Savage is the Dawn

High Andes

The jungle was thick, Tom was wheezing, and the mountain was steep. We tore at roots that pulled away from the loose dirt and sent our ankles back and down a few steps. Vines hung all around and I wet my lips. I was in want of water. Perhaps over the next ridge, there would be a stream. We needed a few things that the jungle could provide us. A way to carry equipment like the blowgun and darts, something to carry water, the journey would be long, the road broken and dangerous.

There were trees coated in needles that should you slip and grab at them would open your hand to the bone. Tom almost slid into one and I knew he was not used to life in the bushes where the wild heartbeat is heard through the souls of your feet. The canopy was glowing an iridescent yellow as leaves took on the quality of little suns and twisted about when monkeys called and leaped from branch to branch.

We heard a large clamor up ahead with squealing with shouts. When we entered a low clearing we could see in the mud the tracks of the wild pigs we had just frightened away. I made signs and gestures to Tom on the journey. I tried to teach him that every movement in nature is a splash in a pond with ripples and signs, you can read it and track what has happened here or there. You can induce strange events and perplexing mysteries from bent shoots and chewn roots.

We drank from puddles collected by large leaves. I rubbed my lips and found the cracks therein soothed. I looked at our legs where the metal clasps held tight to fierce and festering open wounds. Nearby I found a soothing sap from a reed and opened vines to ease our pained legs. The blowgun was rather good for hunting the large howling monkeys that were full of strong meat from a simple life in the canopy. We had five darts left so I gave the gun over to Tom and taught him to shoot as my father had once taught me, but he had not the eye nor the lungs to be an effective hunter yet. One of these large monkeys I had shot with one of the last of the darts I had made and wrapped in a thick leaf, he hung limply around my neck as we pressed on up the half-trail. Once or twice our binds became entwined in the shoots and new growth of the hills we continued to climb. Higher up we found the place where cloud and fern met. All about us were rising mists and drooping bows of long slender leaves. The air was cool on my skin as a gentle breeze wet my arms and hair. Silver drops of sunlit rain fell from the treetops above and surprised the boy as he struggled to regain his footing in the muck of the mountainside. I steadied his back a few times as we drove our feet forward. I took some vines and began to work upon them to create a weave. This would carry the many things we needed.

The trees became mangled and branches drove low so as to create paths leading into their tangles that I knew well how to walk, jump, and run along, but the boy did not and those paths would have been far too dangerous, though I trusted him now far more than ever, there was much that my many years had taught me that could not be taught, even to a young Cincini stripling in a day, let alone one who did not speak as I then did. There were strong branches and weak ones. There was soft moss and slick slime and should he not know the difference between the two, he would surely pull us off into the white clouds below. However, for me, they would have been the easier paths up the steepening cliffsides, where sheer cliffs began to rise above the high fern floors.

The trees far beyond and far above slipped into the forgetful obscurity of the cloud forest's eternal mists. They only became remembered again as dim dark objects when we had moved forward some distance and only then, the form of a great tree with vines pulling it down would become an outline and finally when it could be touched, it once again had bark, and color, and dampness all in the oneness of its being.

We had run a great while and the sounds of the mine were eaten up by the cooing of the birds and the peeping of the frogs. We found a shaded rocky outcrop dry and up from the wet of the ground. I looked at Tom and saw he was wheezing with the strain of the constant climb. I pointed to the ground and he collapsed in a heap on the stone. I built a fire in the old ways I knew how, but I always was thinking of the little blue box that produced its own flame at a touch, that one of the prisoners had. I never was able to trade or to steel that wonderful thing. The fire was a challenge as the bit of toothed jaw was now quite dull.