Encounter
During the past couple days the greenery had started becoming brighter, livelier. The underside of the broader leaves gave a translucent shade of yellow he often gazed at while taking refuge against the midday sun. Behind him, the grey peaks receded ever further into the distance. Now, the skirts of the mountain range, still boasting commendable heights, acted as his night bound embrace and dawn’s caress.
The abandoned tracks ventured long into the west; he followed. On his tattered jacket’s front pocket, a stitched patch: “King” displayed in bold letters, “Denim C.O” in a smaller and lighter font. To the few who knew him —or had known him— that had become his name, one given to him by the road, by the years of vagrancy. In the ever-forward trail from one town to another, that patch had become the moniker used to recount the tales of his character by his fellow drifters, scoundrels and hobos. By his ephemeral lovers, the paymasters, the bartenders, the wagon companions; the fugitives and the bailiffs. On a few occasions, even found in the short-term contracts, bonds or release forms he had once signed: King. A name spoken only so often, and by only so many before it would call only to memories evoked in his absence.
He hadn’t been this far west before. Word had it, a sailing company based at a small, distant port town was looking for crew men —an opportunity for work while sating his deeply held longing for the sight of foreign lands, though, perhaps more important, a much-desired excuse for complete self-reinvention. However, the stretch towards it was lengthier and more solitary than any other he had ever taken on foot. Eastwards behind him he was familiar with the dirt roads, the encampments, the trails and the steads along the way, but around him, these lands were all new, these wilds were different.
It took many days of traversing grueling, arid, harsh terrain, and many nights of daunting frigid endurance, before he would be able to carelessly exhale the warmer air of these now colorful, more tender surroundings. And having left behind the challenge of the icy summits’ environs —perhaps rekindled by the subdued rebirth of sorts he underwent while surmounting such an ordeal— his wondrous spirit had resurfaced, once again, buoyant, curious and young, as it hadn’t been in years.
It is so that during one of his midday breaks, a time spent cautiously eating his remaining canned rations —as well as whatever berries, roots or bulbs he had picked along the way— while checking his map for the nearest waterways, something caught his eye. As he looked up, the faint sight of a smoke column behind the mountains north of the tracks surprised and intrigued him. By his calculations, the port town was still a week or so away, and the last outpost whence he came was far beyond the peaks. He was deep at nature’s realm. This sight defied his expectations and beckoned him.
So, after the sun had become tamer, and with his water skins refilled, he broke from the tracks and deepened into the brush, disappearing beyond the tree line, heading north in the direction of the smoke.
Hours passed while hiking towards the crest, and after having crossed the first ridge, he was met with the realization that the source was further than he had originally imagined. Ahead of him lay another set of highlands preceded by a narrow, steep valley. Behind them, the smoke column was starting to become thinner and fainter, and by that time the sun was already approaching its western repose. He knew that as he descended into the crease, he would have to rest, resuming only at first light the next day. So, he made note of the location of the smoke and, with a clear view of the mountainside, he roughly planned out the possible trails for the day to come, only then he started descending. As he entered the fragrant, humid grounds at the bottom of the valley, with their fading silence, cicadas announced sundown. For a couple of minutes, it felt to him as if he had just dived into lake, everything was still, like a painting, but within the vacuum left in their quietude, the growing sounds of a myriad nocturnal dwellers breathing life into the dark mantle, lulled King into his first night beyond the tracks.
Next morning he was up before dawn. After consuming a handful of small dark berries he had found the day before, readied as he was, the ascent began. The slope was steep, as expected. He had to go the long route, contouring the incline sideways, and without a line of sight to the position of the smoke —if there was still any— he was at the mercy of his memory. The moment came when he had crossed a corner and encountered in front of him an open tuff rock face he couldn’t have possibly surveyed the day before. It lay hidden between the folds of the mountain and separated him from the crest. He proceeded. Emboldened by his previous conquests he didn’t think of it as much of a challenge. He could preview a clear through-lin that seemed safe enough, requiring almost no climbing at all.
The dry, dusty, porous stone clung to his skin with each grasp and footstep forwards. Its bright white surface shone like a gas lamp under the orange hued early daylight, casting a timid glow onto the forest below. The thrilling sensorial experience and the slight feeling of trepidation created by the increasing verticality of the cliff, led him to a moment of rapture. Faced with the wide panorama that sat above the tree tops, he stopped to take it in. The mountainous furrowed earth stretched south-west into the horizon, lowering in heights and jaggedness as it distanced. Over there, somewhere behind the rising sun, hid the port town, far away from everything King had ever known. Gifted with a bird’s-eye view, he felt as if he’d escaped his body —he was but a point in time and space suspended right between a promise and the unyielding slab of stone behind him.
He sighed softly, and still doused in contemplation, he turned back to continue, but not having left entirely his entranced state, he lost his footing, falling precipitously down the wall. Without time for thought, in a moment’s notice, King desperately threw his hands at the rock aiming for anything he could grab onto, but his right hand landed in a sharp pointed formation that pierced him, leaving an incisive cut going from the side of his wrist all the way up to the palm of his hand. Regardless, amidst the lancing pain, he clutched with all of his strength —and aided by a small ledge down the cliff— he was able to avert what would have otherwise been a drastically more severe conclusion.
