The Long Journey Home (Across The Lake Book 2)

by Doug Kelly

  Hauk silently thanked the gods for his safety and whispered to Aton that he had seen enough. With all due caution, they traversed the scruffy land of the promontory, exited it, and then ran south until the rock wall faded away. At this location, they went up the slope to the plateau and found their home in the cave, greeted by the faint aroma of slow-cooked pork. Famished, neither man could wait. Ready to dig his way into the warm soil, Hauk removed his heavy sword to be free of any hindrance while he dug. They attacked the heated earth that covered the cooking pit. Aton used the turtle shell as a scoop, and Hauk used his hands, but the rocks below were still too hot to touch, so Hauk crossed the log bridge and went to the closest thicket of trees, surrounded with dense bushes, to look for broad, thick, green leaves to use like oven mittens.

  After standing up and turning around with an armful of green tree leaves, Hauk was face to face with a fierce cougar. It was a young male, not fully mature, but a daunting opponent to a man armed only with his friend’s knife. Startled and surprised, he was standing with his back against a tree, while the animal gathered itself together, getting ready to pounce. With his back pinned to the tree, feeling like he had no other choice, with no other weapon than a knife, he dropped the leaves, withdrew the knife, and rushed on the formidable animal, which turned to meet its new adversary.

  Hauk possessed immense strength and agility. He seized the cougar's throat with one powerful hand, holding it like a vise, ignoring the beast's claws that tore at his chest, and with the other, he repeatedly plunged the dagger into its heart and lungs until he felt the vicious cat stop fighting. The cougar fell limp onto the ground. The struggle was short. Hauk kicked the dead body aside. Blood flowed from his shoulder, under his torn shirt, but he took no notice of it because the adrenaline rush had masked the pain and made his hands tremble like leaves in a spring breeze. When his nerves calmed, he cut the front and hind paws from the cougar’s dead body to keep the claws as a trophy, and he limped back to camp.

  When Aton saw his bloody friend cross the log bridge, he grabbed his bow, which he had already strung, and notched an arrow, fully expecting Hauk to have just escaped a life-or-death clash with a cannibal. Aton remembered that in their haste to leave the bay and avoid the man-eaters noticing them, he was sure they had left a trail of footprints that those feral men of the swamps could easily track back to the cave. He swallowed hard and prepared for an invasion. Then he saw the bloody cougar paws and quickly realized that Hauk had confronted a different kind of savage beast.

  “I turned around and it was there,” said Hauk, still breathing heavily from the struggle. “It was as quiet as a shadow. You were correct. I never heard it stalking me.”

  “And then it pounced?”

  “No, I pounced first. If you hesitate, you die. Remember that, Aton.”

  While Hauk washed the blood from his body, Aton finished removing the hot dirt and stones from the cooking pit, using mittens made with green leaves from the woods. They ate ravenously and drank copious amounts of fresh water from the stream. They were glad to be back, but most of all they were just happy to be alive.

  Next to the cooking pit, they started another fire, placed flat stones on it, and then put the remaining hog meat on top of the flat rocks. They were drying the pork into jerky for their departure from the deep forest. Hauk put more armfuls of firewood into the stone-lined pit. The dying embers came back to life under a cloud of white smoke.

  “Why are you starting another fire?” asked Aton.

  “For the animal in our trap.”

  “How do you know it worked?”

  “Because you said it would. Let’s go to it before dark. We don’t have any more time to waste.”

  “You should rest. Just look at you! Your chest is still bleeding.”

  “If you hesitate, you die, and I’m not going to starve to death. We need more meat to dry, and then we need to get out of here. Bring your bow. We don’t know what else is waiting for us, and I’m not taking any more chances.”

  Aton took his bow, but he would have anyway. As they went to the clearing to inspect the pit trap, Aton could not stop thinking about the trail of footprints they had left in the sand after they had fled from the cannibals in the bay. What he should have done was drag a bush behind them as they escaped along the beach, whisking away the footprints with the shrubbery as if it were a broom. Before the next sunrise, nature would have completely obscured what remained, leaving nothing that the cannibals could find and use to track them.

  On the way to the clearing, which surrounded the animal trap, he thought he saw hungry, human eyes in every shadow, and heard twigs snapping under bare feet that mischievously stalked them. Just after they entered the clearing, they heard the unmistakable cry of an injured boar. They could see that the leaf-covered branches that had camouflaged the pit had collapsed. They peered down into the trap and saw a freshly impaled wild boar, lying on its side, futilely kicking and struggling.

  Hauk carefully jumped into the hole, ever vigilant to avoid the sharp, vertical sticks, and plunged his sword through the animal’s side, into its heart. It died quickly after one last shriek. Hauk knocked over the sharp sticks and kneeled beside the feral hog. He put his hand under it and tried to pull up against its thick, bristly fur to test its weight. Under the hog’s rump, his hand had wrapped around what he thought was another sharp stick. He pulled it out and realized that it was an arrow. He stood and held it up for Aton to see.

  “Aton…is this yours?”

