Chapter 6: Deadly Trail
From the shady frozen north side of Giants' Rest Mountain a dozen well-trodden pathways across the ice sheets led in many different directions. In winter thousands of fifty-foot tall Stone-Coat Ice Giants each weighing hundreds of tons strode the paths day and night, going off to establish themselves throughout the Adirondacks and beyond into Canada. Even in the summer a few dozen of them set out across the ice during most nights.
"What a mess!" noted Mark, when he and Walking Stone reached the paths. Each path was a fifteen foot wide, ten to fifteen foot deep trench through the ice, made by the gigantic tramping feet of hundreds of massive Stone-Coat Ice Giants. Some of the footprints were now ten-foot long puddles of cold water up to a foot deep. Little streamlets of melt-water were everywhere. At scattered points the streamlets disappeared into deep gurgling fissures in the ice.
The trench/path they wanted to use had been scouted by Red Claw. It led east-north-east and skirted the shady side of Green Mountain, seven miles away across the ice. "We will need to stay to the right side of the path," said Walking Stone. Indeed, the right side of the path was shaded and the crisp air above it near freezing due to it being deep below the surface level of the ice sheet. The ice there was fairly solid and featured fewer puddles and streamlets from melting. The left side was a dripping crumbling wall of mush.
Mark with his crampon shod boots and tracking poles and Walking Stone with his diamond claws each were at times able to walk at nearly two miles an hour even over the irregular surface covered by gigantic footprints. Gradually the ice and granite peak that was Giants' Rest Mountain disappeared from view behind them and only miles of endless trench could be seen both behind and ahead of them.
"Big crevice," Mark warned, as three-foot wide split in the ice suddenly appeared in front of him. Far below he could hear running water. Looking to the left and right, he found that this was the narrowest place to cross the opening. The bigger Stone-Coats of course simply stepped across it without difficulty. "I can jump across it but I'm not sure that you can. Throw the pack across."
The owl flew ahead, Mark easily jumped across, and Walking Stone tossed the backpack across without difficulty. That left only Walking Stone to cross. "Stone-Coats do not jump," he noted, "but I compute that I will be able to cross it if I take an unusually long stride and have sufficient speed. However the ability of the ice on either side of the opening to support my weight is highly questionable."
Mark dug his climbing rope out of his pack and tossed one end towards Walking Stone and the Stone-Coat caught it in his huge right hand. "Hold the rope in your mouth and if it looks like it you need help I'll pull on it," instructed Mark. "It will only be a small pull compared to your weight but it could provide the little extra force needed to get you across. Leave your hands free to grab at the ice if it comes to that."
Walking Stone first cooled himself off by lying on the ice for a few minutes.
Meanwhile Mark took stock of their status. Before them and too their right broad Green Mountain at last loomed, ice covered on its north edge and green on its south side. The Stone-Coat path they followed skirted the shady north side of the peak. In an hour or so they would have to leave the path and move towards the southern green side of the Mountain, but it would probably be dark long before that. They were already three hours behind his original schedule and it would probably be midnight or later before they reached their wooded destination.
Walking Stone stood up and backed away from the crevice before speed-walking towards it at more than twice his usual speed. On his end of the rope Mark kept pace by dashing at his top speed and keeping the rope taut.
Walking Stone's right foot landed solidly on the far side of the yawning gap as his left foot pushed off powerfully. His body was halfway across the gap when with an audible snap the ice crumbled under the tons of weight applied by his right foot and the Stone-Coat dropped down into the icy crevice.
Mark pulled with all his strength on the rope and though he came to a dead stop he was pleasantly surprised not to be pulled back and into the crevice. Glancing back he saw that Walking Stone's head, shoulders, and arms were still visible above the lip of the fissure. The three-inch long diamond claws of his big fingers were dug into the ice in front of him, and he still held the rope in his jaws.
"Keep pulling in the rope!" said Walking Stone, as with his huge arms he pulled himself forward and out of the dark yawning gap in the ice inch by inch using inhuman strength.
Adrenalin powered, Mark pulled for all he was worth, for long seconds that seemed like minutes. Finally most of the Stone-Coat's great mass was safely out and away from the crevice.
Walking Stone's efforts had generated considerable internal heat and he lay down on the ice to cool off. Mark was similarly exhausted and a dozen yards away was also lying on the ice to recuperate.
