River Bottoms

[rvm45]

Friends,

I THINK that I had this up here, long time gone. I THINK that I took it down, trying to qualify for ''Amazon's" publicity campaign—ya ain't like eligible if'n your stuff is posted anywhere else online.

At any rate, this is s Short Story of only five chapters written back in 2016—I THINK.

NOTE IT IS A SHORT STORY! ONCE I GET TO CH 5; DON'T ASK FOR MORE—UNLESS YOU'RE TRYING TO ANNOY ME.

This story kinda dovetails with "Flywheels" slightly.

I feel bad over the stuff that I've left undone on this forum.

Whatever talent that I ever had is failing. I have four—or five stories in progress and all of them are either STUCK or in the Process of ENDLESS REWRITING of the first few chapters.

Anyway, I'll post a chapter of this per day.

I get more comments that way.


River Bottoms






Chapter One





Root ignored the prattle of the realtor. He’d already made up his mind to buy the house. All that remained was to wring every penny and concession possible from the realtor.

Generally Root despised haggling. Wasting words and trying to get the best of someone in a deal were both vulgar. But Root had a deep-seated loathing for the banks, real estate companies and realtors. Foreclosures were at an all-time high. Economists guesstimated that in the near future over twenty-six percent of home owners would end up losing their homes with nothing to show for it. Small farms foreclosures were near fifty-three percent.

Root largely blamed the bankers and the realtors. They had tricked many with their snake-oil con games and their labyrinthine contracts. Of course, there was blame enough to go around. It is very hard to cheat someone who isn’t trying to take advantage and being in debt is always the first step toward bankruptcy.

Still every quarter he saved was one less quarter to feed the beast.

Root didn’t tell the realtor that the house had once belonged to his great aunt. It had been a small farm then—about five acres. There had been many plum trees and a grape arbor and blackberry briars. One shed had held rabbits and another held chickens. At the back of the lot there had been a pen with a Shetland pony and a Billy goat.

The lot was just over an acre now. They had amputated a piece of land on either side leaving naught but a long thin strip going back to the levee. The fruit trees, the arbors and the berry patches were all torn down and rooted out now. The sheds were long gone.

There were cookie-cutter houses on either side and the house was now inside the city limits.

Root’s aunt had kept a double barrel 12 Gauge by her back door. She kept a .22 rifle by the front door. Once his aunt had showed Root an Iver Johnson British Bulldog in .44 Webley that she kept under her pillow.

Her guns were long gone too, just like the outbuildings. The house’s clapboard construction was cleverly covered with shiny new vinyl siding. The house was hooked up to city water and the water pump that had crouched under the kitchen sink was long gone.

Root would have paid a hefty premium to have the house back as it was, but there was no way.

The house was old. It was small—only one bedroom—and it had the levee behind it. All those things made the place hard to sell in a very slack market so Root got it dirt cheap.

The levee and what lay beyond was what had motivated Root to buy the place.

There were obstacles. The Levee Authority had placed a six-foot chain-link fence between the back yards and the levee. Root bristled at what he perceived as an injustice. There had been no fence when he was a boy.

Root was of an age where climbing six-foot chain-link fences was a no-go. If he made a hole in the fence, the Levee Authority would have no sense of humor about it whatsoever. Root also assumed—just for the sake of good Op-Sec—that all his neighbors were snitching tattling fiends.

Root ordered one of those prefabricated buildings that looked like a mini 10’x16’ barn. He paid extra for a back door and he had the crew lay it just forty inches from the Levee Authority’s iron curtain.

He worked mostly at night, but he was shielded from view by his neighbors—unless one of them had his curiosity so piqued that he walked well onto Root’s property to see behind the shed. That was highly unlikely.

Root used bolt cutters and a cut-off wheel to breach the fence and install his own personal gate. The chain-link fence was galvanized and weathered well so it took minimal distressing to make it fit in. Root let a chain marinate in a gallon jar of salt, vinegar and dilute sulfuric acid till it looked weathered as all Hell. He made a big lock look old on the outside while carefully preserving the lock’s innards.

Now first of all, the Levee Authority was mostly absentee. If someone did walk down the levee, odds were that he wouldn’t even notice the gate. If he did notice, more than likely he’d shrug it off while wondering what purpose the gate had served.

If by some wildly improbable chance, the Levee Authority chose to use the gate, they would despair of finding a key and they’d cut the chain. Then if they were polite, they’d ask Root’s permission to traipse through his back yard. If they were overbearing like most civil-masters, they’d ignore Root’s property rights and just traipse.

Root went through his shed, through the gate and across the levee. It was about a mile walk through the sparse river bottom foliage and then Root stood on the bank of the mighty river.

On the other side of the river was a huge forest covering hundreds of square miles. The land all belonged to a large timber company. Root had seen diagrams in books showing how the company divided the land into large hexagons and further divided the hexagon into six equilateral triangles. Each triangle was a square mile in area and every fifty years, two equidistant triangles were harvested. That meant that the stand that was harvested had been growing for one hundred and fifty years. The company then replanted the clear-cut triangles with a fairly diverse selection of trees. The new stand would be sandwiched between a fifty-year-old forest on one side and a one-hundred-year-old forest on the other. Also, there were a few acres in the acute tips of the triangle that were never harvested.

Only timber prices were down and the forest in the large ox-bow peninsula was relatively hard to harvest. None of the river bottom trees had been harvested for over two hundred years and many didn’t think that they ever would be again. That didn’t mean that the tight-fisted men-crones who owned the company were willing to part with a single acre. They forbade any and all forms of trespass on their property.

But the company headquarters was far away. There were probably fairly large tracts of land that hadn’t felt the trod of human feet since the last sectional clear-cutting. If one could cross the river he would be perfectly safe to plant a garden, run a trapline, build a hunting cabin or hunt deer, bear, rabbit, squirrel, possum and coon, doves and turkeys—just whatever cranked one's handle. There were even stories of mad trappers who trapped or stalked human beings— just for the Hell of it.

Yeah, yeah the river bottoms across the river were a free zone, but Root had no means to cross the river.

Root’s father had been a very strong swimmer and he’d told Root that while he never had swam across the river, he sincerely believed that he could have in his prime. Root had been a rather weak swimmer in his prime and he was well past his prime nowadays.

At least Root could gaze across the river like Moses looking across the Jordan into the promised land. God hadn’t forbade Root to cross this river though.

Root noticed a bit of metal sticking out of the ground. A little digging and rooting around revealed an aluminum boat that had been buried in the muck.

When he got the boat dug out and turned it over—for it was upside down—he found that the boat still looked like it would float without leaking.

There was still some paint on the bow that said, “Chester”. Root barely remembered Uncle Chester. He’d died when Root was a boy—but apparently, he’d named his boat after himself.

Now it wasn’t too unreasonable to find that an upside down, fully painted aluminum boat had passed the decades without corroding away. Wooden oars would have been something else again. Fortunately, the oars weren’t made of wood. They were of some battleship gray plastic that Root had never seen before. The plastic was too heavy to float, so he’d better make sure that they were securely fixed in the oarlocks he told himself.

*************** ********************* ********************************

It was late November when Root was finally able to try out a full-fledged river crossing with his boat and the day started out clear and sunny and warm. Halfway across the rough oar handles already had Root’s hands threatening to blister. Supposedly it was easier to row perpendicular to the current and simply to accept being swept downstream. Some even opined that it was easier to row somewhat downstream. Root wasn’t good enough at vectors to figure out how any amount of force applied on the “X” axis could ever translate into force applied along the “Y” axis.

Be all that as it may. If Root drifted downstream coming and then drifted even farther downstream going, he’d find himself far downstream from his starting point.

The river had a few sandy banks, but more often the trees grew right down to the waterline.

Root boldly aimed at a small sandy bank somewhat upstream of his present position. That way he could afford to drift a bit downstream on the return trip, when presumably he’d be more fatigued.

Root wasn’t totally exhausted when he reached the sandy river bank, but he wasn’t far from it.

He didn’t trust his boat to stay moored, so he wrestled it onto the bank like someone landing a three-hundred-pound alligator. He drove a long thirty-inch metal stake over eighteen inches deep into the sandy soil and snubbed a rope to it. He tied another rope to a tree over a foot in diameter and then dropped his anchor. He figured that even if the river rose precipitously, his boat should stay tied in place.

The scraggly woods along the bank weren’t terribly inspiring to Root—though he didn’t know what he had expected to find.

There were beaucoup willows, sycamores and catalpa trees. There were a few stunted maples and elms. There were tracks along the muddy ground: possum and coon, a track that might have been muskrat though Root had never encountered either muskrats or their tracks before, along with several bird footprints and some cat tracks. Root wasn’t enough of a tracker to distinguish bobcat or lynx tracks from house cat tracks.

He followed a winding path that led ever upward. In a quarter mile he’d climbed twenty or twenty-five feet. Now the forest started to look like a forest. There were great oaks, walnut and hickory trees. The maples assumed their full stature along with basswood and elm. There were under-canopy trees like honey locust, black cherry and sassafras.

