by Doug Kelly
Now they looked to the landside. The morning sun was low and warmed their faces as they observed the infinite emerald blanket that extended all the way to the eastern horizon. An enormous green belt of trees surrounded the lake. To the north, the tree belt was thinner, allowing them to easily see a vast, grassy plain past the tall trees. To the east, the woods extended much farther away, but at a great distance, it also transitioned into prairieland, merging with the waves of tall grass to the north. Acknowledging the immensity of the surrounding verdure, Aton understood the importance of determining the best path for their travel. Being lost in the woods would be a terrible existence.
They could not perceive the work of a human hand anywhere. There was no telltale sign of a city. Not a trace of a village, or an obvious network of roads, not even smoke curling in the air from a lonely campfire. If there were solitary cabins in the distance, the canopy of trees easily concealed them.
Just when Aton concluded that nothing he saw appeared to show that people occupied the area, he noticed, in a pale line from the north to the south, an absence of vegetation on the grassy plain that continued like a scar going south through the forest, only remaining visible due to the absence of trees. From its direction and proximity to the lake, he believed that he was looking at an ancient American road with which he might be familiar.
Several years ago, during one of his distant expeditions from his clan’s stockade, he had found a road referred to by local inhabitants as Interstate 55. He had determined its name from old metal signs he had found near it while exploring. He had understood the writing on the American signs, and had used that knowledge to confirm its name as the same name that clans in close proximity to the old highway used when mentioning the old road. Others had referred to it using the same nomenclature, so when he had found it, there was no doubt in his mind as to what he had been standing on.
Years ago, during his expedition to that place, he could see that the width, thickness, and extent of the material the Americans had used to build that highway had inhibited the growth of encumbering vegetation. Therefore, the ancient road that thick brushwood, saplings, dense grasses, and thistles did not burden with their presence, made travel, including troop movements for warfare and wagon trains for commerce, more easily conducted when compared to the crude dirt roads that connected many of their current population centers. If that was the ancient American road, and he believed it was, then that landmark would guide them out of here. The old road traveled to the south, all the way to the ocean, which he had not yet seen. He had only heard of the ocean from various tales but had never ventured all the way to the gulf coast. He also knew that ancient highway traveled close to his old home and territory familiar to him. Now he understood that if he followed the shoreline of the lake, that road would soon come close to the water's edge. He estimated their proximity to the ancient thoroughfare, which was certainly in the direction that they would travel, and concluded they could attain it, but with some difficulty. From that highway, he knew that he could find a village and start a new life.
Aton confidently lifted a finger to point in the direction of where he understood the ancient road was. Hauk nodded his head to acknowledge his understanding. They both agreed to the plan, which was to exit this place by following the lakeshore and travel south a great distance before turning to the east and journeying through the woods in search of that ancient highway. Initiating the excursion on the flat beach would make walking so much easier, compared to slashing the entire way through the vines and thorn bushes of the thick forest. The lakeshore would eventually meander close to the road, so where they would estimate the beach and road were in relatively close proximity, they would traverse through the woods, hoping to find an opening in the dense wall of trees or at least an animal trail, to find their way to the old highway.
Before departing the summit, Aton had another close look at the distant hilltops to the south. Some of those peaks appeared to be void of trees. He could easily explain this if the crests consisted of rocky terrain, but even though he was at a great distance from them, they appeared to be lush and green. Where had the trees gone? Aton had no explanation, but it was his nature to become obsessed with a question that he could not answer, so he brooded over the riddle. He also wondered if he had seen narrow paths connecting the denuded hill peaks. Resolving that he had already found an ancient American road, a landmark that was the object of their current exploration, he put his thoughts about it to rest. They were leaving soon, and that was all that mattered now.
They only had to descend the mountain slope again, so the arduous labor of ascension had ceased. To their great relief, the excursion was a success. They knew that when they returned to their rock shelter, they would need to prepare for their exodus from the forest jungle that had entrapped them, and their first priority was to acquire a supply of food for the journey. Tender hog flesh was waiting for them in the roasting pit at their cave. If they dried more of that meat, they would nearly be ready to leave the confines of the unfamiliar forest.
