Previous chapters can be found here:
1- April 6
2- April 12
3- April 18
Chapter 4
It soon dawned on Abe that his giddy mood was actually the result of a growing fever. His arm was swelling and it felt hot. He stopped for a few moments and made himself a woefully inadequate sling out of the drawstring in his pants.
As he eyed the hills in front of him he wondered if it really mattered that he get to the top of the ridge. Maybe there was nothing there anyway. But he felt he had to get up there and see. His throbbing arm only added another element of urgency to the task.
Deciding which way to go was quite a challenge. How he longed at this moment for more information. He was not used to making decisions with so little to go on. But he didn’t have time to indulge his annoyance. He made up is mind rather than walking up and down all the small rises, he would follow a gully that meandered upwards. The plant life was beginning to change too, making his trek more tedious. Along with the waist high shrubs he started to encounter clumps of grasses. There was no trail and it was slow going walking between all the bushes and now having to contend with grass clumps. He made his way doggedly wincing at every misstep.
As he rounded a corner, he paused to get his bearings and was startled to see about a fifty yards away, what looked like a deer. It was a very large and very red deer. It looked at that him momentarily, twitching a large ear back and forth, and then went back to grazing on the shrubbery. It was the first living creature he had encountered and it was a great comfort to see that it did not seem to be dangerous, despite its considerable size. He decided to walk toward the deer to see what would happen.
Spending your whole life expecting animals to run away from you did not prepare him for the fact that when he got to within about twenty feet of the deer, it came walking over to him in a friendly manner, much like a pony looking for a sugar cube. It stepped straight up to him and lowered its head slightly. Abe stood in shocked silence. It was a beautiful thing, sleek and shiny. Its back was level with Abe’s shoulder. It had large round intelligent eyes with very long lashes. It was a more substantial animal than the deer on Earth. And was stronger looking, its back broader, and he noticed a white area on its chest the traveled down underneath its belly, like a gazelle.
"Greetings from Earth”, he said grinning in spite of himself, and bowed awkwardly. “I'm a stranger in this land. Are there more of your kind?"
The animal blinked at him solemnly and reached up to nuzzle his ear.
"Well I'm going to continue now on my journey, so I’ll you see around okay?" The deer of course did not reply and instead strolled over and took a mouth full of leaves from one of the shrubs. "So you like the sweet ones too, eh? Well that makes two of us."
He moved off slowly and the animal went back to its meal in supreme indifference.
He climbed all that day until darkness began to fall. By the look of it, he had another few hours of walking to reach the top of the ridge. He found a grassy area near an outcropping of rock and started gathering up a few handfuls of the succulent leaves, both salty and sweet. As the very last rays of the sun were disappearing, he ate his meal and looked back out over the plain. It was vast. And from here looked very desolate. The bronze sky changed to brilliant orange with the light bouncing off some white clouds that slowly turned pink as he watched. It gave him some measure of comfort to know that he could go back down there and survive.
He made himself as comfortable as he could, and drifted off into a fitful sleep.
* * *
The next morning he woke very early. To his surprise a few yards away lay the deer, head up, gazing at the horizon. He couldn't believe it. This was going to be hard to get used to. Wild animals that seemed to have no fear of men.
Abe was feeling worse though, he was sweating and chilled, and his mouth was dry. He made himself eat as many leaves as he could get down. He looked up at the ridge. It seemed an impossible way off. But there was no way he was going to sit here all day wondering what was on the other side.
He started out, and the deer rose up and followed him in that effortless way that all deer seem to have no matter what world they are from. As he climbed, Abe tried not to get too excited about what might be on the other side of the ridge. He didn't want to be disappointed. Perhaps it was just another plain on the other side, just as vast and desolate as the one behind him. But as it is with all hikers, the closer you get to the top of a ridge, the faster you seem to go. By the time he reached the top he was dizzy and gasping for breath.
As he crawled up onto a broken pile of stones, all his attention was focused on finding a way not to stumble. Without the use of his injured arm, it was slow going. The red deer followed close behind picking her way gracefully. He stepped around a large boulder and suddenly a vista opened to an astonishing sight. He sat down abruptly and stared.
