illusion of his contingency. He was as all men but tightroping it over the abyss on the linestrung grace of a higher power. Yet the land seemed to be a support stretching indomitable from horizon to horizon, sure as the ages, rising up on one side of him hard against the sky in a chine of whited teeth as though the jaws of the world itself were hinging open about him. How a man could fall off so wide a stage was sure a mystery to him, but he recalled each day the friends he had lost, his perished brother.
Only silence dogged his heels in those distant places, or mayhaps the cry of some eagle or wail of the wolf with its speakless sorrow, the outraged shriek of a marmot from a mountain redoubt, the angry chatter of squirrels bickering in the pinewood or the wind sloughing through the needles. Now and then this same wind would come howling as though it were dragging away some fresh ghost on its ceaseless paths—some raised spirit that raged at mortality and would not go, but by the law of afterthings must.
He had been riding at an easy pace on his old speckled nag for days untallied, his destination written for all he knew on some invisible ledger of fate. He might have marked it with a single word, “Away,” and tossed the thing off like a die. He was the son of his nation, he was a child of his times, and his freedom struggled against its own conditions. His was the vanity of all worldly evasion—the will to flee being the one thing from which no man can ever flee, even so long as a clockturn—and maybe he himself knew it.
He wore a crooked Stetson of beaver hide, silvering in its age. One edge had ceded to the usury of time and hung limp as though an ictus had seized it. An old ragged magpie feather of unusual length rose up from its faded band. His burly chest was covered in a moth-eaten flannel of red and black plaid, and over this he had flung an old shapeless oilskin of forest-green canvass exuding a pungent scent. Corduroy trousers clad legs that, for all their being hauled about by limbs other than his own, seemed nonetheless solid enough hanging there in their stirrups. His was a poverty that might have been dignified or might have been embarrassing, but there in that wild place it failed all contrast and found no right anchor in good or bad, but seemed a kind of riches and a kind of penury at once. That which would save him on the frigid nights would be his affluence; that which would fail him there, his mortal debt; that which would burden him on a sunny noontide, his merest superfluity.
By and by in the twilight hours he stopped his horse in a wide flat bowl scooped out of the hills, with a knoll sharply rising on one side, the mountains lumbering out beyond, and a long flat shalestrewn pan that shed down to a broad creek passing there in its ceaseless determination to get elsewhere. A few wayward saplings grew on that pebble-strewn basin, the greater trees cleaving instead to the hillsides surrounding the bowl as if they had been put to flight from that place by a nameless danger and were struggling now for higher ground. He folded a hand over his eyes and glanced up at the bird-carried sky and marked the traverse of the sun as it slid imperceptibly westward to where it would soon fall to a withering ember upon the skyline. And he scratched his beard and patted his nag upon her balding withers and halted her and dismounted, drawing from his saddlebags the items he would need to lay his camp for that night.
He hobbled his mare to pasture in the spring meadow in the crook of the hillside and to sup from the stream until the light had declined from orange to brown. Kind words he spent on the horse in good-night, and patted her soft warm muzzle. His slender brown eyes were deep and thoughtful, as they were wont to be at the end of these lonely days.
A fire he built him of old branches and pinecones. He carried out the spark for it from a hollowed buffalo horn which he kept ready at hand and so set flame to the dried moss and whittled wood he had formed there like a mouse nest. Had been a firebearer of the same steady spark for longer than he could recall, and lived thus in unknowing mimic of distant forebears, who would keep the divine fire alit for decades and centuries even in caverns and hearthfires in honor of erstwhile gods. This, his secular fire, caught in its nest, balancing heat in his breath, and a tiny flame leapt out there and grew upwards into the tent of branches he had arranged. The sap sputtered and spat in the growing gloom and the flame winnowed its sparks against the great emptiness above like guidelights in a senseless and inhuman eternity.
He roasted a squirrel he had snared that morning, skinning it and spitting it on a green pine shoot, and contented himself on its sparse flesh. A faded Mexican rug below and a twinfolded bisonskin above served as his bedding. No pillow to rest his head upon but the thin strip of the woven fabric and hard earth itself. Above him the stars wheeled and careened in their voids at distances and speeds such as could not be fathomed and in pursuit of waylines such as could not be calculated, not even by the subtlest arts of our human science, so much did they depend on the gaze even of this tiny reflective soul on his crude bed who stared now up at them.
He heeded only occasionally the shadows that were rising and declining in the margins of the firelight. There they shifted and broke as if being itself had become unruly and made to rove and jitter in the night. Then that same formless kingdom came down on him too and he slipped away into a fast slumber.
Come morning he rose before the sun was but a wisp of light, as though he had pressing business to be attending to. But he only set himself to pray, then loitered about his campsite and resurrected the fire from its own ash-buried embers; and he sat long upon a large flat shalerock there, breathing the sweet smell of the pine smoke and warming his hands at it, staring into it as its light grew feebler in the rising of the greater splendor above. When the sky had shifted from navy to eggshell blue and the stars washed out, and his horse began to snort steam in the morning brilliance, then he rose in the silence and strode down across the basin to the stream to wash his face in its bracing water and to rouse himself for his renewed journey toward nowhere. He stooped before the margin of lacework ice that had crept down from the stony bank, that herald of the coming winter. And he drew up a tiny pool into his hands and splashed it over his face, rubbing the vestiges of sleep from his eyes.
Yet he was still. Yet he did not move. Yet he squatted there, hunched over, beard dripping, as though he had been gazing enrapt into his own reflection. Then of a sudden he jerked and glanced about himself as if coming free of some dream, peering with dark mistrust into the forest. He turned back from that anywhere that had so suddenly become a here, and he reached a hand down and broke through that shattered image of himself rippling on the stream to scoop up a fistful of waterblown sand from the streambed.
He held it in the light before him.
The mud dripped from his fingers, and in the mud, little pebbles gleamed impossibly, shimmering in the sun as though imbued with some lumination all their own. He prodded them with his free hand, pushing them this way and that in the light, carefully watching how they shone.
And when his fingers began to tremble it was not for the touch of that snowmelt runoff…
You have just read the first chapter of the serial novel SACRIFICE, by John Bruce Leonard. A new chapter will be published each week. If you want to receive new chapters directly via email, please —
Very good prose 👌
I’m in! Let’s see where this rider takes us.