They began the descent of the mountain. Climbing down the crater, they went around the cone and reached their encampment of the previous night. Hauk suggested that they eat breakfast before beginning the long walk back to their cave. They ate so heartily that the store of dried turkey and nuts was totally exhausted. After leaving the plateau, Aton reminded Hauk of his proposal to return to their shelter by a different route. Recent events had left him with an uneasy feeling. He wanted to know of any hidden threats, maybe cannibals, lurking near their temporary home.
They followed the sloping ridge down, below which the nearby creek that drained into the lake flowed past. It probably had its source at some point past the shadows of the rocky cone. They agreed to stay close to each other during the return trip. They had been lucky so far in the forest, only having seen paw prints of a cougar, and the hog they had killed had been of a size that they would have been able to defend themselves if it had attacked, but it was very certain that dangerous animals, maybe cannibals, inhabited this thick forest, too. It was prudent to be on their guard. Aton took the lead. His keen hunter’s eyes hardly blinked whenever they blazed a trail through dense vegetation.
Toward late morning, they descended the last slope of the mountain, where rocks, bushes, and ragged trees were strewn upon the ground. A strip of rocky, rough terrain surrounded the northern band of the cone’s base. Before the lush vegetation began again, great blocks of rock, which appeared to be of a different origin than that which surrounded the dormant volcano, littered the foreground. The asteroid’s collision with earth had ejected the stones confronting them; debris from the collision had struck here, and the craters that had surrounded the impacted rocks had leveled long ago, disappearing after the flood and deluge of torrential rains receded.
It was here among the rocks ahead of them that Aton thought he saw smoke. He stopped abruptly and so did Hauk, who followed close behind his friend.
“Smoke,” whispered Aton.
“Cannibals,” replied Hauk.
CHAPTER TWELVE
They thought that they had clearly seen smoke, but it was actually a billowing cloud of steam rising from a small geyser behind the scattered boulders, spraying into the air, quickly dissipating as it rose. No longer fearing this to be smoke from a campfire, but still not understanding its source, they went forward to investigate. As they got closer, a disagreeable odor impregnated the air, almost choking them. It reminded them of the stench that saturated the abandoned city of Baton Rouge. This putrid smell was from sulfur dioxide gas mixed with super-heated water vapor escaping from a deep fissure in the earth, so the rising clouds and noxious haze actually had a volcanic subterranean origin. Geothermal heat from hot magma deep below the earth’s crust had scalded an underground pocket of water, causing intermittent eruptions. They accepted it as a warning and immediately left the area.
They proceeded toward the border of the thick forest, which they would reach after a short jog,
following the bending stream as they went. On the way, the waters of the creek flowed between high banks of red clay. They were approaching a watershed of merging stream valleys, which was the source of the little river. The trees nearby were tall, healthy, and full of shiny leaves, rising to the sky on sloping banks. Birds swarmed among the branches, which did not hinder the colorful display of their feathers, and they appeared like a moving rainbow accompanied by a deafening clamor of sound.
This wonderful image of moving color interrupted their walk for a moment, and then they resumed the trek along the stream, under an arching tree canopy of a fantastic height. The thick foliage was superb camouflage, concealing the eventual source of the stream from their previous observation on the cone. As they walked, the creek grew much wider, and Aton supposed that they would soon reach its source. In fact, after emerging from beneath a thick clump of beautiful trees, it suddenly appeared before their eyes. The meandering valleys converged at a central point, from where the effluent waters joined into a larger stream that eventually flowed by their cave and into Lake Pontchartrain. The explorers had arrived at the stream’s watershed. The place was well worth looking at, reposing in a crowd of diversified trees.