The ridge dropped away precipitously. Much steeper than the hills he had just climbed. What he saw kept confusing him. For although the wide valley seemed several miles across, there was a tree growing, not quite in the center, that was so enormous as to defy logic. It was like looking at an optical illusion. He gave serious thought to the possibility that he was hallucinating.
The tops of the leafy branches were nearly the same height as the surrounding mountain tops. He tried to get his mind around what he was seeing, again and again. He finally gave it up. That was one enormous tree.
The base of the tree was wide, impossibly so. The branches spread out in a huge canopy. Some places were fairly open near the trunk and others in dappled shade. He could see what looked like fields, although these fields were not squares or rectangles but irregular shapes meandering out from the base of the tree in different colors of green, tan, brown and some multicolored ones, as if flowers grew there.
At least he was no longer in wilderness. People – well, beings lived here. But what if they were giants? This was an alarming possibility.
There seemed no other thing to do, but get himself down there. At least there were no militant looking fortresses or barriers thank goodness. That was somewhat encouraging. But the descent on this side was very steep. From this spot he would need special equipment to get down to the valley floor. He started to scan along the cliffs to his right to see if there wasn't an easier way down, and off in the distance to his surprise, he saw a road. And it looked pretty wide too. Big enough for giants? He glanced across at the deer, who was gazing out into the valley also.
"What say we follow the ridge that way, see if we can meet up with the road. What do you think?"
In answer, she (he thought it was a she), looked at him solemnly blinking her great liquid eyes slowly. It was kind of spooky. But in spite of himself, he was glad to have some kind of company at this moment.
They made their way along the ridge about a half mile and after dropping down 30 feet they came crashing out from the thick undergrowth right onto the road. Looking back toward the ‘wilderness’ plain he could see the road winding down into it. He had missed it completely from the angle he had been traveling. It would have made his journey a lot easier had he known it was there.
The deer stood in the middle of the road looking at him. He took a few steps onto it and looked down. It wasn't made of gravel or dirt or asphalt. He knelt down and took a good look. He wasn't surprised to see that it was composed of a dense mat of root-like structures, this time of a more robust size. He took a few steps on the road and noticed that although it was very strong it was also resilient. Sort of like walking on a stiff sponge.
The road followed along the ridge and wound down the mountainside at a gentle grade. He kept his eyes on the tree whenever he could and was becoming more and more in awe of its sheer bulk. By the time they reached the valley floor, the sun was getting low in the sky. That golden bronze sky. It was hard to get used to it. There were clouds this evening, dazzling white ones that soared into the atmosphere. They made such an unusual sight paired with the tree that he truly felt he was on an alien planet.
He found himself growing weaker and more confused as he walked along. At one point he grew so dizzy, he reached out with his right hand and steadied himself by holding onto the deer’s back. She didn’t flinch and in fact took a step closer and slowed her pace. Soon he stopped trying to take in the novel surroundings and focused on the road just ahead.
Leaning heavily now on the back of the deer, and walking very slowly, Abe became aware of voices. At first he wasn’t sure if they were speaking in an unknown language, or if he just wasn’t hearing them right. He felt confused and dizzy. He looked up and saw two men,at least they looked human to him, running up the road. Somewhere in his muddled state, he was relieved. No giants after all.
Now during the many months of his training, one of the things that Abe had learned was some basic sign language. And he had learned it for just such an occasion as this. He was racking his brain to try to remember the signs for, ‘I come in peace’, but for the life of him could not recall what to do. Besides, his left arm was so swollen by now that any movement cost him excruciating pain and he was reluctant to make the attempt.
The men slowed their pace and came up to Abe carefully with concern written on their faces. One reached out, and put Abe’s right arm over his own shoulder and started walking with him. The other man shouted something and others came hurrying up the road. By the time they arrived under the first shade of the tree, there was a crowd coming out to meet them. Someone had brought a litter. They unrolled it and with great care, helped him onto it. Four men took up the corners and they began to carry him toward the tree.