Root stopped and made a fire. He’d built wilderness fires before, but not often. It was an outdoor skill that couldn’t be stressed enough.

Clouds covered the sky. A brisk wind blew and there were scattered flurries of snow.

He'd only planned to spend a few hours in the forest, but he believed in preparing as much as possible for every contingency. He had some things in a PVC tube that he’d meant to cache against future emergencies.

There was a thick space blanket—the full-fledged one, not the tiny mylar one. There were two bricks of .22 LR ammunition and a cheap Chipmunk single Shot rifle that he’d picked up second hand. There were fifty rounds of #7 28-Gauge shotgun shells, a second-hand Ka-Bar knife, a brand-new whetstone and several means to make a fire and with some miscellaneous stuff. There was a bit of wire, a bit of paracord, a sewing kit, two dozen safety pins, two rat traps and a roll of electrician’s tape along with four trash bags.

He hadn’t brought much food though.

Root fixed himself a pot full of combined coffee/cocoa as he weighed his options.

The cold might hang on for days. The longer that he sat shivering around a fire on short rations, the harder that it would be to re-cross the river. No one would come looking for him. He’d made a point of keeping his expedition below the radar. If people didn’t know that the was going across the river, then they couldn’t act to prevent him.

He decided that his best bet would be to start back now.

He moved around his hasty camp, burying his cache tube and putting out his fire.

Aside from the .22 Chipmunk that he’d cached, Root had two guns. He wore a nickel Walther .32 ACP PP that had been his mother’s in a black flap holster and he had his drilling. The drilling was made to his exacting specifications and had been expensive.

For long term survival, a .22 LR and abundant ammunition is usually the best choice. It lacked a little versatility though. Root felt that the 28 Gauge was a notably better game getter than the smaller .410—and .410 slugs were a joke. On the other hand, five pounds or ten pounds of 28 Gauge cartridges held noticeably more rounds than the same weight of 20 Gauge cartridges would have. It was true, they didn’t make slugs for the 28 Gauge, but with a bore size of .55”, a .50 caliber round ball worked particularly well even with the polymer shot cups. Root had screw-in rifled chokes and he’d hold the gun up to any muzzle loading .50 or .54 caliber with much longer barrels.

The punkin’ ball loads were good deer or bear rounds at close range and most shots in the forest were inside fifty-yards.

Root’s drilling had two 28 Gauge barrels over a single .22 LR barrel. The barrels were only eighteen and a quarter inches long. He felt any extra barrel length only added unnecessary weight and bollixed handling with no corresponding gain. He liked a twelve inch pull length with a modest recoil pad. He heartily believed that one was better with a stock two-and-a-half inches too short than with one a half inch too long—and a shorter stock was a lighter stock.

The gun’s wood was Birdseye maple. It was bright nickeled and had what Root referred to as “a honkin’ big brass bead” for a front sight. Actually, though the center brass bead was a quarter inch in diameter, there was a normal sized brass bead over each barrel like a single barrel shotguns sported—to help Root figure Kentucky windage for each barrel individually on the occasional long shot…

Though the extra front beads were more to satisfy Root’s desire for ostentation more than for any other reason.

Root thought a great deal of the little gun and he was rarely more than arm’s reach from it. He strapped it tightly to his back in the boat so it wouldn’t be lost if he capsized. His life jacket should more than compensate for any buoyancy the two guns cost him. If not then they could all go to the bottom together.

Nonetheless as Root shillyshallied around getting his gear together to leave, he got a good twelve or thirteen feet from his shoulder arm. He realized that a positively huge black bear was watching him intently from perhaps twenty-five feet away. Bears weren’t true hibernators and could appear anytime. At any rate, it had just turned cold.

There were puny black bears under two hundred pounds—and they were still quite dangerous to people. Then there were black bears that got into the lower weight range for a grizzly—five hundred to maybe six hundred and fifty pounds. Root always felt that this was a huge black bear based on the size of its head. Of course, there was no way to prove it afterward.

There was precious little ability to back down or to behave timidly or even prudently in Root. Here was a bear. Most likely it would kill him. That being the case, Root’s primary goal was to see that the bear didn’t survive him by very long.

Root’s razor-edged Bowie had more than enough penetration to kill a bear. Killing it in time to save Root from a bad mauling or death was the hard part. Even if it killed him, if it bled out later or died from a lingering infection that was all protein for Root. He held his Bowie in his strong left hand and felt his muscles swell and pump in anticipation of dealing murderous blows.

He bared his teeth and snarled at the bear from deep down in his throat. The bear was going to absorb all the pent-up hatred that had accrued in Root from every wrong that he’d ever suffered at the hands of man or fate.

“Coward! Punk!” Root taunted the bear. “Well are you gonna get down or not?”

Root took a couple of steps toward the bear.

Always afterward, Root was convinced that the bear shook its head in puzzlement and then turned away.

He was momentarily disappointed, but warrior must proceed strategically even when he’d prefer the elegant simplicity of a Kamikaze attack. He hurried to his boat before the bear rethought its own strategy.

Root had a pair of wool glove liners in his pack but no glove shells. He’d left them out for some obscure reason. It was an open question though whether he could have rowed with both liner and glove shell on his hands.

The wind blew through the knit gloves and chilled his hands and fingers, but nowhere near as much as his hands would have been chilled without the gloves. By the time that Root was two-thirds of the way across the river, the wind was blowing two-foot white capped waves and Root was chilled to the bone.

He made his landing somehow and diligently pulled his boat ashore. Then he had a mile walk through the woods. He passed through the gate in the Levee Authority fence, went in one end and out the other of his shed and into his back yard and then through his back door.

Even then his misery wasn’t over. He pulled the glove liners off of his hands and then managed to remove his boots and sock. He managed to unscrew the cap from the aspirin bottle and dry swallowed four of the tablets.

Running warm water onto very chilled hands was a no-go. Not only would it be agonizing, but it was easy to badly scald chilled hands without realizing it until too late. Root managed to nudge his thermostat about eight degrees warmer and he alternated holding his chilled hands in his armpits or holding them above the heat vent.

Eventually he felt well enough to take a warm shower—partly because he’d warmed up a bit and partly due to the aspirin he’d taken. He left his clothing to lay where it fell. He still didn’t trust his hands to tell him if the water was too hot. He set the dials by eye, from memory and cautiously let the water run onto his thigh to gauge its temperature. He stood under the lukewarm water for a long time, gradually increasing the temperature. He stayed until he started to run out of hot water.

He fixed himself a big pint-sized cup of coffee/cocoa. He still didn’t trust his numb fingers to hold onto the hot cup. He was careful only to touch it on the handle or at the bottom rim.

He ate a couple candy bars and drank a second cup of hot beverage. He picked up his drilling and his Walther PP, leaving everything else as it fell and retired to bed.

Root told himself that he wouldn’t cross the river again until spring and between now and then he needed to address a number of points.





RVM45

[NCWEBNUT]

Going to be another good one, Thanks rvm45

[gipsy]

Great start for sure.

[rvm45]

Chapter Two






Root exercised diligently all winter and through early Spring. By the start of April, he was ready to return to the forest across the river.

He now wore a Ruger Redhawk .44 Magnum with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel on his right hip and one of the new Smith and Wesson five-shot .44 Magnums with the odd four and a quarter inch barrel in a shoulder holster under his left arm. The five-shot revolver was notably lighter and more compact than another Redhawk would have been. He wasn’t going to let another bear or catamount or mad trapper catch him relatively gunless. Once had been quite enough.

He thought that the little Walther’s feelings would be hurt if he left him at home so he now wore the flapped holster reversed on his left hip. He made a special effort to utilize the little gun to harvest small game occasionally just so he wouldn’t feel left out.

Root spent a few four and five-day excursions building a half a dozen lean-to shelters in strategic spots in the forest. He wasn’t as much interested in practicing how to build expedient lean-tos in survival situations, as he was in providing himself with enough robust and long-lasting shelters in hopefully opportune spots, that he was far less likely to need to erect expedient shelters. Consequently, he used bailing wire and the occasional spike nail in the lean-to construction. The roofs were not latticework affairs, but were solid arrays of slanting saplings. He took the time to peel each sapling and even shaved them a bit in order to fit them more closely together, though there were still places where he could see a bit of daylight between them.

Next he painted the saplings generously with creosote. Then he started at the bottom and applied strips of sheet polyethylene. One sheet would have sufficed—except that then the holes where he tacked the plastic down would have leaked. He lapped another layer over each line of tacks. Then he thoroughly thatched the roof with bundles of cattail leaves. The shelter was already waterproof, but the thatch would protect his plastic sheet from direct sunlight and even when well browned, it would still hide the shelter to a degree.

He put in a sleeping platform and that was the one place he did not put creosote. Past experience had convinced him that creosote could cause burns even years after it was applied. He closed the ends of the lean-tos with rows of saplings driven into the ground and added a mild overhang in front. Of course, there was a fire pit and a reflector built as well. Each shelter had at least one cache tube secreted nearby.