"Hey! I thought we weren't supposed to do that sort of thing again," Mark complained, but he was grinning. "You are definitely slowing me down." He pulled the hood of his jacket over his head and tied it, rather than rest his head on the bare ice.
"Your puny efforts again made a big difference, human," Walking Stone was saying when the flies struck.
Mark only heard their buzzing for a moment, not even long enough for him to register what he was hearing, and then five of the creatures were on him, nipping at him with sharp, raspy, sucking mouths that would have dug into his flesh had he not been covered in jacket and leggings that were reinforced by thread spun from Stone-Coat made carbon nanotubes a hundred times stronger than steel. But the attackers soon sensed that the boy's uncovered hands and face were vulnerable, and they quickly refocused their attack.
Walking Stone heard the boy's screams mixed in with the buzzing of the flies and the screeching of Red Claw, and stumbled to Mark to find a dozen flies attacking his human companion's face. The boy was flailing wildly with his arms and knocking most of the creatures back but they threatened to overcome him with their sheer numbers.
Walking Stone dispatched several flies by spearing them with deadly icicles propelled from his mouth by steam, and quickly crushed several others in his big stone hands and jaws, but more of them kept coming. He pulled the boy into a nearby unusually deep depression in the ice made by the toe of a gigantic Stone-Coat and lay atop him, blocking the flies with his stony body. The soft creatures could do nothing to harm a Stone-Coat, and any that landed on him had the bottoms of their feet dissolved by his nanotube filled skin and they quickly flew away. The remaining flies cannibalized the flies that had been killed and flew away in minutes when there was nothing else to eat.
"Are they gone? Let me up!" came the muffled but insistent voice of Mark from underneath his stone protector.
Walking Stone stood up and Mark crawled slowly out of the toe-print, bleeding from several superficial gouges on his face and hands, but not badly injured. His tough hooded clothing and his companions had saved him. "Red Claw," he mumbled immediately, as he stood up and stumbled unsteadily to a spot several yards away where the grisly scattered remains of the owl lay. There were white feathers and bloody bones and nothing else left of the valiant bird. A dozen fly wings and other tough bits of fly were mixed in with the feathers, showing that the bird had not died easily.
Mark Dawn Owl dropped to his suddenly weak knees in shock, tears quickly forming in his eyes. "This wasn't supposed to happen!" he shouted angrily, jumped up, and waved his arms impotently. "He was supposed to become my official clan brother! We were going to grow up together!"
"Stillness and quiet is advised," cautioned Walking Stone. "The flies may sense your motion or sound and return."
"Good! Let them! I'll kill them! I'll kill them all!" He pulled his forgotten hunting knife out and held it tightly as he searched the empty skies for flies. There were none.
"It is beginning to get dark," noted Walking Stone. "The flies will become inactive without the stimulation and warmth of sunlight. They seek somewhere warmer than ice and melting
snow to rest for the night. You need to do the same. It is unfortunate that Red Claw has been killed but we must move on."
"He should have flown away when they attacked," reasoned Mark. "I should have ordered him to fly away. He would have escaped them and he would still be alive. I sensed him fighting and dying soon after the flies attacked, but I did nothing but selfishly try to fight off my own attackers while crying out for help like a helpless baby."
"I did not sense his dying battle," said Walking Stone. "My focus was on you. You were fully occupied by the flies and their attack happened too quickly for you to do anything other than take the defensive measures for yourself that you did. I was similarly occupied. I also conclude that you could not have saved him; you could not even save yourself. Besides, he would not have left you even if you had told him to do so."
"What?"
"He has shown that he was truly your clan brother," explained Walking Stone. "You refused to leave me alone in the ice even when I told you to do so. You would not leave me, and you risked your life for me and for our quest together. Similarly, Red Claw would never have left you. Like me, he was truly your clan brother. He could have flown away, but his solution to the attack problem was to stay and fight. That was the trade-off that he chose to make for your sake. His solution was not perfect, as there was no entirely satisfactory solution available to him, but he did the best that he could. One of the many flies that he killed could have killed you."
"He was a hero, and my friend."