Being in a horizontal position suddenly made him feel weak. He watched in a daze, as the shade became deeper and deeper. The branches soared high into the evening sky, a vision of gold and green. From someplace far away, he heard himself whimper with equal measures of relief and pain. Everyone was talking at once in a melodious sounding language that Abe could make no sense of at all. Suddenly the crowd parted and an older man bent over the litter and gazed into Abe’s eyes. He spoke in soothing tones, felt his fevered forehead, and took a brief look at his arm.
Abe decided to try and say something, and settled on the basics.
“My name is Abraham Talbot. I am from the planet Earth. My ship has crashed on your world. Can you tell me where I am?”
The older man listened intently with a slight frown of concentration on his face. He shook his head back and forth, but smiled at Abe reassuringly and motioned for the men who were carrying him to go on.
As the crowd carried Abe off, the older man turned to the deer, still standing in the middle of the road. She took a few careful steps toward him and bowed her head slightly. He reached out his hand and placed his fingers on her forehead. A conversation without spoken words followed.
“Found it by the mountain top. Led it to you. It is injured, yes? It knew to eat journey bread.”
“You did well Daphir. Yes, he is hurt. Stay a while, I hear Misha has made honey cake. Tell her I sent you.”
This conversation took only a brief moment. The man took his fingers from her forehead and she bounded off toward the tree and disappeared into its shade.
He turned slowly, pausing for a moment looking up at their beautiful tree, and then at the crowd of people surrounding the stranger moving away from him. “I wonder.” He said aloud.
* * * *
Abe was gathering only vague impressions of his surroundings as they moved under and finally, to his surprise, into the tree. They moved through a tunnel that suddenly opened out into a light space with a very high ceiling. Or was there a ceiling? He saw what he thought were balconies all along the sides of the huge space, and straight up, he thought he was seeing leaves, but they were so far up there, he wasn’t sure. They went up a broad staircase and down a hallway and into a room. They placed him on a bed, and the now small contingent of people quietly left the room.
A man sat down at his bedside and nodded to Abe encouragingly, helped him lift his head and offered him a cup filled with a warm, sweet smelling liquid. At this point, he was too weak to protest and obediently drank the whole thing down. It tasted like mulled cider. Within a few minutes, he drifted off to sleep.
1- April 6
2- April 12
3- April 18
Chapter 4
It soon dawned on Abe that his giddy mood was actually the result of a growing fever. His arm was swelling and it felt hot. He stopped for a few moments and made himself a woefully inadequate sling out of the drawstring in his pants.
As he eyed the hills in front of him he wondered if it really mattered that he get to the top of the ridge. Maybe there was nothing there anyway. But he felt he had to get up there and see. His throbbing arm only added another element of urgency to the task.
Deciding which way to go was quite a challenge. How he longed at this moment for more information. He was not used to making decisions with so little to go on. But he didn’t have time to indulge his annoyance. He made up is mind rather than walking up and down all the small rises, he would follow a gully that meandered upwards. The plant life was beginning to change too, making his trek more tedious. Along with the waist high shrubs he started to encounter clumps of grasses. There was no trail and it was slow going walking between all the bushes and now having to contend with grass clumps. He made his way doggedly wincing at every misstep.
As he rounded a corner, he paused to get his bearings and was startled to see about a fifty yards away, what looked like a deer. It was a very large and very red deer. It looked at that him momentarily, twitching a large ear back and forth, and then went back to grazing on the shrubbery. It was the first living creature he had encountered and it was a great comfort to see that it did not seem to be dangerous, despite its considerable size. He decided to walk toward the deer to see what would happen.
Spending your whole life expecting animals to run away from you did not prepare him for the fact that when he got to within about twenty feet of the deer, it came walking over to him in a friendly manner, much like a pony looking for a sugar cube. It stepped straight up to him and lowered its head slightly. Abe stood in shocked silence. It was a beautiful thing, sleek and shiny. Its back was level with Abe’s shoulder. It had large round intelligent eyes with very long lashes. It was a more substantial animal than the deer on Earth. And was stronger looking, its back broader, and he noticed a white area on its chest the traveled down underneath its belly, like a gazelle.
"Greetings from Earth”, he said grinning in spite of himself, and bowed awkwardly. “I'm a stranger in this land. Are there more of your kind?"
