Sunday, May 11, 2008

Lightning's Mystery Revealed

I was driving to Selene with my buddy Shortcut. It was a long drive through the middle of nowhere, and he had been injured at work and didn't look too enthusiastic about anything. Then he sat up.

“Want to hear a story?" he asked. "A story my uncle told me when I was a little shaver.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll tell you if you’re interested.”

“Yeah, why not?”

He eased back in his seat. “They say my uncle was a lonely kid who grew up set in his lonely ways. Not only that but he smelled bad. It wasn’t only that he didn’t like taking baths, but he had his own odour. He smelled like moose shit, if you ask me.

“But he liked to hunt. He’d go out with the other hunters then he’d set off alone, talking to himself, because he used to talk to himself when alone into the woods. Every time he went he’d get something. He’d find the guys again, and take them back to whatever he’d killed, and they’d cut it up and pack it out of the woods, and we’d have meat.

“One day he never came back. They looked for him, but nobody found him, nobody knew where he could be. We missed him because all us kids liked Uncle Jake; we used to follow him around and stuff. We got hungrier too, ’cause we never had that meat he was getting. But we got by. Then a couple of months later, just about when it was starting to snow, he showed up in the village with a hell of a story to tell.

“He told everyone he met a woman who lived in a hut up in the mountains with all kinds of children and no man. She invited him into her hut and he was surprised to find that she had beer, cases of it, and she offered him some and he began to drink with her. When he got to this part of the story, everyone laughed about my uncle finding a woman in the woods who was not only friendly but had beer!

“By and by, my uncle got drunk and the woman looked more and more beautiful, and he wanted to play jiggy jig with her. But when he got into her bed, he got tired from all that beer and fell asleep.

“And as he slept he had a dream that all the animals came out of their hiding places in the forest to be with her, and she knew them all by name, even the fiercest ones. He said he saw a grizzly bear walk up to her like a big dumb dog, lick her face, and let her scratch him behind the ears.

“When he woke up in the morning he said goodbye to the woman, came back down the mountainside, and started out on his way home. He was surprised when after walking all day he found himself back at the woman’s hut. This dumbfounded my uncle who figured he knew his way around in the woods better than anyone. But she offered him more beer, so he spent another night with her, and just like the night before he fell asleep in her bed.

“Except this time he got woken up at dawn by one of her kids crying. My uncle got the story from the kid that an animal had killed one of her brothers the night before. My uncle went to find the woman.

“He found her in a meadow on the mountainside. Her hair was all white and stuck out of her head like a storm cloud. Her eyes burned like fire. Her hands looked like claws as she reached to the sky. Dark clouds swirled above her and though dawn had broke the sky was black as night. She let out a howl and lightning flashed from the clouds, splitting into forks, each fork smashing into a tree, which exploded in fire. She howled again and more lightning flashed, setting more trees on fire, so that soon the whole forest was burnin’. My uncle ran, and he didn’t stop running until he reached a lake, and when he got to that lake he dived into the water.

“He stayed in the water a whole day. When he came out again, numb from cold, all that was left of the forest was black stumps, charred and smoldering, and not even the sound of a bird.

“Uncle Jake said he cried then. It was terrible.

“He had no rifle, not even a knife, so he had nothing to hunt with, and nothing to hunt anyway, so things didn’t look good for him. He managed to find a stream running out of the lake and threw rocks at little trout in that stream for something to eat, and then followed the stream to a river, and then followed the river to the coast. He followed the coast back up to our village.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah. That’s my uncle’s story.”

“So he’s still hunting?”

“I don’t know. He disappeared a couple of years after that. Nobody knows what happened to him.”

“Maybe he went back to her. She could of put a spell on him.”

“You think maybe it’s true?” he asked.

By now were were driving through a clear-cut. The road cut across a side hill stripped by rain to clay and gravel, clumps of brush growing here and there among branches tangled like torn cable, tombstone stumps standing above it all.

“Sometimes in these mountains make you feel there’s stuff going on we can’t explain,” I said.

“You think maybe that witch’s got something in for my family?”

I smiled. “It’s a good story, anyway.”

“He just probably wanted to scare us kids.”

“I wonder where all her kids came from.”

“I don’t know. I was wondering where all the beer came from,” he said.

We laughed.

2 comments:

Elvie said...

Good luck with your submissions to those publishers! Published anything so far? I enjoyed this story.

this was my very favourite line. “'Sometimes in these mountains make you feel there’s stuff going on we can’t explain,' I said."

I'm from the West Coast of BC too - I agree.

by James Lewis said...

I sent it out to five publishers. I think I have a shot.