by Inmon, Shawn
Nothing else to learn here. Except that you got another one, Banda-ak. Wherever you are, I hope you rejoice in that.
Alex stood and said, “Which way from here?”
Werda-ak moved away from the pile of bones, looking at the trail, the branches, the sky. He turned to Monda-ak. “Which way?”
The dog didn’t hesitate, but took off at an angle from the trail. The land was mostly flat and occupied by small, scrabbled bushes and fallen trees, so even without the trail, the going wasn’t too treacherous.
It seemed that Monda-ak had caught a scent of something, because he trotted confidently ahead of them.
“If we see him chasing a rabbit, we’ll have to go back to the trail and reconnoiter.”
The dog’s belly seemed to be full, though—of what, Alex didn’t want to consider—and so he was not chasing food. Eventually, Werda-ak began to find signs as well—scuffed spots where a number of men had gone over a log, branches that had been broken, and the occasional footprint. They kept a steady pace across uncharted land for several hours.
Finally, they reached a clearing where Monda-ak seemed to be confused. He moved around and around the area in a large circle.
Alex found some loose dirt and kicked at it. Black, cold ashes were buried. He stood still and listened. A small stream burbled not far away.
“He’s confused because he’s picking up too many of the same scent. This is where they stopped the first night,” Alex said. He pointed at some trees that ringed the clearing. “We can sleep there.”
“Why are we stopping already?” the boy asked Alex. “We need to catch them, not just keep the same pace.”
“Don’t be impatient. If we can find food here, that’s fine. If not, we can eat what we brought, then find a sturdy limb and go to sleep. We’ll start again before dawn. I’d rather march in the cool of the morning.”
Senta-eh strung her bow, looked at Werda-ak and said, “You look for their trail out of here, so we can find it in the dark. I’ll find us dinner.”
The tracker, the hunter, and the dog went off in three different directions, each with a task of their own. That left Alex alone to build a fire, and to think. He gathered dry wood and let his mind wander to the bigger problem at hand.
The boy is impetuous, but he’s not wrong. After today, we will have to make better time. If we can make up three or four hours per day, we might catch them in a month or two.
Alex’s shoulders slumped. A month or two. That seemed so long, when he had been so close to going home just a few days earlier.
Chapter Three
The First Mighty River
Senta-eh proved to be as competent as ever, bringing back a large gray rabbit in no time. Alex guessed that since there were no tribes here, the animals didn’t have the proper fear of humans. They cleaned and spitted the animal and ate until they were stuffed, and there was plenty left for Monda-ak. Of course, he considered anything less than ten pounds of meat to be just a nice snack.
Immediately after dinner, each of the three travelers picked a tree, clambered up and assumed the position—legs wrapped around the trunk and head resting against the same. It was good that they were all relatively young, as sleeping more than one night in this position would have crippled an older person.
Monda-ak slept curled up at the bottom of Alex’s tree, acting as an alarm system.
Alex was the first to awaken the next morning and enjoyed a few minutes in the tree, listening to the ending of the night cycle and the beginning of the transition to dawn. He dropped lightly to his feet, managing not to land on the giant, snoring mound of his best friend. Monda-ak stretched, shook himself awake and followed Alex to the small stream, where both took a long drink and Alex filled his water bags.
When they returned to camp, Werda-ak and Senta-eh were awake and ready. They set out on the trail the boy had mapped for them the night before. The way was lit by the barest glow of a pre-dawn morning.
Just a few minutes out of camp, Monda-ak became confused again. He followed one trail, then left it and found another. He followed that for a few moments, then found another.
Alex called him back. He glanced up at the sky, which was just light enough now that he could clearly see his hand in front of him.
“I think they were still worried about us following them, so after their first night, they split up, at least for a while.”
“What do we do, then?” Senta-eh asked.
Alex thought for a long moment. “Would they really permanently split up? One of them is having to keep a constant watch on Lanta-eh. Plus, just because we haven’t seen any predators hunting us doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. They’ll know that, too. I think they’re just trying to confuse and delay us.”
Alex sat quietly for a few moments, running through possibilities and probabilities.
“Yes, that’s got to be it. They won’t risk leaving Lanta-eh alone with just one or two of them for too long, so they’ll come back together sooner rather than later.”
He bent slightly and put his face close to Monda-ak’s. “Find the strongest scent and stay with it. Don’t get sidetracked, okay?”
Monda-ak immediately turned, sniffed one trail, then another and another. That was the one he liked, and without hesitation, he followed it.
In the end, that turned out to be exactly what Alex had sussed out—another tactic simply intended to delay them. Before the sun hit apex that day, they found a spot where a soft piece of dirt revealed many different sets of footprints—including one much smaller than the others.
Lanta-eh.
Seeing that footprint made the hunt more real for Alex. He had been thinking of their mission as not much more than an inconvenience that was delaying his return to Amy. But here, seeing that small moccasin print in the dirt, he remembered the girl herself, who was not so much older than Amy herself.
Alex had never bought into the prophecy that Lanta-eh was the chosen one. He’d never really bought in to any prophecy or religion in this world or the one he was born in. He believed in himself, and those who stood with him, but not much beyond that.