"Yes. Such acts of sacrifice are something that you warm creatures sometimes do for each other, even though you are very frail and short-lived. You do not even have redundant memories! Such self-sacrifice is a phenomenon under our intensive study."
With tears in his eyes Mark picked up a small soft owl feather and put it in his tee-shirt pocket, over his heart. When he readied his pack he made another grim discovery. The ravenous flies had ripped open the pouch carrying his food and eaten everything. He had been looking forward to eating turkey sandwiches at the end of the day; now he had nothing to eat or drink except a half-empty canteen of water. He should have eaten earlier! His stomach suddenly felt painfully empty. He cleaned the empty fly fouled food pouch in a puddle of ice-cold water, filled his canteen, and they moved on.
Walking Stone led the way using infrared vision when it became completely dark, and Mark followed as best he could. Fog was quickly forming in the ice-chilled summer air; by dawn this entire ice -covered region of the North American continent would be shrouded in thick fog that would linger for much of the following day. Near the ice the temperature of the ice-chilled fog was near freezing.
They removed Walking Stone's parka and packed it away in the backpack. The Stone-Coat no longer had to make frequent stops to cool himself off. The radioactive Stone-Coat glowed slightly and Mark literally followed in his big footsteps, occasionally stumbling and catching himself on increasingly sore hands and knees. It was a moonless night, dark and silent except for the glowing Stone-Coat, whose every footstep crunched into ice or splashed into a water-filled giant footprint. Mark's own heavy breathing and the crunch of his own ice-gripping crampon-clad boots was comparatively quiet.
The boy was increasingly tired, hungry, and distraught. What had made him ever think that he could reach Green Mountain in a single morning and afternoon? He had to push himself to the limit of his strength to keep up with Walking Stone. His Stone-Coat companion had not really hindered him at all, he realized. If he had come on this quest without Walking Stone he would likely by now be miles further back along this endless path, totally exhausted from carrying the heavy pack or eaten by flies.
The invigorated Stone-Coat was essentially tireless, but his human companion was not. Mark's legs increasingly ached and he was breathing too hard. Perhaps they should stop here for the night, Mark thought. It would be cold sleeping atop the ice in his light sleeping-bag but he was becoming too tired to go on; he was even more tired than hungry. He was about to suggest to Walking Stone that they stop when he heard a distant splashing of puddles and crunching of ice behind them that could only mean that Ice Giants that were rapidly overtaking the questers.
"Many big Stone Coats come," confirmed Walking Stone. "We need to get off the path now and let them pass by us. It is near to where we needed to get off this path anyway, for we are near Green Mountain."
In the dull light that his glowing companion created, the ten to fifteen foot walls of ice to either side of the Stone-Coat pathway loomed impossibly high. "Do we have to?" asked Mark. "I've never heard of a Stone-Coat walking on a person or another Stone-Coat. Won't they simply step over or around us?"
"Not in this situation. They have been instructed to completely ignore us, so that means that they could by chance step on us."
"That's totally stupid!" remarked Mark. "Stepping on us would be interfering with us and that would be against the quest rules!"
"Perhaps they would agree to your very logical interpretation but unfortunately during our quest they are forbidden from communicating with us," explained Walking Stone.
Not far enough behind them, Mark could hear the cracking and crushing of ice, and he could already see several pairs of huge red glowing eyes fifty to sixty feet above the fog-covered path, moving steadily towards them. These Stone-Coat Ice Giants of Mohawk legend were setting off to colonize some unknown distant rock outcroppings, perhaps in distant Canada. In the summer they walked by night and concealed and cooled themselves in the ice sheet by day. "They're too close! Why didn't you detect them sooner?"
"Their radio communication is sporadic and limited to help avoid detection by humans," said Walking Stone. "They walk quietly and swiftly and only at night."
"Nifty, but now we need to climb up and away from this path."
"Yes, here along the southern edge of the path, where the ice is shaded and most firm and might bear our weight," agreed Walking Stone, who rotated his head to scan the cliff using his infra-red night vision. "I see no nearby point where our egress is favored." The cliff bordering the giant-worn pathway here was nearly fifteen feet high and made of slippery vertical ice smoothed by repeated melting and refreezing. Towards the bottom it was solid ice, near the top it was melting mush that due to summer warmth tended to break off in big heavy chunks.
