All Living : A Seedvision Saga (9781621473923) (8 page)

Kole stared into the center of his small camp’s fire. The flames of orange, red, yellow, and blue danced around in significant patterns. Kole was sure of their significance. He just didn’t know what they meant. He sighed. The meanings of life and the mysteries of death had perplexed him for the last three days. Abel’s death had served no purpose that he could see. His brother’s very existence was interrupted by a pointless and abrupt end. Kole knew the Creator could re-create Abel, or bring him back again, but Kole had waited over Abel’s body for a day and a night, and there was no life-breath given back to Abel.

Adam had finally come over quietly behind Kole and placed a hand on his shoulder. The touch loosened Kole’s grief, and once again he was overcome with emotion. He turned to his father, looked into Adam’s own wet eyes and mouthed one word.
Why?
Adam only shook his head. The two men had clasped each other in an embrace of consolation and stood there, a father and son learning to mourn over the body of the first fallen family member. His mother and sisters stood a distance off to one side, their muffled wailing the only sounds in the night.

Cain was nowhere to be found. Kole had searched for Cain, needing to have his questions answered by the one person who might have answers, but Cain had disappeared. Kole suspected Cain was enduring his own personal grief and needed time to understand his actions as well.

On the morning of the third day after Abel’s fall, the family had wrapped his body in a soft, leather hide and laid him gently on a stone shelf in a cave across the stream. There was no sense of completion to the act, no feeling of fulfillment. It merely seemed necessary.

Abel’s sheep followed the family and stood outside the entrance to the cave, bleating repeatedly, as if they too felt a sense of loss for their shepherd. Finally they had quieted and begun to graze peacefully on the tender young shoots of early summer grasses.

But that was yesterday. With one hand Kole rubbed the pad of his thumb over a small, wooden bird that he was carving for Kesitah while with the other he poked at the wood in the fire pit with a stick, pondering the events of the last few days. A splash of bright sparks leaped into the air from the hot coals and swirled aimlessly on the breeze before burning out and disappearing. Kole wondered if someday there would be thousands of people swirling around, bright, hot sparks of life, burning aimlessly, only to then blink out of existence. Thousands of people! Seemed hard to believe, but if his parents, as two, could start a family, then a family could become dozens, and dozens could become hundreds. Why not hundreds of hundreds, eventually?

Kole thought about Kesitah and the children they would someday have. Children he would enjoy watching grow into adulthood and have children of their own, who would then have children that would have children and so on; unless brother turned against brother, or sister against sister, or child against parent. There were no promises made that would ensure survival. If Cain could kill, if Abel could die, then there were no guarantees.

Kole had followed this line of reasoning more than once in the last few days, and it was this thinking that had led him to be sitting where he was, a day’s journey west of his parents’ camp. He knew of only one location where answers could be found, and it was toward that destination that he now traveled. A place he had not seen in thirty years, and a place he remembered nothing about. Yet it was a sanctuary, a spot for solace that had been described to him and his siblings many times during a family meal or before falling asleep as a child. A wonderful site where perhaps promises were to be found, guarantees made, or resolutions encountered. Just thinking of the place made him shiver.

The garden. If such answers were to be had in Eden, Kole would pursue them. If indeed solutions existed as to why this bad thing happened to his brothers—to his family—Kole would wrestle for them and claim them for his father and mother.

There was no going back in for Adam or Eve. They had been sent out, never to return. They were banished from the garden, driven out by God and the entrance guarded by Cherubim. Kole wondered if the angel of the Lord would still be at the gate. His parents had described the guardian of the Creator, but they had only a fleeting glance from a distance before they turned their faces from the Way and stumbled out into the Land. Kole wondered how he would gain access to the garden and if he would be granted an audience with the Lord. Such thoughts kept him warmer than the small fire he tended, the night being a cool, windy one for a lone traveler in a vast, empty darkness.

Kole thought he heard a noise out by his sheep. He turned his head to listen, but they were quiet and resting. Kole knew that if anything were there to disturb them, their bleating would alert him. He added more wood to the fire and pulled his wrap around himself. Using a rock for a headrest, he lay back and stared at the countless stars in the heavens, counting them until he fell into another night of restless sleep.

Kole woke the next morning to the sound of a songbird. He opened his eyes and smiled when he saw the feathered little warbler only a few cubits from his face. The little bird had her chest all puffed out and was singing with great gusto as if to wake him. He lay very still and watched for several minutes, admiring her musical finesse and the way her tiny body was so perfectly created. Finally, without moving from his sleeping spot, Kole put his lips together and gave an adequate impersonation of the small bird’s few seconds of song. She got quiet and cocked her head as if to listen to him. She chirped, and he whistled. She whistled, and he laughed, causing her to fly away to a low tree branch where she sat and studied him as he rose and stirred at the coals in his fire.

“Oh well,” said Kole to himself when he realized they were cold and beyond reviving. He pulled out a couple pieces of dried fish that hung in a pouch, secured around his waist by a leather strap. He munched on them while he relieved himself, dressed, and went over to inspect his sheep where they stood grazing. A quick head count revealed an even number of sheep, which was odd because he only had seventeen. He surveyed the flock again and quickly noticed the intruder, a second year lamb with a strange gray muzzle. It was one of Abel’s flock, the one he had called Nod.

