Moontrap - Don Berry (43 page)

Slowly the balance of light changed. The western sky
grew dark, and in the east was the pale glow of the rising moon, not
yet visible above the trees. The old man put one last stick on the
fire to last until he was asleep. He made a halfhearted attempt to
clear away some of the larger rocks before he rolled up in his
blanket, but he knew it wouldn't make much  difference. If you
got rid of the rocks you had the holes they left. It was better to
try to fit yourself around the worst spots.

With the setting of the sun the night had become
pleasantly cool. He took off his moccasins, which were still wet from
the wading. The dust he had collected on the slope had formed a fine,
silty layer of mud inside. He rinsed them out carefully, scrubbing
away the soapy-feeling layer. Ruefully he noted that the hole in the
right sole had grown considerably from the rough pounding down the
rocky slope. He stuck his little finger through the hole
experimentally, then shrugged. He washed his feet and put the
moccasins back on to prevent them from shrinking up so badly in the
night they could not be worn tomorrow.

He pulled the blanket over him, tucked the edges
under and rolled over to his side. He could see both the fire and the
reflection of it in the tiny inlet beside him. He glanced up at the
light and eerie glow that preceded the appearance of the moon, and
realized there would be a time in the night when the great disk would
be overhead in the space between the trees, directly over the river.
Then he would be able to see both the moon and its reflection in the
still inlet. It would be pleasant, but would not happen for a couple
of hours. He thought he would like to wake up for it, to see two
moons at the same time.

A fly or something buzzed near his ear, and he
sleepily swatted at it, hoping it was not a mosquito. Mosquitoes were
a damned nuisance. They said the ones that buzzed weren't the ones
that bit you, but the buzzing ones were the ones you swatted. It
didn't seem fair, but he supposed it was probably true. There was
nothing to guarantee that things would be fair. He wondered vaguely
if a mosquito could see the end of its own nose.
 
.
He wakened without being startled, and at first
could not understand why. Then he realized he had promised himself a
look at the overhead moon, and it was the sudden increase of light
that had brought him out of sleep. It was almost directly above,
framed between the wall of trees that edged the river. The night was
very clear, and the markings on the face of the brilliant disk were
sharp and distinct. For the thousandth time the old man tried to make
some sense of them, tried to make them fit into a comprehensible
pattern, tried to see the man in the moon. He never could. Everybody
else saw the man in the moon, and a dozen times people had tried to
explain to him, but he never could see it. To him there were gray
patches, and he was perfectly familiar with their shape; but he could
not make pictures out of them. It was the moon, with its uniqueness,
and resembled nothing but itself.

It was sufficient.

He glanced over at the reflection in the inlet, where
the moon's twin wavered luminously in the darkness. The inlet was not
as calm as it had appeared. The reflection lengthened and shortened
and occasionally broke, distorting the perfect symmetry of the
brilliance that hung overhead. He wondered if it would be possible to
make it hold completely still, and be the perfect, flawless duplicate
he had seen in his mind when he had thought about it before. In an
odd way it seemed possible to him that in the reflection he might be
able to see the pictures, even though he could not see them in the
moon itself. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to be a
good idea. He had always wanted to see the man in the moon. He
unwrapped himself from the blanket. His fire was still glowing
faintly, and he threw on one of the pieces of wood he'd been saving
for morning. As it flamed up and lit a small circle he surveyed the
problem.

The mouth of the inlet was only about eight feet
wide, and there was already a fallen log damming part of it. One end
of the log rested up on his bank, and he thought if he could get that
end into the water across the mouth it might do the job. It was too
heavy to lift, but he thought he could pry it off with a lever of
some kind. He looked around the edges of the fire circle until he
found a windfall about six inches through at the base.

He dragged it back to the fire and hacked off a few
of the more troublesome branches. With the lever he waded to the
river side of the log and thrust the thick end beneath, wedging it in
the stones of the bottom. He heaved up, but the end of the lever
slipped and the log dropped back to the bank. He took a more secure
purchase and tried again, and this time it worked perfectly. The end
of the log rose from the bank and slid down the lever with a great
splash to lie directly across the mouth of the inlet.

The splash completely destroyed the moon's image,
scattering it in wild ripples and flecks of brightness that darted on
the surface. He climbed back up on the bank and squatted on his heels
to wait for the disturbance to die down and the whole image to
return. When the ripples had settled, he found the reflection still
wavered and moved. There was undoubtedly a current coming in from
somewhere, probably around the end of the log, where it did not fit
perfectly against the bank.

He sighed, and gathered up some stones and twigs to
dam the gap. He had to go back into the water to do it, and his legs
were getting cold. He packed the sticks and rocks into the open
space, sealing them in with mud. It would wash away, but it might
last long enough to get the moon still for just a moment. There was
not much to packing the end, but when he had finished the improvised
dam he had to wait again for the ripples to subside so he could see
if it had worked.

It had not been enough. The reflection still wavered
and distorted itself. The current must be coming in under the log
itself. It was more complicated than he had expected, building a trap
for the moon. He went back into the water again. Patiently he began
to wedge stones at the bottom of the log, filling spaces between
large ones with smaller ones, and scraping up gravel from the bottom
to dam whatever holes he had left. He worked as quickly as he could,
but plugging most of the eight-foot length still took him almost
twenty minutes.

When he got back to the bank and looked in the water
there was no image at all. The moon had passed over the clear space
above and was behind the trees again on its slow and certain journey
to the other side of the world.
 