Any of the shelters were subject to being found of course, but Root made every effort to make them harder to find. There didn’t seem to be anyone else moving through the woods so far as Root could tell. He never came across human tracks, the remains of campfires, wood shavings or signs of cut wood. On the other hand, Root made every effort not to leave such signs himself. Of course, he was nowhere near being a woods ghost, but he made a fair effort and got steadily better.

Winter came and once again Root sat out the season, but he wasn’t idle. He exercised, practiced with his firearms and accumulated matériel. He got started a couple of weeks earlier the next year and he set about building himself a full-fledged cabin. There were logs aplenty, but there was also stone—big pieces of limestone that resembled driveway chat except that they were a foot to a foot-and-a-half across and inches thick. There was a limit to how much the Johnboat would carry in one trip, but three fifty-pound bags of Portland cement was a reasonable load—less than a passenger would have weighed the boat down—and left room for a few extras as well.

Root had seen pictures of old Irish stone huts that had been assembled without cement and had stood for centuries. He wasn’t that sure of his ability to stack the stones so certain and surely. What he did do was fit the stones very carefully and then used plenty of mortar for insurance.

He’s read that organic material in the cement weakened it, so he contrived to strain as much extraneous material out of the river water as possible. Though he contrived to make catchments for rainwater, much of his cement making water had to be carried from the river with a five-gallon plastic bucket on each end of a pole—though he only started with about four gallons in each bucket and sometimes was lucky to get to his building site with seven gallons of water.

The end result was that he spent two years building his cabin and during that time he spent more time rowing back and forth across the river than he’d have liked. Nonetheless, he spent some time hunting, scouting and generally walking the woods—his woods as he was coming to think of them—every trip.

He ended up with a round stone hut a little over twenty feet in diameter. There was a central fireplace—the chimney providing a handy support for his roof beams. The roof wasn’t as sharply pitched as Root would have liked. He hadn’t been at all happy working on the roof even with its rather shallow pitch.

In a forest full of timber, Root carried 1”x 6”, 1”x8” and 1”x 10” planks of knotty pine to panel the inside of his hut with. He also carried 2”x 6”s and 2”x10”s to make furniture with and a couple of 6’x2’x3” maple table tops for work benches. He was convinced that the dimensioned lumber was better than anything he was likely to make anytime soon. Even if he could have contrived to make suitable boards, it would have been labor intensive.

Every trip he brought a few more supplies and tools for self-sufficient living. He had a workbench with both a large machinist’s vice and a smallish watchmaker sized vise. He had an anvil in a covered shed outside, but the size of the anvil had been limited by the size he felt comfortable carrying in his boat. He even had a hand driven metal shaper and a treadle lathe along with a fair assortment of hammers of all types, files, stones, screwdrivers, gun cleaning kits and whatever. He had hand turned drills, augers, wood chisels, hand routers and what have you. He had a few planes and blades to make many more of various types. In truth, he had more tools than he really knew how to use well.

He had gotten to the stage that he could hardly pass up a deal on a good old gun whether he really had a use for it or not. There were three military style Enfields lying in a row in his hidden gun cabinet. There was a sporterized Enfield, a 7mm Mauser and a sporterized Arisaka that someone had done a beautiful job of converting to .257 Roberts. He hadn’t had any 7x 57 or .257 Roberts ammunition, but the Arisaka had a price tag of $45 and the Mauser was only $110. How could he hurt the old gun’s feelings by passing them by at that price?

There were two 7.92x 57 Mausers, four 7.62x54R Mosin Nagants, two SKS carbines, a Winchester .30-30, two Marlin 336 .30-30s along with several Pistol Caliber Lever Actions. He had a stock 1903A3 Springfield and a Springfield that someone had thoroughly bollixed a sporterization on. The originality of the good old gun already ruined, Root had had it turned into a slightly overweight Scout Rifle with a clear conscience. He thought the two Springfields were worth the rest of the rifles put together for use.

Root had far more rifles than he would ever need or could reasonably use—not to mention all the pistols and shotguns as well was guns in cache tubes. He resolved to quit buying guns and concentrate on laying in more ammunition, components, accessories.

As Omar had said:

“Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
“I swore—but was I sober when I swore?”

Besides, he needed an M1 Carbine to complement the pair of Ruger Blackhawks in .30 Carbine, and he really wanted something in .375 Holland and Holland Magnum…

****************** ************************** ************************************

It was early in the Spring after Root finally completed his stone hut when he encountered the mermaid—if that was the proper word for the bizarre creature that he encountered.

She was lying face down about ten or fifteen yards from what was about a quarter-of-an-acre woods pond. She was sprawled out awkwardly with her knees pulled up beneath her like someone expecting a spanking. She was a ghastly shade of palest white. She reminded Root of an albino mud puppy, a drowned fishing worm or perhaps a fat grub worm.

At second glance, she had legs and not a tail—but the legs were twice the length of a normal woman’s and her feet were huge webbed affairs longer than Root’s lower leg. She had long lank hair that looked like she’d rubbed it down with handfuls of rancid lard. She smelled like spoiled poultry.

She gave Root a venomous look.

“I suppose that you’ll rape me. That’s what you human’s always do when you catch a mermaid too far from the water,” she spat out.

“I’ll give you a present if you won’t take advantage of me,” she added.

Her voice had an unpleasant belching quality.

Root sat down on a log that was clean out of spitting distance of the mermaid. He was repelled, but he wasn’t going to leave without having a few words with this bizarre frog-like haint.

“I’ll tell you what,” Root said. “I’ll give you a present if I can be spared from consorting with you.”

She gave him a brief look of even more concentrated venom.

“Do I repel you?” she asked.

“If I said ‘No’, I wouldn’t be truthful,” Root allowed.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“First off, how can something your size live in a pond that small?” Root asked.

“Don’t you realize that you’re not in Kansas anymore,” she asked in a voice dripping with contempt.

“Can’t rightly say that I was ever in Kansas,” Root allowed.

“It’s an expression you dim wit!”

“But how did you know the expression?” Root demanded. “Does your frog pond have Netflix?”

“I know many things. I’m not mortal like you were. To answer your question:

“I can transport myself instantaneously to any pond or lake or stream in the woods, or to the river. I can also adjust my size to any available space as long as it’s wet,” she said.

“Why don’t you transport yourself away from me?”

“I have to be in the water.”

“Why do you ever leave the water in that case?”

“Why do you come into the Enchanted Forest where there are perils that you can’t even imagine? Sometimes it’s our geas to put ourselves at risk,” she said.

“I don’t know what sort of gift that I could give you. I’d gladly give you one of my Buck Knives, but it would soon corrode beyond use underwater,” Root solemnly told the mermaid. “If you’ll let me slide, I’ll bring you something special next time.”

“Do I really repel you that much?” she asked.

“Yes,” Root replied.

“I need your aid. I’m stranded out of reach of my pond. I’m turned the wrong way and I’ll die soon if I can’t get to water.”

Root considered this carefully.

“I’m going to help you. I’m doing the Good Samaritan thing here. God be my witness and judge between us if this is some sort of ploy,” Root said.
He stood and then paused momentarily while wearing a furious brooding scowl.

“God may forgive you if you betray me, but I won’t,” he said darkly.

Root set his rifle to one side. First, he grabbed the mermaid’s ankles. It was worse than touching a snake. She felt as if she’d been greased. Root drug the mermaid through a hundred and eighty degrees.

“Now you’re pointed the right way,” he said.

“Pond and Honor woman! You must weigh over five hundred pounds. I’m going to try to lift as much of your torso clear of the ground as possible and try to drag you. Put your arms around my neck and try to help me any way that you can. Don’t even think about trying to choke me. If you do, I’ll gut you like a fish.”

Root was completely out of breath by the time that he dragged the haint to the edge of the pool. As he tugged strongly by the edge of the pond, a section of the bank gave way and Root and the mermaid tumbled into the pond. There was no shallow in that section of the pond and Root found himself in eight foot of water.

He didn’t trust the mermaid at all now that they were both in her element. He drew his Bowie just in case.

Something large passed Root in the water. It hit him hard enough to crack several ribs. The mermaid grabbed Root’s knife hand and drug him to the very bottom of the pond. Root was trying to draw a smaller right-hand knife when the mermaid’s frantic gesturing got his attention. She pointed to her own eyes and then pointed the two fingers across the pond. Root seemed able to see much more clearly in the pond water than he’d have thought was possible, but all he could see was a huge mouthful of teeth coming at them from across the pond.

Root released the Bowie to the frantically gesturing mermaid. Somehow, she grabbed Root with her huge misshapen feet and cast him far out of the pond and harm’s way with a motion reminiscent of doing leg curls. He landed almost where the mermaid had been laying.

Root went back toward the pond to see what in Hell was going on.

A great brown creature shot out of the water. The damned thing was nearly as long as a Greyhound Bus. All the while the mermaid clung to the huge beast’s neck like a Bulldog. She stabbed it again and again with Root’s custom Bowie with the thirteen-inch blade. The big knife looked quite at home in the mermaid’s oversized hand. The creature went into a death roll and the whole scene reminded Root of an old Johnny Weissmuller movie.