Kole approached the small animal slowly, not wanting to frighten him. The lamb watched him approach for a moment, then took two hesitant steps toward him.

“Hello there, little one,” said Kole, reaching out a gentle hand to stroke the small animal. The lamb lowered his head, allowing himself to be touched, then looked up at Kole with sad, round eyes.

“You miss Abel as much as I do, don’t you?” he said.

The little lamb bobbed his head up and down at the sound of his shepherd’s name.

“No wonder Abel called you Nod,” said Kole, “You almost seem to understand what I’m saying to you.”

Nod bleated an answer.

“Well, we can’t stay around here all day. I don’t know how far it is to the garden, but I suspect it’s at least another couple full days of walking. According to Dad, if I keep walking toward the setting sun I should come to a canyon that leads straight to the gates of Eden. I have no idea what I’m going to say to the guardian angel. Hopefully the Creator will smooth the way. I know He knows I’m coming.”

Kole looked down at Nod. “I don’t know how you found your way here, Nod, but I don’t want you wandering away from the flock and getting lost or hurt.”

He took a long cord of leather from out of the pouch on his side and tied one end loosely around Nod’s neck. Kole whistled for his lead sheep. “Come here, Tso’n.”

A fat, old ram ambled up to Kole’s side. “You’re going to take this little one into your care, Tso’n. Lead him as you do the rest of the flock,” said Kole, tying the other end of the cord to Tso’n’s tail. The ram strained his neck around to see behind him. Tso’n grunted as if in reluctant obedience to his shepherd, then looked up, waiting for Kole to lead the way.

Kole picked up his pack and crook and headed west away from the rising sun. The going was fairly easy; the hills were not steep and the meadows not overgrown enough to impede his progress. He wound his way around natural obstacles with ease and only occasionally had to glance behind him to check on his flock.

In the thirty or so short years since the creation week, the world had not developed the natural animal predators that would soon cause foot travel to become a danger. There were no thieves or bandits to worry about either. They did not exist. In fact, at that time, there was no word in Kole’s vocabulary for a person who spent his time in the pursuit of taking from others. Those words had not yet become necessary.

The day warmed up as the sun rose higher in the sky and around midday, Kole stopped to let his sheep graze and drink from a cool and welcoming brook. He untied the lead cord from Tson’s tail and watched him bound away like a yearling, glad to be relieved of his responsibility. Kole left the leather strap around Nod’s neck, so he could tie him to the ram again when they once more set out, and as far as Kole could tell, little Nod didn’t mind it.

Kole sat down and sharpened a simple spear with his pocket rock. It did not take long
after that before he had caught, cleaned, and cooked two brightly-colored fish over a small fire. Fish, any meat in fact, always tasted better to him fresh as opposed to being dried or smoked. The process was good for preserving the meat longer, but it seemed to lose something in flavor. But building a fire from scratch was never an especially enjoyable task, and the dried meat was fast food, especially on a journey such as this one.

Kole had traveled on several lengthy excursions before, on hunting trips with his family, but never in this direction. Adam had seemed to avoid even gazing west toward Eden, much less journeying there. Kole assumed it was the memory of what had been lost and the reminder of his own sin that still troubled him. Yet the family had found a good spot to live—plenty of food, animals, and fish; good soil for growing crops, an abundance of wild berries and nuts in the vicinity, several caves for shelter when the wind would blow hard, beautiful trees and flowers. It was a good place, a place to call home.

Kole’s thoughts were interrupted by a familiar whistling sound from a nearby bush. Kole looked in the direction of the sound, and perched on a low branch was his little bird friend from earlier that morning. Kole’s eyes followed the bird as she darted in and out of the branches of nearby trees.
I could fly with you,
Kole thought,
if I had a pair of wings.
He watched as the bird extended her wings and flapped her way up into the clear, blue sky. He studied her movements as she worked her way higher into the air and then lost sight of her as the sun got in his eyes.
If a man had wings,
Kole speculated,
he could travel much quicker, never having to wade through streams or climb over rocks.

It was late afternoon as Kole was stopping to rest for the day that he heard another sound from overhead. Looking up, he saw a much larger bird gliding through the air; wings outstretched in a graceful span, the hawk rose and fell upon invisible gusts of air, dipping and circling effortlessly, never once moving its wings to rise. Kole’s mind experienced a leap of intuitive insight as he watched the bird disappear. Perhaps it is not so much the wings and their feathers that enable flight as it is the weight of the flyer and the strength of the air. The hawk is bigger than the songbird, so the wind he is riding must be stronger than the breeze that I feel. If the hawk were twice the size of the songbird, then maybe the wind must be twice as strong too, or even twice again. If the wind continues to blow harder, higher up, then maybe even a man could ride its careless breezes to places only it has ever seen. Perhaps we could harness its unseen currents if we could only climb high enough. Kole wondered if he could find a mountain or other high place to test his idea. Maybe it’s the shape of the bird that calls to the wind, bidding it to come and serve the animal.

Kole wondered if he could trick the wind into thinking he was a bird, trick it into giving him a ride above the soil that God had cursed.
But would not God have given man wings if he had intended him to fly? Father said that God has given mankind dominion over the earth and all that is in it. Would that not include the wind?