Chapter Nineteen

1

The morning light was thin and cold. The sky was
clear, and the old man knew it would be hot. But the thickly grown
river valley was like an undersea canyon, and he was submerged
beneath fathoms of green that filtered out warmth from the light that
reached him, seeping through the leafy roof like a winter rain.

It was all right. When he opened his eyes and looked
around him, he knew he had sloughed off the last of the protective
skin, the horny coating of blindness and insensitivity he had grown
to protect himself from the rawness of others' emotions, from the
ugliness of their doings. This morning the world was new again, as it
should be every morning. Washed clean by the night of all its
tensions and confusions, pure and virgin under the sky. A new day,
full of surprises and new things to see and new wonderings and maybe
even an answer or two. A new day, free and limitless, to be lived for
its own sake.

There was still little warmth in the air when he had
finished eating. He would have to get moving to get the dampness out
of him. He gathered up his little gear and stuffed it in the pack. As
he stood taking one last look around the campsite for forgotten
articles, his glance flickered over the little inlet, with its
absurdly ineffectual dam. He grimaced, and a sudden thought occurred
to him.

He shrugged out of the pack and knelt at the end of
the pool away from the river. Slowly dipping his arm in, he tried to
see if he could feel motion at that end of the inlet. It had just
passed his mind that it might be an outlet for a spring, rather than
an inlet of the river.

But he could feel nothing. He stood again, wiping his
hand absently on his trouser leg and staring down at the pool. Well,
he would never know, now. He had tried to make a trap for the moon
and failed, and he would never know exactly why.

He wriggled his arms through the pack straps again,
and waded into the river, walking carefully on the rocky, slippery
bottom. At the other side he glanced back at his dam, the mud and
sticks now nearly washed away leaving things as they had been before
he came.

He turned and started up
the brushy slope. Beside him the great boulder, thick with cascading
ferns and moss, was a silent, massive sanctuary for small creatures
that live in eternal dampness.

***

Today he was alive again, and he was glad to be
himself once more, without the callous layer that came from rubbing
too much against human beings. As he moved upward toward the
mountain's foot the damp-stiffness worked out of his muscles quickly.
The brilliant newness of the day was strong in his belly. He was raw
and open again, letting the world come into him and taking pleasure
in the deep invasion. His eyes saw more, his ears heard more, his
mind collected and arranged and patterned the information his senses
brought him precisely, sharply.

Details of almost invisible fineness engraved
themselves on his mind without effort; the myriad infinity of
textures and shapes and sounds that were the forest. The saw-toothed
edge of a sunlit leaf against a shadow-somber fern, the crook of a
branch at his elbow, the hushed breath of a fir limb sweeping the
air, gently. And with the increased sensitivity there came the eerie,
almost forgotten sense of lightness, as though he had thrown down a
fifty-pound pack. lt always happened when he was fully himself. It
was how he liked to live, sharply, and how he liked to see, clearly.

He was climbing steadily
now, though the ground was not yet rising steeply. Occasionally,
through breaks in the screen of trees ahead, he could see the
outlines of Saddle Mountain's double hump. He was approaching from
the southwest, and part of his view of the mountain itself was
obscured by a minor peak. The little peak rose perhaps a hundred and
fifty feet above the surrounding ground. It reached well above the
level of the trees, standing absurdly naked and compact like a
dungheap in short grass. From the top he thought he would be able to
get a fair look at the countryside, and the mountain itself, less
than half a mile from the flat-topped little pinnacle.

***

The animal trails thinned out, disappeared, started
again. The brush was heavy on the uphill slope, and going was slower
than he had hoped. When he finally reached the top of the little
promontory the day was far along, near noon. The sun was full on the
face of the mountain now, picking out the folds and crevices of the
peaks sharply.

He put his pack and gun on the ground and sat down to
empty his moccasins of the rocks and gravel they had accumulated on
the walk up from the river valley. He poured out two miniature
waterfalls and banged the soles together to dislodge the last
fragments.

He was well above the tree level here, but looking to
his left he was unable to see the ocean, fifteen miles away, and it
disappointed him. The western horizon was blurred and indistinct in
the gray-blue sea mist. In fact, he was not certain he could have
seen the sea itself, even granting the day were clear enough. He
looked up toward the mountain face that rose abruptly a half-mile
distant from him. If he could see it at all, it would be from up
there.

Absently he tamped his pipe full while letting his
eyes rove over the slope leading to the minor peak, looking for
trails. From here the brush looked almost like a tufted meadow, but
there was not a sign of a trail anywhere, and he knew the undergrowth
was probably over head height. He finished stuffing his pipe and lit
up. He sat then for nearly half an hour, still as a rock, with his
hands clasped in front of his knees, studying the configuration of
the mountain.

Finally he knocked out his pipe and stuck it in the
broad flap of his hunting shirt, where it rested hot against his
ribs. He stood up and stretched, spreading his arms wide against the
sky. He picked up his gun and began to climb down from the small
peak, swinging around the base and starting up the first gentle slope
of the mountain itself. After an hour and a half the terrain grew
more and more rocky, a litter of stones, gravel and reddish-brown
dust. The trees began to thin noticeably, leaving occasional tiny
meadows.

When at last he reached the edge of the timber the
trail he was following was running almost horizontal along the
mountain flank, heading west. just beyond the trees was the widest
meadow he had yet seen, slanting down the mountainside to his left.
Outcroppings of rock studded the slope, and on the other side was a
long, straight rib of rock extending downslope. Above and to the
right the small peak rose, rocky and bare of trees.

He squatted at the edge of the meadow and considered
the long rock wall, absently plaiting one of the long black braids
that hung beneath his hat.