Finally, the mermaid was cast far to one side. She sat motionless in the water looking like a big albino bullfrog calmly awaiting the huge creature’s aquatic charge.

Root supposed that she was “his” mermaid despite the fact that she disgusted him and that he didn’t trust her even a little. He drew his Redhawk and ripped off six Double Action rounds of .44 Magnum into the creature’s open mouth. It was no more challenging than shooting six rounds into an open fifty-five-gallon trash can at the same range—about thirty yards—and it did about as much good.

The mermaid rose far out of the water like a water polo player or a trained dolphin. She cast a beachball sized watery fireball at the creature and it promptly rolled over dead.

She swam over to where Root stood reloading and favoring his cracked ribs.

“What in the seven burning Hells is that?” he demanded as if the mermaid was to blame for its existence.

“That my fastidious and fast shooting friend, is an otterdile. Haven’t you encountered one before?” she said as she handed him his Bowie handle foremost.

“Start with something like a river otter and blow it up and stretch it out until it resembles a mammalized version of a crocodile.

“It takes a very big and very old otterdile to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. Thing is about otterdiles, they’re not like me and you. They start out as natural creatures but there’s a touch of ‘otherness’ about them. They don’t die of old age and they grow their whole lives, but very slowly past a certain point.

“Sometimes though, one of them will hook into one or another source of power and then they bulk up. That one was well on his way to becoming a dragon,” the mermaid said.

“A dragon? O come off it. It is like: Really man, be for real,” Root exclaimed.

“Where do you think dragons come from? The stork doesn’t bring them and they don’t sprout like mushrooms under cabbage leaves,” the mermaid asked him.

“I don’t think that they come from anywhere. Dragons are mythical,” Root insisted.

“Yeah, like mermaids, and human beings and otterdiles—we’re all mythical creatures,” she said.

“Why do you lump us together? You’re not claiming to be a natural creature, are you? You’re obviously a haint,” Root objected.

“Hell no! I’m not a natural creature! That would insult both my and your intelligence. You’re not insulting my intelligence by claiming that you aren’t as much of a haint as I am—are you?”

She stared him hard in the eye as if she’d just made a very telling point.

“Some dragons start as otterdiles, some start as elves or dryads or mermaids. Some few even start out as human beings,” she said giving Root a suspicious glance.

“I’m not a haint. I am a human being,” Root insisted.

“Do you know how long it has been since I saw a human being? All my friends will think I’m tripping or telling tall tales when I tell them about you,” she said.

“I don’t have any friends, but I wouldn’t tell them about you if’n I did,” Root said. “But so far as that goes, there are millions—no billions more just like me just across the river.”

“Humans may be natural creatures where you come from. Here you are rare creatures of wonder and enchantment. What river is it to which you refer?” she asked.

“The Ohio River.”

“You’re not in Kentucky. That river isn’t the Allegheny or the Monongahela. It’s not the Klondike or the Wabash or the Congo either. It isn’t even the River Lethe.

“This isn’t Tennessee or Pennsylvania or even Michigan. It isn’t even Warrick County where strange things happen.

“You are in the Enchanted Forest and you get here by crossing the Father of All Waters,” the mermaid said like someone presenting an irrefutable argument.

“Whore’s spit!” Root ejaculated.

“You can reach Macersville from here though and Dixie and every other mythical place that you’ve ever dreamed or heard of. Navigation is mighty demanding though,” The mermaid said.

“I’m hungry, wet and I’m in pain. I think your otterdile may have broken my ribs. I’m not going to stand here and argue about nonsense with a gray-meat mermaid.

Do be aware of the otterdile threat around water. They will sense that you took part in the killing of the big one. Some of them will come gunning for you—so to speak.

“My name is ‘Bliss’ by the way. Do come and see me again. Would you like me better as a boy? No, I see that you wouldn’t,” Bliss said.

“You’re mental. Awhile back you were worried that I’d rape you. Now you want to flirt with me.

“If I weren’t bothered by your corpselike pallor, your stench or your greasy hair, knowing that you can switch your sex at will would turn me off completely,” Root retorted.

“Didn’t you search long and hard looking for the way back to Macersville to rejoin the Pale Lady? Yet my pallor is offsetting?”

“You’re confusing me with my cousin—but how do you know about Macersville and the Pale Lady?” Root said.

“Magical beings like you and I have ways of simply knowing certain things. The knowing isn’t infallible though. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“My name is ‘Root.’ Goodbye.”

When Root had walked a few steps, she called out to him.

“I can’t change my sex. I can just cast a glamor,” Bliss shouted after Root.

“Why do I care?” Root responded.

He was in for some dark brooding. Of course, he was in Kentucky. The Indians—the real Indians, not those other fun-loving folks who made Bollywood movies—had called it “The Dark and Bloody Ground.” They recognized that Kentucky was a center of unchancy and weird goings on—far more than even Warrick County. They hunted and made war there, but didn’t dwell there.

Anyway, how could he get to Macersville Kentucky from here if he wasn’t in Kentucky?

Anyway, mermaids had a very poor reputation either for veracity or for goodwill. Root told himself that first of all he didn’t believe a single damned thing that the mermaid had told him. He didn’t believe in haints—notwithstanding his cousin’s experience with the Pale Lady. And come to think of it, he didn’t believe in mermaids either—and the next time that he saw Bliss he’d flat out tell her so!

[feralferret]

Thank you for this story. I'm looking forward to the remainder.

I hope your muse decides to return and help you with your other stories that you are fighting. I'm sure that you are frustrated with your difficulties.

[rvm45]

Chapter Three







Two years had passed since Root had seen the mermaid. He hunted and roamed the woods a great deal now and he saw no more evidence of the unnatural or unchancy.

Root continued to bring things across the river that he thought would increase his happiness or self-sufficiency in the big forest across the river.

He brought a couple of the simple gun racks that held four guns each vertically. The wood was cheap, but it looked better after Root stained and refinished it. He didn’t like the idea of someone discovering his home and stealing his things—particularly his guns—in his absence. However, his hidden gun cabinet would soon be full to overflowing. He decided to use the open gun cases for guns that he used regularly or that were cheap enough that he really wouldn’t mind losing them.

He picked up another Military style Enfield, another Mosin-Nagant and an SKS. He picked up a double barrel 20 Gauge shotgun at a bargain price, and then a cheap Remington 870 also in 20 Gauge. He had an old Winchester 1200 in 12 Gauge as well as a 12 Gauge H&R single shot.

The guns did nothing for the decor in their worn and rag-tag condition. By the time that Root had cleaned up the metal and either blued or nickeled it, refinished and sometimes added some checkering to the stocks— even replacing a couple altogether—he had too much time and too much of himself invested in the guns to part with them gladly.

There were a few handguns mounted on the wall as well and there were several more guns of all types in semi-discrete niches or hidden completely in secret stashes.

Root had four full-size reproductions of famous painting hanging on his walls—two by Renoir, one by Edward Hopper and one by Escher. He had four of the 16”x 24” exploded isometric drawings of guns: The 1911A1, a generic Smith and Wesson double action revolver, The M-16 and the AK-47. He’d laminated them and then framed then with the same type of frame that he used for his reproductions. John Browning’s .45 Automatic hung between Renoir and Hopper without feeling the least bit outclassed.

Root also had a few smaller originals from contemporary and obscure artists. He had 2’x 3’ vinyl periodic table, a star chart and a couple of medical anatomy charts on his walls.

Every trip he tried hard to bring at least four or five good books to his growing library. Good—real good— books were hard to come by and they were also frequently expensive when located. For every good book Root brought three or four mediocre books. He had old textbooks from high school and college, how-to books that had nothing exceptional in them and dull novels that frankly, Root could have taken or left. He also stockpiled books on mathematics, chemistry and Bible commentaries—things that he’d always wanted to get more deeply into, but never seemed to get around to.

If nothing else, covering large portions of the knotty pine walls with built-in book cases and then filling the shelves with books was good insulation.

He stockpiled other things as well. He was constantly asking himself what he could profitably add to his stores.

Outside Root not only had a rather large garden plot prepared—and located so that it was not obvious until someone pretty much stumbled into the garden proper. He planted fruit trees—apple, peach, pear, cherry, plum and apricot. He didn’t trust the idea of having the trees in groves. That would have made his hideout too easy to find. Instead he made a crude map of the area and planted his trees along spiral lines similar to the Fibonacci sequence of a sunflower’s seeds. The isolated apple and plum trees would tell that someone had been cultivating—at least within several years--but without beaucoup mapping the center would not be at all obvious.

Although his place wouldn’t be that hard to find for anyone willing to go to the trouble of graphing and charting the location of his fruit trees, there were far easier ways to find his lair for someone that determined.

As a sidelight, although the trees might have been many steps apart for a man walking, they were conveniently close together for flying pollinators like bees, bumble bees and humming birds.

