Highway of Eternity (11 page)

He set to work. Selecting stout limbs from the pile of juniper he had stacked for firewood, he trimmed them to proper lengths, sharpened their ends. He cut the meat into smaller pieces, thrust the sharpened ends of the limbs through them, impaling several gobbets of meat on each of the stakes. The fire had burned down to a bed of coals. He raked still-flaming chunks of wood to one side and used them to start another fire. He jammed the stakes into the ground, canting them to extend, with their freights of meat, above the coals.

He sat down and watched the cooking, adjusting the stakes from time to time. His mouth watered at the smell of the cooking meat. But mouth-watering as it might be, it wouldn't be tasty. He had no salt with which to season it.

The wolves were still quarreling over the carcass of the bull. A few of the vultures had dropped down, but had been chased off by the wolves. Now they sat, hunched, at a respectful distance, waiting for their chance at meat. The sun was just above the horizon. Night was coming on.

Out there on the plain lay the carcass of a bison that had been known in Boone's time only as a fossil. Further out would be other living fossils—mastodons, mammoths, primitive horses, and perhaps camels. Even the wolves feasting on the bison might be fossils.

Crouched beside the bed of coals, Boone kept close watch on the cooking meat. Pangs of hunger assailed him. Since the almost inedible oatmeal in the morning, he had eaten nothing. He had fallen on hard times.

When he had jumped into the traveler with Enid, he recalled, the thought had crossed his mind that they would go into the future, instead of to this world of extinct beasts and living fossils. Then the urgency of those last seconds at Hopkins Acre had driven the thought from his mind.

There would have been something to interest him in the future, but there was very little here. He thought about the future he had heard of at Hopkins Acre—a world almost empty of visible humanity, although humankind still was there as incorporeal beings, pure intelligence, with the survival factor that had made men the masters of the planet finally refined into small quantitive qualities that were no more than dust motes, if even that.

Change, he thought. Earth had undergone change during the nearly five billion years of its existence. What seemed at first small factors became in time significant in a process that no intelligence could pinpoint before it was too late to take measures to counteract.

Even given intelligence, the great reptiles could not have guessed what was happening to bring them to extinction sixty-five million years ago. Other forms of life had suffered extinction that could not be foreseen. He had read that the first great extinction had come two billion years ago when the first green plants converted carbon dioxide to oxygen, changing Earth's atmosphere from a reducing to an oxidizing medium, bringing death to most earlier, more primitive forms, to whom oxygen was poison.

There had been many times of dying; the species that had died in the past were a hundred times more numerous than those still living. Finally, up there in the future, it seemed the human race was dying. Perhaps it would still exist, but in a form that might cancel it as a factor in the further evolution of Earth.

Enid had told him that trees would supersede mankind, taking the place of man, once man was finally done. The idea was ridiculous, of course. By what process or capacity could trees take the place of mankind? Yet if anything were to replace humanity, it was perhaps fitting that it should be trees. All through history, trees had been friend of man—and man had been both friend and enemy to trees. Men had cut down the great forests wantonly; yet other men had cherished or, at times, even worshipped trees.

One of the stakes that held the gobs of meat above the coals tilted, its base shifting in the ground, and fell into the fire. Cursing, Boone snatched it off the coals. Holding the stake with one hand, he brushed the meat free of ash with the other. It must be done enough for eating. Gingerly, he slid one of the gobbets off the stake, bouncing it in his hand. When it was cool enough, he took a bite of it. For lack of salt it was tasteless, but its warmth and texture felt good in his mouth. He chewed it. It took a lot of chewing, but his stomach seemed very glad of it. Once he had eaten all he could, he laid the stake down on a patch of grass and took off his jacket, shirt, and undershirt. Stretching the undershirt out on the ground, he took up the other stakes and stripped the meat off them into a pile on the shirt. Threading the rest of the uncooked meat on the stakes, he set them above the coals, put on his shirt and jacket, and settled down to wait for the remainder of the meat to cook.