Exalted, and still under the effects of the adrenaline rushing through his veins, he scaled and swayed upward, as if channeling an ibex, reaching the other side of the rock-face. He sat on the protruding roots of a tree to catch his breath and recompose. He felt the blood dripping down his fingers, seeping into the soft, dark soil below. Unfazed, he tore up a piece of cloth from the ankle of his cotton duck pants that had already been partly ripped by the fall, and used it to bandage the wound. He looked at the horizon once again, now firmly and sober. He then stood and continued his ascent.
By the time he was able to cross the second ridge, he was greeted by the sound of running water in the distance, a most welcome presence. Injured and diminished, but with a privileged view of his surroundings, he tried to locate the smoke column, but couldn’t find any clear sign of it. He proceeded to follow the sound of water, assuming both things couldn’t be far apart. After about an hour of hiking, lengthened by avoiding any escarpments he found along the way down —as shallow as they might have been— his assumptions were proven right. The smoke, now darker and rising to lower heights, appeared clear beyond the top branches of the canopy as he approached a crag. The trees cleared and the ground abruptly plunged into the flowing water.
Finally in sight: a weathered cabin just below him, on the other side of a fast-moving stream.
Outside the cabin, at the far end, a rack with rags and vestments hanging out to dry near a wide patch of earth deliberately planted with tubers, roots and herbs. On the opposite side: a crude wooden bench, various tools, knives, and an axe stabbed at the flat side of a stub. And just a few steps north, between the cabin’s front and the river bank, lay on the ground the carcass remains of an animal beside a covered wooden structure placed over a smoldering firepit —the culprit for the smoke, preserving such prized nourishment.
He sat on a rounded boulder that rested directly above the stream, attentively staring, stomach rumbling, wondrousness aloft. Even though it felt as if time had slowly elapsed, it wasn’t long before the door opened —and then, he saw her: as rugged and fierce as the mounds, crests and cliffs that surrounded them, but of a lilting, fluid beauty, just as the stream between them.
Her frame, her stance, severe and purposeful, yet like a dance, her motions, wave-like, succinct and alluring. Her feet, crusty and dirty, painted with the same dye that nourished all growing things. Her chest, bare naked and scarred —surfacing veins of tourmaline ore playing within the folds of her breasts. Her physique, forever afflicted and engraved by the whims of the wild. Her face, an epic of leather, displaying a stoic brow, but of a soft contour protecting a serene smile. And her copperish hair, thick, sparsely discolored and unkemptly braided, bearing a distinct crown of dried branches, pretty weeds and delicate wildflowers.
The landscape of her skin shifted with every stretching and contraction of her limbs as she walked towards her bench, an imposing picture of character and constitution. As she arrived at the table, with a forceful and echoing “whack!”, cleaver in hand, she hacked at one of the bones remaining from the menagerie of hide, flesh and organs. The muscle meats, now hanging in the smoker, perfumed the air around with an inescapably enticing aroma. She dropped the now-smaller bone bits inside a crudely shaped pot, and whatever giblets and fat strands still lay at her bench, she scrapped —juices and all— into a smaller metallic container. She turned around in the direction of the cabin, but after a contemplative second, gracefully, she turned back to the smaller pot and scooped out with her fingers a small piece of glistening, purplish organ meat.
By then, the morning sun had risen just enough to shine from behind the ridge where King stood. It showered the riverbed with a subtle light that delicately etched amber glimmers reflecting all over her figure —which in counter-light, defined her silhouette in golden lining just as she placed her bloody fingers holding the raw flesh inside her mouth. Her cracked lips now tinted of a vivid red hue, glistening as much as the morsel she had just consumed.
He found himself captivated. Lost in the enactment of her brusque play, bewildered by her hardened topography, enchanted by her waltz-like boundlessness; a most refined expression of natural cohesion. She seemed to him but an extension of the stream, or, as if the abrasive bark that garbed the red oak —and its rot, and its fungi, and the seed that birthed the tree. She felt imposing yet so distant, as if the soaring heights whose crying wallows both eroded, and allowed for all that’s green. She was the same stone that sang the current’s calming verse, and cut the earth, shattered bedrock deep beneath her feet. She was an expression of the mountain’s will, both its child, thunderous, and solemnly whisperful, its queen.
The spell broke as she started humming a guttural tune while moving towards the cabin. The strange melody brought King back to his senses —it pulled him, plummeting right back at the boulder. Regardless, he kept on watching, immobile, as by now his intrigue had become arousal and infatuation.
She entered the cabin, leaving him accompanied, for a brief moment, by nothing but her song. She exited once again, this time holding in her right hand another pot, the biggest one so far. She headed in the direction of the water —her pace and demeanor like a prowl, one foot eclipsing the other with an elegant mindless intentionality. She walked almost perfectly in line towards the boulder where King sat, as she approached the riverbank. She kneeled in front of the water and proceeded to fill her pot; her song sounding more like a murmur at this point, though still holding the lingering essence of a growling beast. With the pot half-filled she started standing up, when abruptly, her tune got swallowed by a startled silence —Right there, above the middle of stream, like two crashing bodies, her eyes and King’s had finally met.