Root continually considered the feasibility of staying over a Winter, but he distrusted the idea of being stranded anywhere almost to the point of obsession. Still, he reasoned with himself, he had enough food stored away to feed himself for the next few years even if he gave up hunting and gardening altogether.

He’d built three back-up log cabins in various locations and any of them should have more than enough food and gear to see him through a single Winter—or two—though they were far more Spartan than his stone hut. He had nine of his elaborate lean-tos built. Even if he could just make it to one of them with nothing but the clothes on his back, there was food stored, a few firearms and blankets, blades and what have you.

If he was forced to live through the Winter in one of his lean-tos, he’d have to hunt, cut plenty of firewood and be resigned to shivering through some of the coldest nights before the season had run its course.

Surely, Root reasoned with himself, even if staying for the Winter turned into an unmitigated disaster, there would be a few days warm enough for him to row himself across the river.

While he was making up his mind, he stashed a few more days’ worth of food at each of his lean-tos along with an extra yard-sale firearm or two, and a bit more wool and he cut a couple or more days’ worth of firewood for each station.

************** ******************** *************************


Root went to fetch some water from his rain barrel. He’d hauled several of the big blue fifty-five-gallon polyethylene barrels across the river—one at a time of course. They were light but bulky. They were very tough and they’d last nearly forever even when exposed to sunlight.

The bright blue was a bit too attention drawing for Root’s preference though. In the case of his rain barrel, he’d half buried it. Then he’d coated the outside with a thick dull brown casein-based paint that he’d liberally spiked with salt, iron compounds and capsicum. That should thoroughly deter any moisture loving varmints he thought.

He never set foot outside his house anymore without his two .44 Magnums and his .32 Walther PP. He might have successfully hidden his hut from men, but no forest creature could be unaware of his home’s presence.

Today he was carrying a legal sized Whippet that he’d made from a thoroughly battered and bollixed old Browning Auto-Five. He could just have easily have cut it to the original specs—there was no one to object on this side of the river. He just felt that the extra few inches on the barrel added little weight or bulk and offered a useful increase in muzzle velocity.

The olde tyme bank robber Clyde Barrow had designed the first Whippets. He’d sawn the barrel of a Browning Auto-Five shotgun off the length of one shotgun cartridge in front of where the magazine tube ended and then shortened the stock as much as the long recoil action would allow. Barrow had been a tiny jockey sized man and he could “Whip-It” out from under a coat and fire it like a regular shotgun.

Root wasn’t jockey sized. He weighed enough to have made two of Barrow with enough left over to make a serious start on a good-sized toddler.

Men with thick pectoral muscles often needed a shotgun with less pull length. Women also frequently needed a shorter pull.

The women, because they are generally smaller statured—no their breasts were too distant from the shoulder to be a factor—the thick muscled men because they can't pull the gun in quite as close to the shoulder.

The barrel on Root’s whippet was eighteen and a quarter inches. He’d made a very modest recoil pad from a zori. He’d picked up a new pair at the dollar store. He sure didn’t wear the damned things.

Even with the added thickness of the zori, Root’s thick chest and his educated taste for shorter pulling shotguns, he couldn’t shoulder the Whippet comfortably. It might have been uncomfortable, but it was quick enough. Mainly though, he thought of it as a weapon that he planned to fire up close and personal from the underarm assault position.

Root had three loads and three screw-in chokes for the gun: for daylight a rifled choke for .73” punkin balls, for night use a choke that would give fairly open patterns with the mini-magnum load of twelve 00 buckshot and for indoor use he had high brass loads with almost two ounces of buffered and plated BB shot and an extra tight turkey choke.

The BBs would have a bit more penetration on his paneling and furniture than he’d have liked and a bit less penetration on home invaders than was ideal. Still, it was a workable compromise.

He really didn't plan to need a weapon while fetching a pail of water. It was just a good—and potentially life-saving habit that he’d gotten into.

Root set his shotgun firmly to one side, the butt resting on the wood and the barrel against the shed wall.

He pulled the lid off the rain barrel and there was a miniature Bliss floating with her legs tailing loosely behind her like a big albino bullfrog. Root could have comfortably held the miniature Bliss in the palm of one hand.

“We need to talk,” was the first thing that Bliss said to Root.

The big bass voice coming from within the confines of the half-full rain barrel added to Root’s discomfiture. He stepped back too fast and tripped over something. He managed to guide his fall and ended up sitting on the short stack of firewood beside his Whippet.

He grabbed the Whippet and held it firmly at port arms while he took several deep breaths to calm himself.

“You never came by to see me. I’m beginning to fear that our relationship was purely physical,” Bliss continued.

Now her upper body—at least what Root could see of it—was full sized. She rested both forearms on the edge of the barrel. Her head and shoulders were now out of the barrel but she was about four inches too low to expose her bare breasts—for which Root was particularly grateful.

Root had no idea if she was supporting her slightly larger than human form with a tadpole sized derrière or if her lower body extended into some other place. He wasn’t about to wander over to the rain barrel to look. He didn’t trust Bliss. She might have pulled him in and drowned him in his own rain barrel. Or she might shrink him to grasshopper size or transport him almost anywhere.

Quite apart from all that, Root was quite sure that looking directly into the sort of tesseract that the situation seemed to call for would be most unsettling to his composure.

“Now laying all jesting firmly aside, the whole forest is in jeopardy—and the forest is a far vaster realm than you now imagine. There has been a summons sent for every mystical creature that lives in this local arm of the forest and that includes you. There is travel involved. Get yourself a few things that you might need over a two or three week stay in the forest and meet us by my lake,” Bliss said.

“Lake!” Root sneered. “It’s more like a little forest frog pond.”

“Huge lake, muddle-puddle or deer’s hoof print filled with rain—that body of water is a power spot for me. You both bled in those waters and shed blood in them, so it is also a place of power for you. When I am gone, remember me and remember the lake,” Bliss said.

“Are you due to expire soon?” Root asked with just a touch of sympathy.

“No, at least that is not what I refer to. You’re due for a fading soon though,” she replied.

“Can you stay there just one moment?” Root said.

“Is it important?”

“Yes,”

“Then I will stay for a moment,” the mermaid told Root.

Root dashed into his hut and came back with a long pole and a cloth sack.

“I told you that I’d get you a special gift,” Root said. “This is either a smallish trident or a large frog gig. The head is a very corrosion resistant bronze alloy. There is a matching sword and dagger to go with the trident. Bronze is a bit less strong than steel, but it tends to bend rather than break. I knew that any sort of iron or steel would soon corrode away in your pond.”

“You don’t think that a magical creature such as myself can protect metals from corroding?” Bliss asked in wonderment.

Then the head of the trident grew in her hand. There were now three fifteen-inch-long double-edged daggers for its tines. When she unsheathed the sword, its twenty-inch blade became an extra-large two-handed sword. The dagger grew to be as big as the sheathed short sword had been.

“These are weapons of power Root. Where did you get them?”

Root shrugged.

“There’s a dude in England that makes bronze weapons. I put in a custom order. I put the hickory handle on the trident and the handles on the knife and sword. I also made the sheaths and the belts. They weren’t real big on full tangs on blades in the old days, but I insisted. They’re also longer bladed countered by being a bit wider and thicker. You’re a bit bigger than life sized,” Root said depreciatingly.

The mermaid grabbed Root and pulled him close before he could fight or even object. She had kissed his cheek and released him before he could draw a weapon—leaving Root looking a bit silly standing there all alone with his five-shot Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum in his right hand and a long bladed dagger in his left.


**************** ******************* *****************************


Root thought and then loaded himself heavy. He could always discard gear, but he couldn’t pull gear out of his rear end if he didn’t have it.

He took down the Winchester 1200 that he’d turned into a close-range offensive weapon. He only took single ball punkin’ loads for the shotgun. Ranges were short in the forest and the farther one penetrated into the forest the closer together the giant trees seemed to grow. The .73 caliber punkin’ balls should serve—they hit harder than the balls from the old Brown Bess with far less smoke and recoil and they were far more accurate.

He carried his .30-06 Scout Rifle slung from his pack. If he had to survive long term separated from his supplies, .30-06 shells were far lighter than shotgun shells, though by some reckonings they lacked the 12 gauge’s “Stomp ‘em Flat” stopping power at spitting distances.


Inside his pack Root had his 28 gauge drilling—that he considered better for foraging for food that either of the other long guns—all taken down and ready to go along with a long barreled Smith and Wesson .22 LR Revolver. He wasn’t going to a foraging fest—at least to hear Bliss tell it—but to a possible war—or at least a
feud.


But he was a very cautious individual. No, that wasn’t precisely correct. Root often took outlandish risks. It was more that he enjoyed trying to foresee various possible complications and trying to have the right gear and munitions on hand to deal with them.


**************** ******************** **************************


When Root arrived at the rendezvous at Bliss’ pond there were around a dozen haints standing around nonchalantly.

Bliss was walking around looking like a rather big-boned albino human woman wearing a white tunic of twisted fibers that made her at least marginally decent.