Darkness was creeping in. He could barely make out the wolves that still were clustered about the bison. In the east, the sky was flushed with the rising of the moon.

He watched the meat above the coals until it was done, pushed off the gobbets onto the undershirt, wrapped the meat well in it, used his knife to dig a hole, placed the meat into the hole, filled the hole even with the ground, tamped it down, and then sat upon the hole. Anything that wants that meat, he told himself, will have to go through me to get it.

He felt an expansiveness and a certain pride in himself. Whatever might happen in the days to come, he had done well so far. He had food for several days. Perhaps he should not have wasted the bullet, but he could not bring himself to regret doing it. He had given the bull a quick and decent death. If he had not, the wolves would have pulled the old bull down and started tearing him apart while he was still alive.

Maybe it made no difference, the wasting of the bullet. Any time now Enid would be back to pick him up. He thought about it for a time, trying to make himself believe it, but not successfully. There was a good possibility she would return, but an equally good possibility that she wouldn't.

He turned up the collar of his coat against the chill of night. Last night he'd had a blanket, but now he had none. He had only the clothes he stood in. He nodded, dozing, and woke with a start. There had been no reason to awake; nothing was amiss. He went back to sleep, the rifle cradled in his lap.

He stirred again, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and he was not alone. Across the fire from him sat, or seemed to sit, a man wrapped in some all-enveloping covering that might have been a cloak, wearing on his head a conical hat that dropped down so far it hid his face. Beside him sat the wolf—
the
wolf, for Boone was certain that it was the same wolf with which he'd found himself sitting nose to nose when he had wakened the night before. The wolf was smiling at him, and he had never known that a wolf could smile.

He stared at the hat. Who are you? What is this about?

He spoke in his mind, talking to himself, not really to the hat. He had not spoken aloud for fear of startling the wolf.

The Hat replied. It is about the brotherhood of life. Who I am is of no consequence. I am only here to act as an interpreter.

An interpreter for whom?

For the wolf and you.

But the wolf does not talk.

No, he does not talk. But he thinks. He is greatly pleased and puzzled.

Puzzled I can understand. But pleased?

He feels a sameness with you. He senses something in you that reminds him of himself. He puzzles what you are.

In time to come, said Boone, he will be one with us. He will become a dog.

If he knew that, said The Hat, it would not impress him. He thinks now to be one with you. An equal. A dog is not your equal.

Sometimes dogs come very close to us.

But they are not one with you. There was another step to take, but it was never taken. Long ago man should have taken it. Now it is too late.

Look, said Boone, he is not one with me. The wolf is not the same as me.

The difference, Boone, is not as great as you may think.

I like him, said Boone. I have admiration for him and a certain understanding.

So has he for you. He sat nose to nose with you when he could have slashed your throat. That was before you killed the bull. He was hungry then. Your flesh could have filled his belly.

Can you tell him, please, that I thank him that he did not slash my throat.

I think he knows that. It was his way of saying he wants to be a friend of yours.

Then tell him I accept his friendship, wish to be a friend of his.

But Boone was talking to an emptiness. The Hat was no longer there. The place he'd sat was empty.

He was no longer there, Boone told himself, because he had never been there. It was all illusion. There was no one but the wolf.

When he looked, the wolf was gone as well.

Boone got to his feet. He was stiff with cold. He fed the fire more wood and stood close against it, soaking up its heat as new, vigorous tongues of flame flared up and ran along the wood.

He had slept for a long time. The moon had slanted far into the west. Moonlight reflected off the shattered skeleton of the monster. It had been a long time since the monster had bespoken him—if, in fact, it ever had bespoken him. Like The Hat, it could be fantasy.