Toward the west, through a curtain of flora picturesquely raised in some places, a horizon of water sparkled across the lake. Numerous aquatic birds frequented the shore below the rock cliff. On the plateau above the rock wall, kingfishers perched on large stones as they watched for fish, and then darting down, they plunged in with a sharp cry, and reappeared with prey in their beaks. On the shore strutted wild ducks, pelicans, and innumerable other water fowl.
Ready to return to their shelter, they descended toward the great plateau. It was with difficulty that they broke a path through the thickets and brushwood. This area appeared like so many other places in this jungle that they had walked through, as if people had never been there, free from the effect of human intervention. They went toward the west after emerging onto the flat top of the great rock cliff that bordered a long section of the lake’s eastern shore.
While crossing the plateau, they happened to find a fissure that had opened across this flat mesa. It was a giant crack in the deep layers of stratified rock, and its bottom sloped gently down as it opened to the shoreline, vertically splitting the cliff like a doorway to the beach. They climbed down the jagged rocks inside the cleft, which resembled a natural staircase, and were pleased to reach the sandy beach. To return to their cave, they had to walk south, reach the semicircular bay that they had explored their first day after wrecking the boat, and then walk over the peninsula’s narrow dimension to reach the section of shore that would lead to the grassy slope below their rock shelter.
Going down the beach, they were tired, but elated because they had seen no serious threats confronting them, except the surrounding wild terrain. Upon seeing imprints of footsteps in the sand, their elation soon vanished, and confusion filled the void, as if they had seen a haunting apparition. It was a trail of naked footprints on the beach going in the same direction that they were, south. They stood stiff and motionless on the shore, as if they were thunderstruck. They listened, looked around, but heard or saw nothing other than the lapping waves against the sand, and birds that were busy flying to and from their nesting places. Hauk kneeled to touch one of the damp impressions. The features were distinct, toes, heel, and a flat arch between them. Neither of them said it, but both knew that someone from a tribe of cannibals had been here.
“This isn’t good,” Hauk confessed.
“Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. We have our bearings to leave, and this is a lone man. We outnumber him.”
“But what if he was walking toward others?” asked Hauk. “We are walking in the same direction.”
“Where are their canoes?” asked Aton.
“I don’t want to find out. Besides, maybe they don’t have any,” Hauk firmly replied.
“We are on an open beach and can’t be ambushed. There is nothing the cannibals can hide behind.”
“I don’t like it. We should turn around,” said Hauk.
“We don’t have any more food with us,” said Aton. “I’m tired and hungry. Going back the way we came can’t be a good idea either. It would be dark before we got back to the cave. Here, we walk in the open. Nothing can lurk in the shadows or hide behind a bush and attack us. I say that we continue. If we see anything strange, anyone, even a beached canoe, we can turn around. I just want to get back to our shelter. I’m hungry, and so are you. The hog should be cooked by now. I can just smell it.” He closed his eyes and imagined the aroma.
“Fine, alright then. We’ll continue, but if I see more footprints or tracks where canoes have beached on the sand, we turn around and go back.”
“Agreed.”
Hauk pointed to the south and raised his eyebrows as an indication that he was ready for Aton to take the lead, and the confident hunter did just that.
Hauk was more terrified than he would admit. Like Aton, he was hungry, but he had been hungry before, so this was nothing new. He understood that food was waiting, so he thought they should have returned to their cave by using the longer, but safer, route. The open beach left them vulnerable. There was no place to hide. They could not run to the west because of the lake, and the cliff blocked the east, so they could only retreat down the beach. His eyes scoured the shore from the edge of the water to the verge of the rock wall, looking for footprints or tracks where a canoe might have beached, and he did this while imagining every bush, every small tree, and every large stone in the distance to be a man, hungry for human flesh.
On their way to the bay of the bent peninsula, after not seeing anything other than the single trail of naked footprints, which had quickly disappeared, they slightly relaxed, and Hauk thought he might have overreacted. After all, Aton was a skilled hunter and was familiar with the habits of these savages. Therefore, as they walked, their apprehensions dissolved, and they thought more about the warm pork waiting for them at home.