“Let me introduce you,” Bliss said in a booming voice that fell an octave below the deepest human vocal range, but still sounded more human that any voice that Root had heard her use previously.

First Bliss led him up to a giant haint. She had the form of a very well-formed human woman—except that she was over eight feet tall—not counting her huge antlers.

She was jet black and covered with a very fine short coat of fur. It reminded Root of seal’s fur. Her head was human up to the eye level. Her eyes seemed to be featureless silver orbs that glowed with inner light. Her ears were larger than a large man’s hands, rising above top of her head and pointed at the tips. Her head started to change from human above the eyebrows, growing thicker and knobbier to accommodate the huge antlers. The antlers were mammoth. They would have over-awed the biggest elk and several of the oversized tines flattened out into modest palmate structures—modest from a moose’s perspective.

She had to be unchancy. There was no way that even her thick bull neck could support that massive rack, Root thought.

“I know you!” Root heard himself say while being astonished that his mouth seemed to take on a will of its own.

“Do you think so?” the mammoth humanoid asked Root.

Her voice was a bit lower than any human’s, but it was higher, and had a far smoother timbre than Bliss’ voice and came across as far more mellow.

“...Crucified spread-eagled against a Crumbling Mossy Wall,
“A Goat-Headed Mayonnaise-Eater Bawls,
“Nearby in the Bog
“Crouch Creatures, Part Man—Part Frog,
“Spiked through Scabby Scrotums to Rotting Logs,
“Eternal Punishment for putting Ketchup on Hot Dogs.
“On the Corners Steel-Eyed, Antlered Bull-Dykes Naked Sprawl
“And...."

Root paused and shook himself. Never mind what the steel-eyed women did with ping pong balls. Why had he even started to repeat that fragment of a poem? And where had he picked up the fragment?

“You’re Bammit aren’t you?” Root said.

“You don’t know the whole poem do you? I’m in that account, but I’m not one of those pitiful creatures that sprawl naked on street corners—do you understand? You should keep that fragment to yourself, but remember it when everyone and everything else has deserted you. There is power there,” Bammit said.

Then she lost her huge antlers while she shrank to the size and confirmation of a human woman—a human woman with steel eyes and palm-sized pointy ears that were forever questing this way and that. Of course very few human women were six four and even fewer had skin as pure black as Bammit’s.

A grayish colored goat-headed creature approached Root from his left, pausing about eight feet away while displaying his empty hands and waiting good naturedly for Root’s permission to close.

“I eat no mayonnaise, so the chances of me being crucified in that particular Hell are negligible, but some folk might find that bit of tortured verse offensive,” He said. “My name is ‘Owen’ by the way.”

Root shook his hand and seeing Root’s puzzlement he added:

“I’m sure that you’ve noticed your hearing growing much more acute as you dwell in the forest? The eyesight and particularly the night vision along with the sense of smell and direction also increase greatly. However, the hearing is first to improve and the improvement always greatly overshadows the improvement of the other senses.

“I know. I started out as a human being myself long, long ago. The thing is, any creature with oversized ears like these,” He said while touching one of his long, pointed, goat-like ears.

“Will have far better hearing than any true human—however long he’s been in the forest,” Owen said.

“Will I turn into something like you if I stay here long enough?” Root asked while feeling a bit queasy.

“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” he added.

All at once it was crystal clear in Root’s mind. He needed to get to his Johnboat. He needn’t go by the stone hut. There was nothing there that he wasn’t willing to sacrifice.

He needed to cross the river. Once across, he’d use one of his .44 Magnum revolvers to shoot the bottom of his craft full of holes and then set it adrift. Then he’d never again go to the shore of the river and never again would he walk in this accursed forest. He’d even do his best to never even dream about this unchancy place.

“I’m sorry, it’s far too late for that. That way is closed to you at the moment. It may open again once more, or it may not. For now, the only way for you is forward,” Bammit said.

“At least I can spare you some dread. You will never become a creature like Bliss or Owen. Your raw horror at the very idea precludes it,” Bammit said.

“How about like you?” Root asked.

“I’m a far higher order of being than either Bliss or Owen. The idea that you might become like me would be rather presumptuous, if it weren’t asked in pure ignorance.

“I’m a Hart. Laying all other considerations to one side, there are only six of us in all the forest and there is no male Hart. Reality isn’t even constructed to allow such an unnatural thing,” she said.

“I don’t want to change into anything inhuman,” Root said with a shudder.

“Cling to that desire then and you won’t. Well, you are already in the process of transforming—but you can cling to your human form more or less, if you cleave to it bravely and strongly,” Bammit said.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Root said dejectedly.

“I know,” Bammit commiserated. “But you have to remain here for now. The moment the smallest opening appears, I give you my word that I will guide you to it.”

“Right now, I need to introduce you to some dryads. And you needn’t worry. The chance of you becoming anything like a dryad is nonexistent,” Bammit said.

Bammit introduced Root to a half a dozen peculiar women. Their faces seemed to be covered in makeup or tattoos in the form of tree bark of various textures, but the skin seemed to blend seamlessly into garments made of the most supple and flexible bark that Root had ever seen. They wore a knotted strap over one shoulder. The garment covered their busts and hung a foot or so below the gathered waist, giving the women mini-skirts of bark or perhaps culottes. Their legs were as bark covered as their arms and faces and they had extra-large bare feet with singularly long toes.

Some of the dryads had eyes of the deepest amber brown while others had eyes like sparkling green emeralds.

“Calm yourself. A dryad starts as a self-sustaining and only vaguely aware eddy in the universal energy field. You should think of them as simple accidental anomalies. But a few of them take hold inside a plant—usually a tree. That gives them greatly improved longevity. Eventually they start to become self-aware. Being sealed in a single tree is limiting and somewhat chancy. Eventually they colonize nearby saplings and become a grove. They also manage to create a animal-like avatar to be their eyes, ears and to effect their immediate environment.

“Most dryads colonize a single species, so you can have a small cadre of them looking after a given piece of forest—and then there are overlapping areas.

“They are practically immortal, except...

“These ones are willingly sacrificing their immortality to travel with us. They will become like branches torn from the tree with very little chance of being grafted to any other source. They will slowly wither and die—but not before they strike a blow,” Bammit said.

“Why do they sacrifice themselves?” Root asked bluntly.

“For the forest’s sake. If the forest perishes then all the enchanted folk—what you call haints—perish,” Bammit explained.

Root was left feeling foolish as the bark covered women each took his hand briefly.

“I honour y’all,” Root told them. “Cowards theorize with the idea of surviving firmly in mind. A Samurai by contrast, proceeds as if he were already dead.

“Few Samurai have lived this ideal as fully as y’all,” he said and gradually ran down. There was little else to say to the doomed haints.

There was a sound like rustling branches among the dryads and a trio of knee-high versions of the tree women came forward.

“They want you to meet these proto-dryads,” Bammit told him. “Behold your apple trees, your peach trees and your cherry trees. The other fruit dryads aren’t even this fully formed yet. These are far ahead of schedule as is. There is something about human activity that seems to leaven and quicken many supernatural phenomena.”

Root stood ruminating about this.

“Don’t think that you can never again harvest fruit, or prune a tree or even cut one down in the fullness of time,” Bammit said. “The dryads dwell in the grove, not a single tree. You need to become attuned to them as you tend your trees in the future though. Think of it as a joint stewardship.”

“I want to go home,” Root repeated. “And all my fruit trees can go to stoke the fires of Hell for all I care—if I can just leave here.”

“I know, but if it becomes apparent that you can never again go home...” Bammit started.

She then introduced Root to a were-bear, a were-deer and a couple were-coons. They had made the transition and rarely took human shape anymore. Like the dryads, they occupied a host of individual forest creatures nowadays and hung over a section of forest like a non-material miasma but for this quest they had assumed more or less human forms.

“I am wolf,” an Indian looking dude in a breechclout, wearing a buckskin shirt and leggings richly decorated with tiny seed beads and dyed porcupine quills. He wore a beaded headband with three large feathers— eagle, turkey or perhaps vulture.
Root regarded him coldly and refrained from offering his hand.

“You hate and despise wolves don’t you? But this isn’t Idaho where hybrid super-wolves devastate the countryside and make a fetish of killing men’s dogs. If such travesties came to the forest, I would help you to eradicate them.

“Why have you never transported a dog across the river with you Root?” The wolf man asked.

“It is a bit irrational to love dogs as you do and hate their ancestors as much as you do. At some time in the future, I will send you wolves that are willing to become dogs and make common cause with man. Dog that have a place in the in the forest and immunity from attack by wolves, coyotes or any sort of fox. How would you like that?”

Root reluctantly extended his hand.

“Ixnay on a dog or dogs brother. All I want is to go home again,” Root said.

“What should I call you?” Root asked.

“Why ‘Wolfe’ of course,” Wolfe said. “It is time to start the meeting and the quest now though."

Root spoke up before anyone else could.