Mark retrieved his ice axe and rope from the backpack before having Walking Stone toss it up and atop the cliff. When Mark climbed up and stood atop Walking Stone's upraised hands his own upheld hands were nearly level with the top edge of the ice cliff. At first the boy thought that it would be easy for him to climb the rest of the way out, but when he drove his axe into the ice a water-soaked chunk if it bigger than his head easily broke off and fell onto his face and then onto Walking Stone. "The ice is far too soft!" he complained. "It won't even hold my weight much less yours!"
"Knock down the soft surface ice," said Walking Stone. "It should be more solid underneath."
Almost blindly in the dark Mark chopped away at the ice as far as he could reach with the short-handled ice axe, knocking big chunks of it down that nearly knocked him off the upraised hands of Walking Stone. Before long he had carved a boy-sized niche into ice that seemed firm enough to hold his weight. "It will easily hold me but not you," he told Walking Stone. "After I climb off of you, claw yourself into the ice wall or you'll be trampled!"
"Affirmative," agreed Walking Stone. "Here comes the first Ice Giant."
As Mark drove his axe hard into the ice as high as he could reach and lifted himself off of Walking Stone, he saw silhouetted against the starry sky the immense towering dark shape of the lead Ice Giant rapidly bearing down on them with twenty-foot strides. Its dinner-dish sized red glowing eyes didn't appear to even register the presence of the questers; this Ice Giant was indeed completely ignoring them. The ice sheet cracked and shook with each monstrous step it took as hundreds of tons of rock pounded the pathway and two-foot long diamond claws dug into crunching ice.
In the glowi
ng light cast by his Stone-Coat companion Mark glimpsed an immense leg swing by him only three feet from where he was perched in the cliff wall, while a broad foot with its immense claws came within scant inches of Walking-Stone's back. It was perhaps sixty feet tall; the creature's knees were nearly as high as the nook in the ice where Mark cowered. At the same time a huge clawed hand swung past only a few feet above him, causing a sudden rush of air that threatened to tumble him from his perch.
"That was too close," Mark noted. He had seen the big Ice Giants many times before, but not this terrifyingly near. They looked almost exactly like Walking Stone but they were a couple of hundred times bigger and a thousand times scarier. Most of them also lacked ears and voices. "Dig yourself in!" Mark advised his Stone-Coat companion.
Walking Stone was already desperately clawing away with hands and feet at the ice-wall, gouging out great chunks of ice. He stopped digging and threw himself against the wall again as the second Ice Giant reached them. This Ice Giant's huge foot landed directly behind Walking Stone, knocking him hard against the ice wall as it fell. The Ice Giants also favored the firmer shady side of their path, Mark belatedly realized with 20-20 hindsight. If he and Walking Stone had simply moved to the other side of the path they might have completely escaped the strides of these giants.
Walking Stone had clawed himself halfway into the ice wall when the third Ice Giant's right foot struck him a glancing blow and he tumbled onto the path. Mark watched in horror as the Ice Giant's swinging left foot kicked Walking Stone solidly, knocking him completely out of sight. "Walking Stone!" he shouted repeatedly, but he got no reply as a dozen more Ice Giants marched past noisily. "Stupid Stone-Coats!" he shouted angrily, as the last of them marched away. "You are breaking our agreement!" He climbed the rest of the way up and out of the path/trench, then for the next half an hour he shouted down at the path for Walking Stone without receiving any reply. There was only silence and the never-ending sound of running water. He was on his own.
Now what? The forests of Green Mountain were a distant dream. It would be suicide for him to go on alone in the dark across the ice sheet. More important, he simply had to find his partner Walking Stone. Was he destroyed or merely injured? Or had he simply been kicked so far down the path that he was out of shouting range and possibly lost?
Mark retrieved his pack and dropped it back down onto the Stone-Coat pathway, then cautiously climbed down after it. He wasn't worried about more Ice Giants coming this night; Ice Giants left Giants' Rest Mountain all at once in the early evening to maximize their nighttime marching time. He had been using his tiny keychain-sized little flashlight. Now he got his larger flashlight out of the backpack and put away his ice axe and rope and began a thorough search for Walking Stone, while periodically calling his name aloud and listening in vain for a reply.