They arrived at the bay and entered it to cross the narrow dimension of the promontory, because it was the shortest path to the slope leading to their shelter. Deep into the bay, it went without saying that when Hauk stumbled on the warm ashes of a campfire, to conclude that he was perfectly bewildered would have been an understatement. Then they looked around the cove, this time with eyes motivated by panic.
Aton should have known better. He was all too familiar with the unrelenting cruelty of these savages who ceremonially ate the flesh of humans to capture their spirits. As the result of his bad judgment, he stood there frozen stiff with terror, unable to express the horror of his mind after seeing that cannibals had strewn on the shore of the bay many fractured skulls, hands, feet, and other cooked bones of human bodies. A small, crackling fire was in a deep pit, and that was where he surmised the cannibals had cooked the humans, on which the savages had then feasted. He turned away from the horrific scene, and his empty stomach wretched with dry heaves.
They ran to the hill, bordered to their left by a wall of slippery rocks, to cross the narrow dimension of the peninsula and escape from the appalling scene. The beach on the other side would take them home. Fatigued, they ran as fast as they could to get to the farther beach and continue their journey to their rock shelter and safety. In the tall grass on the hill, both of them collapsed to their knees so they could catch their breath. Then they heard strange voices enter the bay, which sounded like a language of incoherent gibberish. It was the unmistakable intonations of cannibals speaking to one another. Two sets of cautious eyes peered from above the tall grass and looked down into the bay to see the place from where they had narrowly escaped.
A theater of horror unfolded before their eyes. After the savages beached their canoes in the bay, Aton counted no less than two dozen sub-human beasts that had gathered in the cove. In the fire pit, one of the cannibals kindled the flames back to life. While the fire began to envelop the crackling wood in the pit, the ha
lf-naked men danced in contorting, violent, barbarous gestures. They had shaggy hair with untrimmed beards that descended to their chests. Their bodies were almost naked except for a rag of coarse cloth around their waists. They had wild eyes, enormous hands with immensely long fingernails, dark, sunburned skin, and thickly calloused feet.
After they completed their ceremonial dance, the feral brutes dragged two miserable wretches from where they had moored the canoes. These aboriginal men of the swamp had tied the naked captives’ hands behind their backs, bound at the wrists, like the mortally wounded man Aton and Hauk had recently found on the southern beach, hiding behind a rock, in shock and on the precipice of death. Part of this dreadful group took one captive toward the fire and knocked him on the head with a club. The strike did not kill him. Their victim was still alive, but staggered around, disoriented and dizzy. During the captive’s pleas for mercy, as he tried to stumble away from the fire pit in a futile effort to save his life, Aton heard and understood the groveling man’s words. His accent was that of a nomad, and by the similar appearance of his friend, he was most likely a nomad, too. A final blow to the skull silenced the captive as he pleaded for mercy, and the fatal strike took him from vertical to horizontal, sprawled in a death pose on the ground. A few others came to assist with the process, and went to work immediately butchering the warm body for their meal while they left the other victim standing by himself, seemingly frozen stiff with fear. At the very moment that the cannibals gathered around the warm corpse to collect and drink the blood, the second prisoner, seeing an opportunity to try an escape, inspired by the natural desire for self-preservation, darted away and ran with incredible swiftness on the sand, and he ran directly toward Aton and Hauk. When they saw the fleeing man run toward their concealed location, fear paralyzed their bodies, because they naturally assumed his abductors would pursue, and during the chase, they might discover Aton and Hauk hiding in the tall grass. To prepare to fight, Aton would have to stand to string his bow, and he knew that action would betray their concealed presence. Staying low, Hauk pulled the sword from its scabbard and Aton retrieved his dagger. To their relief, only three men chased the escapee, but his incredible swiftness made them worry that the running man would gain their position, revealing it to the pursuers, and a bloody fight would ensue. Fatigue caught the fleeing captive before the cannibals did. He collapsed to the ground, and the human beasts beat him to death with clubs. They dragged the naked body to the growing fire in the pit, heaved it onto the flames, and burning flesh began to scent the air.