“I pledge on my honor to go home the very first chance that I get. I will leave without regard for the welfare of this forest or any of y'all...

“And I pledge to stick to my original intent to go home even if the time comes that I no longer wish to go home," Root stated defiantly.

“Your self-centered determination is the most reassuring thing that we could hear from you," Bammit said.

“So the forest would b better off without me?"

“No, it is doomed without you," Bammit said.

[rvm45]

Chapter Four







The boles of the trees got steadily bigger as the party marched deeper into the forest. They became far fatter than any giant sequoia trunks that Root had ever seen pictures of. They were eventually so close that a hypothetical road builder would scarcely have room to weave a crookedy two-lane road between the giant tree trunks.

Bammit gestured for Root to come over.

“Food can be hard to come by in the deep forest. Do you see this growth on the bark? The fungus is edible. Some of the fungus even bears a kind of fruit. It isn’t really fruit but the taste and nutritional qualities are similar.

“But this fungus indicates another source of nutrition,” Bammit said.

She pulled the fungus to one side. There were a number of golf ball-sized holes in the bark—and the bark was over a foot thick—and she fished around in the hole until she fished out a giant carpenter ant that was all of four inches long.

“This is a solider ant protecting the nest,” Bammit said.

“Don’t let it bite you. If you had a pot of boiling water handy, you could thrust it all into the water. There is some good meat on the head.

“For a quick snack, it isn’t worth the chance of getting bitten. The head stays capable of biting for some time after it leaves the body.”

So saying, she wrung the head of the giant ant off while it kept its death-grip on the twig—tossing both head and twig to one side.

She offered part of the meat to Root. In Root’s experience, most ants tasted sour like a lemon or a vitamin C tablet. This ant tasted both bland and meaty—like a raw shrimp or crawdead.

“In the deep forest, anything red is generally edible. Anything red that isn’t edible will taste far too foul for you to poison yourself. Green stuff will be far too bitter or sour to eat as a general rule, but many green fungi make potent medicines.

“Anything blue is deadly poison—with one exception,” Bammit said.

She pointed to an eye-height blue fungus up ahead. It was covered with stalks. Each stalk had a marble sized blue eye on the end.

Bammit pulled one of the eyes off of the fungus.

“Swallow this whole,” she said.

“They have a certain power,” she added.

Root had to fight down a moment of nausea as the eye blinked—though it had no lids—and moved around frantically in his hand looking hither and yon trying to figure out its predicament.

“Don’t bite down, you’ll kill it. Swallow! Wash it down with this,” she said while offering Root a small skin bag.

“Waugh! That tastes like equal parts of Everclear, prune juice and bile,” Root complained.

“Alcohol and bile for sure. I have no idea what sort of fruit is used in its creation. It contains several very potent hallucinogens,” Bammit said.

“Thanks for warning me before I drank it,” Root said with heavy sarcasm.

The trail took a turn around a bend and Root was astonished to see the river since he was sure they’d been travelling steadily away from the river. There was no way that there could be two such mighty rivers so close to one another.

“If you truly want to go home Root, your one chance is to swim that river now. Don’t think that you’ll ever get another chance,” Bammit told him.

Root divested himself of all his guns except his mother’s old .32 Walther PP.

“Watch over these for me,” he said as he handed them to Bammit.

The river looked far wider here than where he’d rowed across. Root could hardly see the far shore. It looked like a very thin line on the horizon.

Root swam until he couldn’t swim anymore. As he went under the water for what he thought would be his last time Root was at peace. Better to drown in the river than be a prisoner somewhere that he didn’t want to be.

Then he was buoyed up. Bliss’ voice spoke to him inside his head.

“Root, I can’t exist in your reality. The river exists as a terminus. The forest reality and your world’s reality are mixed in a very turbulent fashion. I can let you catch your breath and rest and bear you part way.

“Then we’ll hit a stretch of water where I cannot go. You must force yourself to swim to the next zone where I can help you once more.

“Do you understand?”

Bliss would hold Root up and tow him through the water. Then she’d abandon him and he’d flounder endlessly and mindlessly through the murky water.

Even the intervals when Bliss swam for them both became a blur to the exhausted Root.

Then Bliss told him:

“You’re in water that you can stand in now. Walk to shore.”

Root walked to shore.

Something was wrong!

Root wore pajamas and a thick robe instead of jeans. He wore house slippers instead of boots. He had an oxygen tube across his face and inserted in his nostrils. His knees and ankles ached with severe rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, his whole body just kinda ached all over.

He wore thick spectacles over rheumy eyes. His balance wasn’t good and he was very unsteady on his feet. He was wet and he was chilled to the bone.

“You fell in the pond you silly old bastard,” the orderly said to him.

As the fellow bum-rushed Root toward a big building, Root caught sight of an old and very rotten wooden rowboat that someone had filled with black soil and turned into a planter.

The bow was in better shape than the rest of the boat and someone had whimsically repainted the boats name in bright orange paint:

“Chester.”

********** ************** ****************************

“I’m gonna fix you, you old senile bastard,” the orderly told Root.

“You caused me all sorts of extra work when you fell into the duck pond yesterday. You weren’t even supposed to be outside unsupervised.”

Root remembered the orderly vaguely now. He always tried to bully Root into letting him give Root a crew cut. That way it would be easy for the orderly to care for.

Root was the only one in the nursing home with long shoulder length white hair. The mean orderly could be quite persuasive—even intimidating.

He’d bullied all the other men into crew cuts and al the women into bobbed haircuts.

“You’re getting a buzz-cut today and from now on I’m going to make sure that you’re too tranked to cause any problems,” the orderly said.

When Root tried to resist, the mean orderly gave Root a stiff fingered jab in the solar plexus that had Root gasping for air.

“That won’t leave a bruise you old bastard. I think that you’re too lively. Lets take away your air,” The orderly said while pulling Root’s oxygen line off his face.

Root’s primary emotion was shame at being man handled so easily by such a stupid bully…

In his prime…

Root didn’t clearly remember either his prime or his decline. He had no idea how he’d come to be in a nursing home.

A quick lick told him that he still had his own teeth, though they were worn.

Root had a weapon—pair of fingernail clippers. Some of the women still fussed with their nails and Root had carefully ground the last half-inch of the little nail-clipper file with emery boards until it was razor sharp.

As the orderly came into range, Root shoved the little shank almost an inch deep right into the man’s eye. Root slashed the orderly once across the face while aiming at the other eye.

Then the enraged orderly who was blinded by tears even in his good eye managed to grab Root’s head.

Root bit one of the orderly’s fingers off and then managed a firm bite on the man’s nose.

“Bite their noses off!” Root had time to think before he lost consciousness.

*********** ***************** ***********************

Root was aware of beaucoup lost time when he came to. He was in a strait jacket in a padded room with some sort of Hannibal Lector anti-biting muzzle on. He had a very foul taste in his mouth that told him that someone had injected him with Sinequan.

After a timeless drifting eternity, a doctor came to see him.

“I know what you are,” the psychiatrist told him bluntly.

“You’ve been crossing that damned river over into that accursed forest. Maybe you were even far enough along to start on a dwelling or maybe catch vague glimpses of its unnatural inhabitants.

“A year or two later and you could have accrued enough mana to have stayed.

“I’m going to fix that though. You’ve been ruled both violent and insane and I’m a well-respected physician.

“Lobotomies are out of fashion, but no one will object if I lobotomize you—after some very prolonged electro–shock treatment.

“You won’t remember the forest—or anything else for that matter—and I can use you as a conduit to send negative karma into that foul realm.”

“Dude, it is like:

“You are a nutcase. You’re the one who needs to see a psychiatrist,” Root managed to get out of his extra dry mouth using his half numb tongue.

“We’ll see how arrogant you are tomorrow when you get your first shock treatment. You know, I didn’t have to let you resume consciousness again.

“I wanted you to know and to suffer,” the doctor said.

[udwe]

Wow!

[rvm45]

Chapter Five







The next morning, they strapped Root to a gurney and made ready to wheel him to electroshock therapy.

The smug psychiatrist was there. The big mean orderly had been invited so he could have the pleasure of watching most of Root’s personality and memories be erased.

Root smiled when he saw the bandage over the orderly’s eye and on his right hand.

“Dude, it is like:

“Looks like I got your trigger finger,” Root taunted.

“Laugh and hurl insults while you can,” A fat-assed nurse with buckteeth and candy apple red lipstick told him primly.

“After your first electroshock you probably won’t have enough personality left to suck a feeding syringe.”

A vulgar ditty from long ago sprung to Root’s lips momentarily…

Vulgar childish scatologic rhymes, but delivered with the scorn and authority of a righteous Prophet weighing the sins of a people not only wicked and wayward but also frivolous and trifling.



Nag, Nag you Dirty Old Hag
You Slimy Slithering Slut…

But then something more dignified and meaningful sprang to mind. He’d remembered a couple fragments before. This version wasn’t quite the same…

Like a Blues melody, the Poem…

No, not a Poem…The Verse would never be exactly the same twice:


Cocaine and Xanax, Acid and Smack
Marshal my Allies for One More Attack
Reinforced as they Stack
By a half-empty Bottle of Jack.