Still, she was just a small girl. He wondered if she was scared, or if she was as calm as Ganku-eh had said she was. The smallest of things—a half-smudged print, lit a fire inside of Alex.
They stayed due north all that day. They found the invaders’ second campsite in mid-afternoon, and Alex felt good that they would shave a few hours at least from their two-plus week head start. They continued on through the heat of the afternoon until it began to turn dusk.
The hike was mostly uneventful, or at least as uneventful as things ever were in Kragdon-ah. On several occasions, Monda-ak abandoned his role as trail blazer and took off at a full run, his great strides gobbling up distance, chasing off some unknown potential predator.
For four more days, they followed this routine—Werda-ak fishing wherever they found water, Senta-eh bagging some small game with her bow the other times. They had not needed to touch the food reserves they carried on their backs.
Alex had fallen into the belief that they might be close enough to their prey to continue to track them by trail and scent. Then, on their sixth day on the trail, they heard what sounded like a mighty roar in the distance. Not the roar of an animal, but a sound just as ferocious.
“Kranda-ah,” Senta-eh said, a certain reverence tingeing her voice.
Alex spoke Winten-ah nearly as well as he spoke English, but he wasn’t familiar with that word. “Kranda-ah?”
“The mighty river,” Werda-ak said.
“So you’ve both heard of it. Have either of you seen it?”
They both answered, “No,” as if he had asked them if they had ever seen Santa Claus. A creation of legend and mystery, but not something one expects to see in their lifetime.
Monda-ak continued to lead them, nose to the ground, following the scent. They crested a hill and stared down at the mighty Kranda-ah. Alex recognized it immediately by what it had been called in his own lifetime�
�the Columbia River. He had crossed it many times on his way to the ocean beaches in Washington or driving north to what had then been called Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Tacoma.
That was all gone now—Seattle, Tacoma, everything west of the I-5 corridor—or so he had been told by Dan Hadaller. It was possible he might get to see the truth of that matter for himself.
They stood for a few moments, looking at the power and might of the river, which seemed larger and more powerful than Alex remembered it.
Maybe that’s the difference between seeing it at eye level and driving over a bridge above it at sixty miles an hour. Or maybe, like the ocean moving more than a hundred miles inland over the centuries, it really is different.
When they tore their eyes away from the river that rushed from their right to their left, they saw that Monda-ak had turned east and headed on without them. Fifty strides away, he had stopped and waited for them.
“Glad the trail didn’t just end here. Not sure what we would have done then,” Alex said.
“Sekun-ak said you were fond of just jumping into rivers and seeing where they take you,” Senta-eh said.
“Sekun-ak talks too much,” Alex said, which made them laugh a little. They all knew that was not true.
They turned east and followed a game trail which ran parallel to the river. The banks of the river were tall in this area—there was no easy way to get down to the river, aside from jumping.
The trail dead-ended onto an open area with large, flat boulders. When they caught up to Monda-ak, he was standing stiff at attention.
Alex followed his gaze and saw what had mesmerized him—a group of skinks were sunning themselves on the warm rock, oblivious to the approach of dog and humans.
The skinks that Alex had seen in his own time had been smallish little lizards, not much longer than his hand, though they often had long tails.
This group resembled those skinks in body type, but not size. From nose to tail, Alex estimated these were two to three feet long. In the front, they looked like a thick garter snake with stubby little legs, but it was their tails that really caught the eye. The tails were an almost neon blue, a shocking contrast between their dull gray-green bodies.
Monda-ak, quivered, wanting to charge into the middle of the pack, but he waited for Alex’s signal.
“Have you seen those before?” Alex whispered.
“No,” both answered quietly.
Alex weighed the possibility that the skinks might have become poisonous over the ensuing centuries, but decided the risk was low. He leaned close to Senta-eh. “I’m going to release Monda-ak, but when I do, why don’t you shoot one? That will be a good supper for us.”
Senta-eh nodded, nocked an arrow, and held steady.
Alex gave one barely audible click of his tongue, and Monda-ak launched himself forward at the same moment Senta-eh loosed her arrow.
Chaos broke loose on the large flat rocks, with the skinks exploding into life—an eruption of scrabbling feet and slapping tails. Monda-ak snapped after them, unable to make up his mind which one to grab first.
Ten seconds later, all but two of the skinks were gone, having disappeared back into their burrows. One was sprawled on its back with an arrow piercing its throat. The other was between Monda-ak’s jaws.
Upon closer examination, Alex saw that Monda-ak didn’t actually have a skink in his mouth—it was only the tail. The lizard had cast off its tail so it could live to slither another day. The dog had fallen for the bait and now was ferociously growling and chewing the rubbery tail.
Werda-ak hustled forward, chopped the head off the lizard with the arrow through it before Monda-ak could finish what he had caught, then started field dressing it on the spot. A twenty-first century skink wouldn’t even be a snack for a single person, but the Kragdon-ah equivalent would feed them all a good meal.
Alex straightened and looked around. The trail ran into a dead end in two directions—east and south. A vertical rock wall rose up, blocking both directions. That left only two choices—the way they had come, and the river.