He sensed nothing but ice, puddles, and little streamlets that gurgled down into deep openings in the ice. Then fifty yards further along the path he found the mangled arm. Including the hand at one end and the elbow at the other it was over two feet long. Shredded strands of carbon nanotubes hung from the broken end.
"Flint!" Mark cursed using the English name for the oftentimes troublesome Mohawk deity. Then using his little flashlight he resumed searching for the rest of Walking Stone. After searching for a half hour without result he returned to the broken off arm. As it lay palm-upward he noticed the fingers move ineffectively, like a turtle trying to right itself.
"Of course!" Mark realized, the arm was still alive, in the Stone-Coat sense. He remembered old stories about Stone-Coats reassembling themselves after being blown to pieces. He turned the forearm over, so that the fingers could walk upon the ice pathway. Immediately it turned itself around in the opposite direction and began to ever so slowly crawl along the path, fingers digging into the ice to pull the forearm along. It was emitting and detecting electronic signals, Mark suspected, and moving towards some other part of itself. Mark used his boot to push it along faster, but its crawling motion was still agonizingly slow. Most of Walking Stone's nuclear power sources were concentrated deep in his core; the isolated forearm had little energy reserves of its own.
At last it reached a big new Stone-Coat footprint-puddle and readily crawled into it, nearly disappearing from sight in foot-deep water that reflected most illumination from his flashlight. It crawled to the middle of the puddle and stopped. With his flashlight Mark could at first barely make-out only the arm and nothing else.
Suddenly he realized that Walking Stone had been dully glowing when he disappeared. He turned off his flashlight, plunging the world around him into darkness. Below the forearm something larger glowed dully under the clear water and ice.
"Flint!" Mark swore, when he realized it was Walking Stone, or at least a big part of him, pushed down into the ice of the path by hundreds of tons of Ice Giant weight! Mark had walked past this spot in the dark a half-dozen times without even noticing him! He searched with his bare hands into the numbingly cold water and felt a small patch of pebbly Stone-Coat skin instead of ice. It was Walking Stone; it had to be!
He clicked the flashlight back on and retrieved the ice axe and wood-axe from his pack, and used them to chop an outlet for the water to drain from the big footprint. The resulting exposed Stone-Coat skin further confirmed that the buried object was indeed Walking Stone. The diamond scales even felt a little warm to Mark's touch; Walking Stone was trying to melt himself out but in an hour hadn't made any noticeable progress; the ice prison that held him was too huge, and easily absorbed his body-heat.
Mark tapped the exposed Stone-Coat skin of his companion a few times with his hatchet, hopefully signaling his presence, and then got to work with his ice axe, chipping chunk after chunk of ice off of the immobilized Stone-Coat.
It soon became apparent that Walking Stone had been crushed down headfirst into the ice path. Within an hour Mark had cleared away several inches of ice from his companion's back, head, and limbs. Abruptly the Stone-Coat flexed and broke the remaining ice that confined him. Soon he stood before Mark, apparently whole except for a conspicuously missing forearm.
"Let's not do that again either," said Mark, as with difficulty he lifted up the heavy detached forearm and handed it to Walking Stone.
"Agreed. Without your aid I may have been inconveniently entrapped for an indeterminate period of time, perhaps for several days and nights while being trampled nightly underfoot. It would have been the end of the quest."
"Your severed arm led me to you," Mark noted.
"A fortuitous loss of limb," Walking Stone said.
"You were lucky only to lose an arm, I suppose."
"There were serious fractures elsewhere but I healed them while in my icy tomb."
"Icy tomb? That's a poetically human expression! I bet you plagiarized that from something you found on the internet! How long will it take you to re-attach your arm?" Walking Stone had already shoved together the broken arm but it would take time for the minerals to meld.
"Overnight," said the Stone-Coat. "I will doubtless need the use of all of my limbs to climb out of this pathway and traverse the ice sheet, so we are unfortunately not going to reach your Green Mountain sanctuary tonight."
"That's alright, I'm too tired to go any further anyway," said Mark.
"And hungry?"
"I'll live. I'll find a dry spot for my little sleeping pad and bag, and you can find a nice cold spot for yourself. The night should be pleasantly uneventful."
"Affirmative," agreed Walking Stone.
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Global Warming Fun 4: They Taste Like Chicken Page 9