Shit! Shit! Syphilis Whore!
Spend the Rent Money
Buy a bit More.

“H”
Shall be The Host of Gifts
That Fill Our Lives Always.

And When We Fill Our Lives
With Olive Oil
Unasked for Gifts and
Thankless Toil…

It is What Shall Be.

First to be Flung upon
Far and Feverish Shores
Frivolous and Furious
Fantastic and Foul


Where Walk Unclean, Undead
Albino Unbelievers…
Mayonnaise-Eaters All.

The Portal once opened
A Bottomless Well
Irresistibly Pulling
To The Nadir of Hell

Crucified Spread-Eagled
Against Moldering Walls
Goat-Headed Mayonnaise-Eaters Bawl

In the Swamps crouch Haints—
Half Man; Half Frog
Scabby Scrotums Spiked
To Rough and Rotten Logs

Eternal Punishment
For Putting Ketchup on Hotdogs.

On Every Corner in the Town
Hard-Eyed, Steel-Eyed
Antlered Bull-Dykes Naked Sprawl
And
Masturbate with Ping Pong Balls.

Headless Shades of Molested Children Play
When Approached they Run Away.

Potato-Headed Lepers Furiously Drive
Raggedy Rust-Eaten Cars
And Drink Vile Bile Flavored Wine
From Quaint and Misshapen Jars.

The Air is filled with Phosphorescent Bugs.
The Pits are lined with Corrosive Slugs.

On a Distant Hill
On Ornate Thrones of Gold
Gentle Collared Clergy Sit
Condemned to Always Cramp
But Never Shit.

Yes! now Root realized what he was reciting and what he was doing. This was a Summoning…

“If we had only known,”
They Lament
With Sighs and Groans:


“We turned the Innocent Head
“With half-baked Modernism
“While the True Believers
“Practiced Fundamentalism.
“There is No Respite, No Relief
“Repentance Garners No Reduction
“For the Miserable Wretched Grief
“In The Land of the Forever Dead.”


It is Futile to negotiate
No Way in Hell to Propitiate
Why Scream and Shout…
At Antlered Bammit
Keeper of the Gate
She Guards the Sole Route
To Exit Perdition…

O yes! This was working! The fat nurse and the psychiatrist were both trying to reach Root. They were frantic to shut him up somehow someway—but it was if an invisible barrier separated them from Root.

They did a sort of forward moonwalk that never took them the slightest bit closer to Root…

The air was filled with static discharges. Root’s old man’s silver mane stood on end as if he’d stuck a finger into a light socket.

Ten feet from the foot of Root’s gurney a portal was opening…




Approached her with Reason
And Flatter her in Season
And Once in a Very Great While
With Happy Stomping Dance
With Joyous Glowing Smile
With Booming Triumphant Shout
Bammit Grants a Second Chance
And Lets the Odd Soul Out…


The portal was the size of a dinner plate. Now it was as big as a garbage can lid. It grew ever larger and Root could see Bammit and some of his other River Bottom friends beyond.

A moment later Bammit stepped through the portal. She was ten-foot tall now and her antlers were enormous. No way that she could walk upright in this full-sized and antlered form—but she did. It was as if the spaces of this world were forcibly, even if only temporarily bent, warped and stretched to allow the giant Hart to pass.

Deer and other ungulates had no upper incisors, but Bammit did. She bared them in rage seeing her friend Root strapped to a gurney with thick leather straps.

She made a small gesture and Root’s restraints were ripped asunder.

Root stood beside the gurney naked but unashamed. Bammit threw Root his wool long under pants, black jeans, a black “T” shirt, black woolen turtleneck sweater, black cowboy boots, black Stetson, mirrored shades and a long black leather duster that reached to within a palm’s breadth of the floor.

There was a thick gold ring with a round red ruby fatter around than a .45 Bullet and a thick gold chain to wear around his neck.

Root dressed without any particular sense of urgency.

Last of all, Bammit handed Root his guns. His .44 Magnums now had stocks of the purest ivory. The Walther PP .32ACP that he thought lost in the river now had the finest and most iridescent of Mother of Pearl grips. His Bowie was now Damascus steel with stag handle, but a couple of his other knives were now pearl handled.

“Doc, I reckon that I should shoot you. You’re a willful threat to my world. I just don’t want to dishonor my gun and I sure don’t want to get any of your cowardly rose water fluids on me or my knives,” Root said to the doctor who was frantically trying to hide from Root under a table.

Bammit laughed explosively and threw Root a medieval style mace with seven modest flanges and a sixteen inch handle.

“A Sovereign cannot be squeamish,” Bammit teased.

It only took a single blow to crush the skull of the doctor and one blow for each of the nurses.

The orderly stood aiming a small revolver at Root while glaring fiercely from the single eye that Root had left him.

“You’re coming with me,” Root told the orderly who was so afraid that he was wetting and soiling himself.

He took a moment to tie the orderly’s hands together with laces from the doctor and the nurses’ shoes.

Root threw the orderly negligently over one shoulder and walked as if the weight of the big beefy man was minuscule.

Root caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he walked by. His hair was three-foot-long very fine and straight and as black as a raven’s wing. His skin was bronze and his eyes were a deep electric blue. They almost seemed to be lit from within.

His face was deeply scarred in a couple of places and a big Indian nose like his father’s had supplanted his modest Celtic nose.

Bammit took Root’s hand and they travelled.

“This is as far as I can take you,” Bammit said. “The rest is up to you.”

Root was surprised. He’d thought that Bammit would escort him home.

It didn’t matter. There was a pond south and a bit west of where he was. He’d wondered as a boy why the pond had always been so dead.

He hadn’t gagged the big orderly, and the man continued to babble without saying anything intelligible.

He sat the orderly down and removed the bandages from the man’s face. The man’s unintelligible bleating and moaning grew faster and louder.

Root held the empty socket open with one hand while he spat up the fungi eye into the other. He paused letting a small trickle of Manitou guide the fungi’s stalk along the optic nerve and into the man’s forebrain.

“Give it an hour or two and you’ll be able to see far farther and better with that eye than you ever could with your original eye,” Root told the hysterical orderly.

“That’s not half bad for a magical healing by a non-magical being, in a world that allows no magic,” Root Said.

Root lifted the heavy man once more and this time Root walked out into the small pond until he was in water midway up his sternum.

“Damned nation Dude! Shut up a moment and let me concentrate. I know that you want to come with me. How else can I restore your trigger finger?

“What a wuss you are! You are gonna have to grow some balls if you want to stay in my service.”

Bliss had said that he’d both spilled blood and shed blood in her small pond. He concentrated on Bliss’ pond and he and the orderly were transported there instantly. Of course, they both ended up in water well over their heads.

Root loosed the man’s bonds with a gesture. He was still so panicked that Root had to pull him ashore.

“Damn it man! Here’s your revolver. I’d stuck it back in your pocket for you, but you managed to spill it into the lake. You’re a bit of a splooge if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Bammit walked out of the woods to greet Root.

“Why did you bring the human?” She asked mildly.

“He could have never found fulfillment there after seeing such a powerful display of Eldritch magic,” Root shrugged.

“Did it occur to you to simply kill him?” Bammit asked.

“I never thought of that. Where is Bliss?” Root asked.

“She perished in the River saving you,” Bammit said.

“Whatever on Earth for?” Root asked.

“She loved you,” Bammit said.

“She hardy knew me,” Root said.

“Magical creatures sometimes find their heart simply belongs to another,” Bammit explained.

************* **************** **************************

There was a huge meeting of magical creatures in the deep forest.

Root hadn’t made it there in the first loop of his timeline. If he had, he’d have found that it was he himself who had called the meeting.

Had the younger Root and the somewhat younger Bammit arrived by some subtle paradox…

They would have seen something the forest had never before seen.

They would have seen a male Hart covered with jet-black fur with eyes that glowed like cobalt lasers.

The male Hart was eighteen feet tall. He had taken the Hart Bammit to mate. And just being around such a potent fount of Manitou had caused Bammit to add three feet to her stature.

A crazy human who was said to have lived over five ordinary human lifetimes always attended him. The human had grown to over seven and a half feet tall. His perpetually wide-open eyes were mismatched.

He served the King of the Forest as a valet, bodyguard, councilor, messenger, friend, and confidant and as the fool and court jester equally—sometimes by turns and sometimes all at one time.

The King’s name was “Root” and he could assume the guise of an ordinary—if very striking human—whenever he chose.

And whenever he sat at a meal, he always filled a golden cup with wine and then poured it on the ground in memory of the friend that he hadn’t realized was a friend until it was too late to thank her.






THE END

[223shootersc]

Thanks good stuff!

[jwh123]

As always, thanks for writing and posting. I was just thinking a week or so ago that it had been a long time since seeing something from you. Much appreciated!

[udwe]

Really liked this! Thanks!

[feralferret]

Thank you for the story.

[logger]

great story thank you