  “No. It looks just like the one—”

  At that moment, Aton heard steps coming in their direction, along the animal path, but behind thick bushes, which obscured his view. Hauk saw the look in Aton’s eyes, and he leapt out of the pit, holding his sword ready for another battle. Hauk could hear the unmistakable sound of advancing steps and saw the shrubbery move as something came toward them.

  “This is it, Hauk. They tracked us here. Keep the pit between them and us. It’s time to fight!”

  The bushes on either side of the trail opened just as a magnificent animal showed itself on the path. It was a cougar at least twice the size of its counterpart, which Hauk had recently killed. The brown color of its hackled fur, raising like a forbidding ridge of mountains along its spine, contrasted with the white hair of its chest. The beast was as beautiful as it was lethal. It was an immense female, mother to the male cat that Hauk had killed. Initially, the scent of cooking meat had attracted the cougar, but on her journey to investigate the smell, the cat had spooked the injured boar to run for its life. The trail of blood from the arrow wound had easily allowed the cougar to track the injured hog to the pit trap. The cat had followed the wounded prey’s odor, but now she smelled the scent of human blood in the air and confidently licked her whiskers as she set her piercing eyes on Hauk. The cougar advanced and gazed around them with blazing eyes, her hair bristling as if this were the first time she scented the tender flesh of men.

  Aton moved from behind the pit, and after advancing to within twenty paces of the crouching beast, he remained motionless, his bow bent, arrow ready to fly, and stood there without moving a muscle. The cougar collected her rear legs underneath herself to leap.

  “Don’t hesitate!” Hauk advised him.

  The bowstring hummed. The arrow flew true, and the shaft pierced deep into the animal’s throat. The big cat writhed on the ground, struggling with impending death, and lost that battle. They rushed toward the dead cougar and, as she lay stretched on the ground, contemplated the animal’s appearance, thinking that her magnificent pelt would be a great testimony to bravery, but they settled for taking the claws instead. Skinning the big cat and preserving her hide would take too long. They were in a hurry to leave. They decided to remove the claws so that each of them could make a necklace of the curved daggers taken from a jungle cat. After the cougar attack, each of them thought he was ready to leave now, more so than his counterpart was, because if a cougar could find them, it was only a matter of time
before they crossed paths with the cannibals. They took the gutted wild boar back to the shelter and expedited butchering it. As they slept, the meat cooked and dried on hot, flat rocks by the fire.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The next morning, they woke before dawn. In the darkness just before sunrise, Aton put some small logs on the crackling fire. He added just enough wood to fuel the rising flames and get the rocks in the fire pit hotter, but not so much wood that it would create a visible plume of smoke that hungry cannibals could easily see from a distance. After witnessing the savage brutality of the swamp men at the bay, they preferred not to advertise their location. Although they were leaving today, they were not quite ready. They had a few more chores to complete before they began their trek. While the meat dried beside the flames, and Hauk was gathering all of their possessions, Aton took his hatchet and went to the woods to change sapling trees into sturdy poles, so they could build a travois sled to transport their goods during the long journey away.

  Although a sled was more primitive than a wagon, the types of terrain they expected to encounter would have made wheeled transportation less efficient and less versatile. During their exodus, they fully expected to encounter a sandy beach sprinkled with cumbersome stones, and dense woods with all of its hazards, which would obstruct an easy path to the ancient highway. Besides, they had no time to fashion crude wheels and axles, or fiddle with perfecting a design for a human-powered cart. For the quickest solution to their transportation problem, Aton had suggested assembling a travois sled, and Hauk had agreed. It was a sound idea, because to heap all of their possessions, the bag of coins and jewelry being the heaviest, on their backs as if they were beasts of burden would be unmanageable, just as impossible as trying to build a wagon.

  After Aton gathered two long poles and some smaller branches that he could fashion into a double yoke and braces for the frame, he went to work lashing it together with long, green, sturdy vines. He bound the two lengthy poles together in the shape of an elongated isosceles triangle, so that the most acute angle of the frame would point forward when finished. For more efficient hauling of the sled by two men, he fitted a stout branch across the front of the sled as a double shoulder harness. At the rear, near the dragging ends of the frame, he stabilized the two poles by wrapping vines tightly around the intersection of each pole to a branch that he had secured as a brace across them, which would be horizontal to the ground. He cut a section of their sail, still stained dark from the toxic fumes that surrounded the forbidden section of the marshy lake, and he punctured holes around the perimeter of the thick cloth, threading vines through the eyelets and around the poles to bind it securely to the frame. The stitched canvas appeared much like a hammock between these two wooden shafts, and was just the correct size for all of their belongings. They made quick work of the sled construction, and by late morning, it was ready for them to drag with the double harness.

  They loaded everything onto the sled, stood on either side of it, lifted the double harness, and each of them put his side of the yoke onto his tired shoulders. With a grunt and mutual sigh of relief, they headed down the slope and onto the beach, as if they were two tired horses with heads hung low. It easily slid across the shore. The friction of the wood on the sand made a constant hissing noise as it dragged behind them.

