The Forests of the Night - J P S Brown

by J P S Brown

  El Yoco scrambled with Mariposa and came directly for Adán. El Yoco had no other way off the mountain. Adán stood and looked at him with sympathy. Where was his terribly grave, level gaze? El Yoco's look was as desperate with pain as his own had been. El Yoco's fine spring had become a narrow, winding, wobbling lope. His head looked grotesque within the bony shoulders. His big feet came on so ponderously they pounded dust off the ground.

  The instant Adán and El Yoco decided they would collide, Adán raised his rifle. He aimed, squeezed, and placed the ball a fraction below the bad eye of El Yoco. El Yoco knocked Adán down and died embracing an oak tree.

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  Great, oppressive thunderheads illumined by lightning imposed themselves upon the sky behind Adán Martinillo as he walked home with El Yoco over his shoulders. Mariposa, limping at his side, occasionally raised his nose to smell El Yoco's paws. Adán went first to the mauguechi, the place he had cleared and burned so he could plant his summer corn. He laid El Yoco in the center of the clearing. He piled brush on the fence where some animal had weakened it. He went on and stopped, standing high on the brink of a precipice over his home.

  "Hoooooooooooaaaaaaaaaah!" he called. "Ooooooooooaaaaaaaaaah!" again with all his heart.

  "Hooooooooooaaaaaaaaaah!" came a girl's answer from the house. Adán Martinillo walked down to his house with clouds full of water rumbling at his back.