The animal blinked at him solemnly and reached up to nuzzle his ear.
"Well I'm going to continue now on my journey, so I’ll you see around okay?" The deer of course did not reply and instead strolled over and took a mouth full of leaves from one of the shrubs. "So you like the sweet ones too, eh? Well that makes two of us."
He moved off slowly and the animal went back to its meal in supreme indifference.
He climbed all that day until darkness began to fall. By the look of it, he had another few hours of walking to reach the top of the ridge. He found a grassy area near an outcropping of rock and started gathering up a few handfuls of the succulent leaves, both salty and sweet. As the very last rays of the sun were disappearing, he ate his meal and looked back out over the plain. It was vast. And from here looked very desolate. The bronze sky changed to brilliant orange with the light bouncing off some white clouds that slowly turned pink as he watched. It gave him some measure of comfort to know that he could go back down there and survive.
He made himself as comfortable as he could, and drifted off into a fitful sleep.
* * *
The next morning he woke very early. To his surprise a few yards away lay the deer, head up, gazing at the horizon. He couldn't believe it. This was going to be hard to get used to. Wild animals that seemed to have no fear of men.
Abe was feeling worse though, he was sweating and chilled, and his mouth was dry. He made himself eat as many leaves as he could get down. He looked up at the ridge. It seemed an impossible way off. But there was no way he was going to sit here all day wondering what was on the other side.
He started out, and the deer rose up and followed him in that effortless way that all deer seem to have no matter what world they are from. As he climbed, Abe tried not to get too excited about what might be on the other side of the ridge. He didn't want to be disappointed. Perhaps it was just another plain on the other side, just as vast and desolate as the one behind him. But as it is with all hikers, the closer you get to the top of a ridge, the faster you seem to go. By the time he reached the top he was dizzy and gasping for breath.
As he crawled up onto a broken pile of stones, all his attention was focused on finding a way not to stumble. Without the use of his injured arm, it was slow going. The red deer followed close behind picking her way gracefully. He stepped around a large boulder and suddenly a vista opened to an astonishing sight. He sat down abruptly and stared.
The ridge dropped away precipitously. Much steeper than the hills he had just climbed. What he saw kept confusing him. For although the wide valley seemed several miles across, there was a tree growing, not quite in the center, that was so enormous as to defy logic. It was like looking at an optical illusion. He gave serious thought to the possibility that he was hallucinating.
The tops of the leafy branches were nearly the same height as the surrounding mountain tops. He tried to get his mind around what he was seeing, again and again. He finally gave it up. That was one enormous tree.
The base of the tree was wide, impossibly so. The branches spread out in a huge canopy. Some places were fairly open near the trunk and others in dappled shade. He could see what looked like fields, although these fields were not squares or rectangles but irregular shapes meandering out from the base of the tree in different colors of green, tan, brown and some multicolored ones, as if flowers grew there.
At least he was no longer in wilderness. People – well, beings lived here. But what if they were giants? This was an alarming possibility.
There seemed no other thing to do, but get himself down there. At least there were no militant looking fortresses or barriers thank goodness. That was somewhat encouraging. But the descent on this side was very steep. From this spot he would need special equipment to get down to the valley floor. He started to scan along the cliffs to his right to see if there wasn't an easier way down, and off in the distance to his surprise, he saw a road. And it looked pretty wide too. Big enough for giants? He glanced across at the deer, who was gazing out into the valley also.
"What say we follow the ridge that way, see if we can meet up with the road. What do you think?"
In answer, she (he thought it was a she), looked at him solemnly blinking her great liquid eyes slowly. It was kind of spooky. But in spite of himself, he was glad to have some kind of company at this moment.
They made their way along the ridge about a half mile and after dropping down 30 feet they came crashing out from the thick undergrowth right onto the road. Looking back toward the ‘wilderness’ plain he could see the road winding down into it. He had missed it completely from the angle he had been traveling. It would have made his journey a lot easier had he known it was there.
The deer stood in the middle of the road looking at him. He took a few steps onto it and looked down. It wasn't made of gravel or dirt or asphalt. He knelt down and took a good look. He wasn't surprised to see that it was composed of a dense mat of root-like structures, this time of a more robust size. He took a few steps on the road and noticed that although it was very strong it was also resilient. Sort of like walking on a stiff sponge.