  Trailing away in the background, the cliff gradually decreased in height against the perspective of the receding horizon. Eventually, they could only see the green tops of the few trees that crowned it. After the rock wall behind them disappeared, the coastline became crooked and meandered in an irregular pattern. Intermittent stones covered the beach, and sandbanks riddled the shallow water. They could see long waves breaking over the rocks by an islet, materializing a foamy fringe. At this point, the beach was very narrow between the edge of the forest and the water. Walking was more difficult here, because of the numerous rocks they encountered on this section of the beach. Birds that were indifferent to their presence capriciously strutted across their path, and innumerable shells were strewn across the beach, dotting the landscape like a mosaic. Flocks of a variety of birds fluttered around them. In the woods, but near the beach, they could hear the bushes rustling and see the grass waving, indicating the presence of timid animals. Farther down, the shore became flat and sandy again. The woods were thinner here, and a few trees rose above a low, marshy ground.

  It was getting late, and they were tired, so they dropped the double harness and decided to spend the night on the beach. The weather was spectacular. After getting their fill of dried pork, they gathered grass and leaf litter from the forest floor and used it to make beds on the sand. The harmonic sound of the gentle waves eased their minds into a deep slumber. The breeze died away with the last light of day, and only rose again with the first streaks of dawn. The night had passed quietly.

  The next day was much the same as the previous. With the burden of their belongings weighting their shoulders as they pulled the crude sleigh, they suffered along a constant path of sand under their feet. On this long flat section of beach, parallel lines from the poles they dragged across the sand framed their trailing footprints, which receded to a single point on the horizon behind them. Aton knew that eventually, they would find an opening in the woods that connected the giant lake’s shore to a road, or at least a path away from the lake and the dangerous marshland near it. He knew there had to be an opening to a trail somewhere. They continued forward, each with one eye toward the forest, looking for an opening in the trees, but they did not find an egress as they walked for what seemed like forever.

  The forest continued like a wall on the left, blocking their escape. After becoming completely exhausted, they took a short rest. They ate more of their dried rations, drank from the lake, and then started again. As the sun declined on the western horizon, they approached a gap in the woods where wet weather had washed eroded topsoil down to the shore, and a long stretch of lush, green grass had grown on it. The vacant beach that surrounded the path of grass harshly contrasted against this river of verdure, which appeared as if it were a soft emerald carpet against a barren strand of sand. The effects of erosion had prevented sapling trees and thick brushwood from rooting here, making this long swath an ideal location to pierce through the forest rather than plunge blindly into a thick and dark section of the unfamiliar woods. Aton thought this might be where they should turn to go into the forest. It was a good place to begin their search for the ancient road, which would be their path away from the lake, and Aton’s first step toward home and maybe revenge. One way or another, he was fully confident that they would soon get to a village where they could both start new lives, but rather than wait and take their chances on a better exit from the beach, they decided to explore here, which was their first opportunity to leave the lake’s shoreline. From where they stood, the path did not look like it was manmade. From his experience with forest trails, Aton was confident that nature had created this egress from the beach. Whether it was nature or manmade was of little concern if this route traversed the dense woods as a path away from the beach. Before they committed to this path, Aton suggested that they go forward without the burden of the heavy sled. It would be much faster to explore the clearing without the travois, because if they concluded it was a dead end, they could just turn around and leave, unburdened with the weight of all their belongings. If it was a true route away from the lake, it would be just as easy to return for their supplies and continue the journey.

  Hauk buried the leather bag that was full of precious treasure, but not before each of them removed a handful of glittering wealth to put into his pockets. They had done this just in case an unexpected tragedy separated them permanently from their loot. Because of this precaution, they would at least have something to start a new life with if something catastrophic and unexpected happened that might prompt them to flee for their lives as they traveled into this unknown section of woods.

  They put their sled over the hole that contained their
hidden wealth, which they had just covered with sand, and entered the forest through the clearing. The thick foliage of the trees threw shade onto the ground for the weary travelers. The path extended as far as the eye could see. As they went farther, it was still evident that wet-weather erosion had created the trail and washed away any saplings that had ever dared try to establish roots. Deeper in the woods, under the denser tree canopy, a thin layer of pebbles, loose dirt, and sand paved the way between the stand of trees on either side, splitting the forest. They looked for any clue that people had been here, but saw nothing to indicate any sign of human intrusion, not one suspicious trace. As they walked along the natural trail, little birds, which glittered in the shafts of sunlight through the tree canopy like winged rubies, escaped from the bushes. The sun was already sinking toward the horizon, and the trees threw long shadows onto the ground. They advanced deeper into the woods, but to their great disappointment, they did not see any signs that human beings had ever passed this way. It was difficult to imagine that any human had ever been at this remote location, but then, a little farther away, a dirt trail crossed perpendicular to the gully on which they walked. Because of this dirt trail just ahead, it was apparent that people had visited this area. In several places, they could distinguish recent traces of human intervention, broken branches, ashes from a fire, and shoeprints in the dirt alongside a multitude of cloven hoof prints, which were most likely from a herd of domesticated animals. All the imprints indicated that the people and their animals had journeyed south, which was the direction Aton and Hauk intended to travel.