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the road, and only every now and then they picked up a small stone and hurled it off into the night. Overhead, the creamy-yellow moon filled the world with cardboard cutouts of massive fir trees and butterscotch meadows. Being a city boy, Cyrus had never imagined a place of such serenity and beauty. Time seemed to be trapped in a web of dancing moonbeams and before he knew it he had reached the foot of the mountains where the debris from aeons of erosion had erected a massive colluvium city. |
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He slowed to a walk and then, without breaking stride, began leaping from boulder to boulder like an intoxicated mountain goat. Seventy feet above the meadow he reached a plateau and sat cross-legged on the icy rock and stared at the lights of Kalispell twinkling like fireflies eight miles away. He felt good. Warm, but not sweaty. He was barely panting and already looking forward to the run back. But first, he decided to take a break and just listen to the night. |
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Turning away from town, he lay back on a bed of dried lichens and let his eyes follow the slope of the mountain up to where the moon crowned the tree line and the oxygen-starved stumps of ancient trees looked like an army of deformed trolls. It was so beautiful that it filled him with emotions and urges he had no name for. |
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''Just look at that moon," he whispered. |
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He stared at the softly glowing orb, trying to make out the individual craters and mountains that the universe's plastic surgeon had molded into the kindly humanoid face that mankind had been staring at since it climbed out of the primal soup. As he stared, the moon seemed to grow until it filled the sky. Cyrus felt a quickening in his blood, a warm rush, a pounding in his ears. |
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Do I have a fever? he wondered. |
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But it seemed unimportant. |
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Deep in the forest, a wolf howled. A long, low, soul-wrenching cry to which his throat longed to respond. |
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I must be nuts. A lunatic? How appropriate. |
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Better start back, he told himself. |
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