The road followed along the ridge and wound down the mountainside at a gentle grade. He kept his eyes on the tree whenever he could and was becoming more and more in awe of its sheer bulk. By the time they reached the valley floor, the sun was getting low in the sky. That golden bronze sky. It was hard to get used to it. There were clouds this evening, dazzling white ones that soared into the atmosphere. They made such an unusual sight paired with the tree that he truly felt he was on an alien planet.
He found himself growing weaker and more confused as he walked along. At one point he grew so dizzy, he reached out with his right hand and steadied himself by holding onto the deer’s back. She didn’t flinch and in fact took a step closer and slowed her pace. Soon he stopped trying to take in the novel surroundings and focused on the road just ahead.
Leaning heavily now on the back of the deer, and walking very slowly, Abe became aware of voices. At first he wasn’t sure if they were speaking in an unknown language, or if he just wasn’t hearing them right. He felt confused and dizzy. He looked up and saw two men,at least they looked human to him, running up the road. Somewhere in his muddled state, he was relieved. No giants after all.
Now during the many months of his training, one of the things that Abe had learned was some basic sign language. And he had learned it for just such an occasion as this. He was racking his brain to try to remember the signs for, ‘I come in peace’, but for the life of him could not recall what to do. Besides, his left arm was so swollen by now that any movement cost him excruciating pain and he was reluctant to make the attempt.
The men slowed their pace and came up to Abe carefully with concern written on their faces. One reached out, and put Abe’s right arm over his own shoulder and started walking with him. The other man shouted something and others came hurrying up the road. By the time they arrived under the first shade of the tree, there was a crowd coming out to meet them. Someone had brought a litter. They unrolled it and with great care, helped him onto it. Four men took up the corners and they began to carry him toward the tree.
Being in a horizontal position suddenly made him feel weak. He watched in a daze, as the shade became deeper and deeper. The branches soared high into the evening sky, a vision of gold and green. From someplace far away, he heard himself whimper with equal measures of relief and pain. Everyone was talking at once in a melodious sounding language that Abe could make no sense of at all. Suddenly the crowd parted and an older man bent over the litter and gazed into Abe’s eyes. He spoke in soothing tones, felt his fevered forehead, and took a brief look at his arm.
Abe decided to try and say something, and settled on the basics.
“My name is Abraham Talbot. I am from the planet Earth. My ship has crashed on your world. Can you tell me where I am?”
The older man listened intently with a slight frown of concentration on his face. He shook his head back and forth, but smiled at Abe reassuringly and motioned for the men who were carrying him to go on.
As the crowd carried Abe off, the older man turned to the deer, still standing in the middle of the road. She took a few careful steps toward him and bowed her head slightly. He reached out his hand and placed his fingers on her forehead. A conversation without spoken words followed.
“Found it by the mountain top. Led it to you. It is injured, yes? It knew to eat journey bread.”
“You did well Daphir. Yes, he is hurt. Stay a while, I hear Misha has made honey cake. Tell her I sent you.”
This conversation took only a brief moment. The man took his fingers from her forehead and she bounded off toward the tree and disappeared into its shade.
He turned slowly, pausing for a moment looking up at their beautiful tree, and then at the crowd of people surrounding the stranger moving away from him. “I wonder.” He said aloud.
* * * *
Abe was gathering only vague impressions of his surroundings as they moved under and finally, to his surprise, into the tree. They moved through a tunnel that suddenly opened out into a light space with a very high ceiling. Or was there a ceiling? He saw what he thought were balconies all along the sides of the huge space, and straight up, he thought he was seeing leaves, but they were so far up there, he wasn’t sure. They went up a broad staircase and down a hallway and into a room. They placed him on a bed, and the now small contingent of people quietly left the room.
A man sat down at his bedside and nodded to Abe encouragingly, helped him lift his head and offered him a cup filled with a warm, sweet smelling liquid. At this point, he was too weak to protest and obediently drank the whole thing down. It tasted like mulled cider. Within a few minutes, he drifted off to sleep.