The path to the river was easier here. There was a gentle bank that sloped all the way down to the water. From his position higher up, Alex could see that the river had narrowed in this spot. In some places, it was three or four miles across, but here, it was only a quarter of a mile or so.
That bottleneck caused the river to run even more ferociously, and it was immediately apparent that they could never swim across. They would be swept rapidly downriver and into the new inland version of the Pacific Ocean.
Alex took a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, looking for any other possible exits from the area where he stood. There was nothing.
Maybe a rock climber, properly equipped, could scramble up one of those rock faces, but an entire raiding party, including a hostage? No way. They crossed the river here and we need to do the same.
That left only the river, rushing, and roiling below them.
Alex turned to Senta-eh and Werda-ak. “Where do you think they went?”
Both instantly pointed down at the river. It was the obvious answer.
“But, there’s no way they could get across. Look how fast it is moving.”
Werda-ak scanned the riverbank, then said, “Ah!” and jumped down toward the water. He turned right, ran upriver, and pointed to a tree which had ropes tied firmly around it.
Those ropes spanned the river like a bridge.
THERE WERE TWO ROPES connected together by hanger ropes every fifty feet. The hangers secured the bottom rope and gave the impression of a real bridge.
Alex hurried down, climbed the tree, and examined the lower rope. It was not old, or rotten. In fact, it looked quite sturdy. Even stretching as far as it did—it held quite firm.
It’s like a crude suspension bridge. The heavier top cable supports the thinner rope that acts as a bridge deck. Ingenious. But it’s not really a bridge. It just ropes. It still doesn’t get us across the river.
Alex hustled back up the bank and followed the top line across. He could see where it was anchored to another tree high up on the other side. Resting on the opposite bank was a smallish wooden boat.
Alex had considered trying to build a boat or raft to get across, but he could picture how that would turn out—with all four of them swept downstream or smashed against rocks or other obstacles.
But if the boat is there, it’s there for a reason.
In a flash, everything became clear.
They attach the boat to the lower rope and pull themselves across to the other side.
This was a greater degree of engineering than Alex had seen since he had arrived in Kragdon-ah, but he guessed it didn’t rise to the level of stama—the universal word for banned technology.
Alex called his companions up to where he was and showed them what he had discovered.
Senta-eh was silent for a moment, then said, “Assuming you’re right, and there’s a way for them to move the boat back and forth, then it’s brilliant. When they were coming to attack us, they used the boat to cross to this side. Then when they had Lanta-eh and wanted to get away, they took the boat with them and left it on the other side. They knew we wouldn’t have any way to get across to chase them.”
“One other question,” Alex said. “Why didn’t they cut the line and burn the boat once they were across?”
Senta-eh looked up at the ropes. “Look at it. This isn’t something they put together in a few days. This is the work of many moon-cycles. So, it’s not their boat. Not their system. There is likely to be another village nearby, and this probably belongs to them. Maybe the attackers befriended them or bribed them so they could use it to get across. If they burned the boat or cut the rope after that, they might have had two groups after them.”
Alex put two fingers against his forehead. “That’s reasonable. But we can’t chase them if we can’t get across. We’re not giving up, and we’re not going back. So how do we solve the problem?”
“I could walk across the rope, get the boat, and bring it back here,” Werda-ak said.
Alex did an actual double take. He couldn’t help himself. He laughed.
Anger flashed in the boy’s eyes. “Don’t laugh, Manta-ak. We played a game like this in the field. We tied a rope a few feet off the ground and took turns walking across it. I was the best at it.”
“How long was the rope? From here to the other side? And, if you fell, was it a few feet to the grass? Or did you plunge into a river that will carry you to your death? No, that will never work.”
A dark cloud cross Werda-ak’s face, and Alex regretted the sting of his words, but didn’t know how to take them back.
When I commanded four hundred men, I just had to pick the biggest and strongest and defeat him. I have no idea how to handle an unruly teenager.
Alex tried to be more reasonable with the boy.
“If you could use the upper rope for balance, you could do it, but there’s too much distance between the ropes. It’s too dangerous. I can’t let you do it.”
Werda-ak didn’t say another word. He ran back down the bank, dropped his pack, and climbed the tree until he stood on the lower rope.
Senta-eh gave Alex a look that told him what she thought of how he was handling the boy, then ran toward the tree. “Werda-ak, stop!”
The boy ignored her and stepped onto the slack line. He bounced on it a little to gauge how much give it had and find his balance. Slowly, with a bit of hesitation, he stepped away from the supporting tree. Soon, he had left the bank behind and was out over the river itself.
If he dies, it’s my damn fault.
Werda-ak seemed to gain confidence and stepped more sure-footedly.
He made it three more steps, then his right foot didn’t plant perfectly on the rope and there was no chance of recovery.
Werda-ak dropped like a stone into the Kranda-ah.
Chapter Four
Into the Kranda-ah
Before the boy even hit the water, Alex was in motion. As he ran, he performed multiple calculations, trying to plot the most likely path the river would carry Werda-ak while simultaneously choosing his own fastest path to beat him to a spot downstream.