A change had come over him, he thought. Short hours ago he had been a hard-bitten newsman who dealt only with facts. But now he fantasized. He talked with a hat, squabbled with a dead monster, and saw in a wolf a friend. Loneliness, he supposed, could drive a man to strangeness, but this soon? Here, however, the loneliness might be different than ordinary loneliness, compounded by the consideration that in all probability he was the only human within the span of two great continents. In his time many scientists believed that the first human had not set foot upon the western hemisphere for at least 10,000 years after this period. Somewhere in the vastness of Asia, barbaric tribes ranged the land, and farther to the west were other men who, in another 20,000 years or so, would begin to paint the first crude drawings of the fauna of their day in the caves of eastern Europe. Here he was a misplaced human, alone among wild beasts.

Warm now, he moved back and began to pace round and round the fire. He tried to think, but there was no beginning to his thoughts, nor was there any end. Like his walking around the fire, his thoughts went round and round.

The wolves were quarreling over the bison, although the quarreling was low-key; they were not putting their hearts into it. Far off, some animal was bawling, a steady, monotonous complaint. Up the slope in the juniper thicket, a bird chirped sadly. The moon hovered just over the western horizon, the east began to brighten, and another day was dawning.

When light came, he dug up the undershirt and took out some meat. Hunkered beside the fire, he chewed and chewed to break up the toughness of the fibers sufficiently to swallow safely. Finished, he went to the spring to get a saucepan of water, then up the hill to fetch wood for the fire.

The realization dawned on him that the days could be difficult to fill. He tried to think of chores that he could invent to keep himself busy. He could think of none that made sense enough to do them. Later he could set out to spy the land, but there was little point in that. Later he might have to do it, but now he had to be here when Enid returned or someone else showed up.

Going to the sandstone spur behind which the bull had been brought to bay, he lugged back to the camp slabs of stone fallen from the spur, as heavy as he could manage, and piled them on top the hole where the meat was buried. Quite possibly roving scavengers, sniffing out the meat, could move the stone to get it. But
his
wolves were too well fed to go to all that bother.

He set out to climb the butte, toiling up its face. Finally he reached the crest and looked out across the country. There was not much to see. Some miles off, a herd of herbivores were grazing, most likely bison. Skittering bands of other animals fled across the land like shadows. Tentatively, he identified them as pronghorns. What looked to be a large bear waddled along a dry stream channel. Otherwise, what he saw was a lot of empty land, cut here and there by dry watercourses and with the everlasting buttes rearing up from it. Here and there along the watercourses were groves of cottonwoods and some of the buttes showed dark splotches that could be thickets of shrubs or clumps of trees.

When he returned to camp, the wolves had left the bison carcass, now little more than bones and scraps of skin flapping in the breeze. A dozen or more vultures hopped about, pecking viciously at one another to guard the territory each had staked out, stripping off the last nourishment remaining on the skeleton.

Boone settled down to wait as best he could. Four days passed and there was no traveler. Boone did his chores. Several times he inspected the wrecked monster, circling it, keeping at a safe distance. He tried to reconstruct it in his mind, to connect the broken parts to one another. He could have done a better job of that if he had allowed himself to get closer to it, picking up some of the broken parts and inspecting them. But he shied away from that. The monster did not speak to him, and finally he became convinced it had never spoken to him, that his memory of its talk was a mental aberration.

By the end of the fourth day, several meals of the meat he had cooked still remained, but it was becoming tainted. He still remained too civilized for his system to tolerate tainted food.

On the morning of the fifth day, he tore a page out of the notebook he carried in his breast pocket and, using the pencil stub, wrote a note:

Gone hunting. Will be back directly.

He placed the note on top of the pile of rock that protected the buried meat and weighed it down with another stone.

Setting out with the rifle, he felt a lifting of his spirits. Finally there was something to be done, a chore that had to be done, that was not simply work made to fill the time.

After a mile or so, the wolf showed up, trotting out from the butte to join him. It fell in to his right, a hundred yards distant and slightly behind him; it seemed friendly and glad to be with him once again. He spoke to it, but the wolf disregarded the speaking and kept on with him, pacing him.