Pahnu

Thursday

CHAPTER 1

 

Cletus shivered as he sat on his horse Ruby. She stood quietly on a dark trail that wound its way along a deep ravine west of the Big Knife Valley. The mountain trail ended a half mile further on as the grade became too steep for a horse to climb. Cletus looked up the treacherous face of the dark silent giant, known as Biawihi to the natives and as Thompson Peak officially, after the explorer who had discovered it. Its uppermost jagged outline, heavy with snow and ice, stood proudly against the night sky--the highest elevation in the entire Big Knife Mountain Range.

Cletus spat brown juice onto a rock by Ruby’s front hoof. He pulled his old brown cowboy hat tighter to his forehead and shivered again. His tattered denim jacket was not heavy enough to stave off the chill of this May morning. The situation had called for immediate action on his part, without benefit of adequate planning and while he had busied himself with the job of loading the package onto his horse, he had still been quite intoxicated. That cherished illusion of warmth had now worn off. 

Faint but increasing light appeared in the sky across the valley, behind the eastern range known as Marble, erasing stars as it grew. Marble Mountain’s height, being many hundreds of feet lower than that of Biawihi, allowed early light from the not yet risen sun to throw an eerie incandescence on Biawihi's eastern face. No sound--no breeze or bird song--could be heard.

Cletus’s wide eyes stared at the ground as he struggled to organize his thoughts--thoughts which lately had argued against him with logic that Cletus himself did not possess. It troubled him and he wondered if he was going crazy. An instant of sadness washed over him. What I’m doing is horribly wrong. Again the thought was not his own. He winced uncomfortably.

Light flashed suddenly, before full sunrise, at Biawihi’s peak, quickly moving downward like melting ice washing the eastern face of the western range clean, as if the mountain was refusing to be accessory to impure deeds performed in the night. “Alpenglow,” he whispered with a smirk, successfully shaking off his discomfort both mental and physical. He looked up at the mountain over his left shoulder. The word arranged his face into an expression of smugness, as though he had spoken secret code—a term he imagined belonged only to locals, an exclusive fellowship of which he was proud to belong.

Lack of interest in studies while at school had stunted his intellectual development. Prideful arrogant ignorance filled the void, causing him to view the world from a position of undeserved superiority and a prejudice that masked an inner fear that constantly tore at the edges of his sanity. He mimicked appreciation for natural beauty and the occasional descriptive word or phrase, repeated in his presence often enough for him to assume from those around him who seemed know.

Cletus Jensen fancied himself a mountain man, misplaced by time. It was completely lost on him that these cultural icons of yester-century were men of incalculable stamina who, while lonely in spirit, were willing  to sacrifice the comforts of polite society for the questionable benefits of freedom, adventure and solitude. Cletus could only play at being a mountain man. He longed for this solitude which he imagined to be his right, but only, it seemed, when fences needed mending or cattle feeding on his parents’ small ranch in the valley below, two miles north of the Marion town limits.

Although he loathed physical labor he did have a job. He worked as a construction hand for his brother-in-law, Gary Erickson. This was something he needed to do in order to sustain his off-hours activities, drinking and gambling--the very activities his father refused to finance. Cletus hated his father, but found it impossible to sever the ties which allowed him to play out his fantasy of autonomy.

The horse sidestepped. A crisp click-clap of hooves on loose stone smashed the silence. Ruby quivered a ripple of traveling muscle under the red blanket-wrapped bundle that lay across her saddle horn. “Easy Rube,” said Cletus, as he pulled his hunting knife from the sheath attached to his belt. Its razor-sharp edge sliced easily through the orange baling twine that he had used to secure the body of Frank Hendrickson for the ride up Biawihi. Cletus kneed the bundle and it slid off the horse’s neck. Ruby sidestepped again and Hendrickson rolled and bounced down the fifty foot drop from the trail to the floor of the ravine.

Loose rocks and a sprig of sage accompanied the body as it slid through the stone and dirt, coming to an abrupt halt against a downed tree trunk. Dust hung in the air. The grinding flow of the rock slide repeated itself in echoes reverberating eerily from further up the ravine. Cletus heard it as accompaniment to the clicking of a tardy, dollar-sized piece of aggregate bouncing down to meet its companions.

Daylight had increased and Cletus had been able to observe the bundled body’s descent. He saluted casually with the index and middle fingers of his right hand, his wild eyes staring through the settling dust. Again a smirk crossed his face, indicating his satisfaction.

Sound waned. The few broken sage branches bled fragrance into the air, and the disturbed terrain sent up a rush of earthy seasoning, blending with the sage. Cletus sniffed it in, then pulled the right rein and Ruby twisted an about-face on the narrow trail.

After a few steps, he pulled her up to a halt. Furrowing his brow for a second, he turned in the saddle to look back up the trail. Cletus pulled his horse another one-eighty to the uphill direction once again and they lunged forward with a tap of his boot heels to her flank.

A thousand feet farther up the path, the rider leaned out to survey the ravine floor dotted with boulders and scrub pines. He continued on until he caught sight of a torn gray blanket far below. Cletus nodded approvingly. This package, deposited on an earlier occasion, had been ripped open. Coyotes, mused Cletus. The atmosphere was too cold for flies to swarm, and no unpleasant odor rose to meet his nostrils.

Three people had gone missing from the valley in the past year. Two had been found; one on the banks of the Marble River, downstream from the highway bridge. That victim had been shot. The other was discovered dead in a sleeping bag at the North Pass campground—blunt force trauma to the head. These were people who had crossed Cletus and had gotten the best of him in some way--in the case of Hendrickson, poker--angering him to the point of murder.

            Cletus dug a finger into his lower lip and cleared the saliva-soaked tobacco gob from his mouth, flinging it to the weeds by the path. A pint bottle of whiskey was drawn from a small weathered leather saddlebag at his saddle’s rear-left, its cap unscrewed. He rested back in the saddle and drank. The whiskey again filled him with a sensation of warmth and his cheeks crimsoned.

Light and color were rapidly shifting in the sky, yet the sun still hid behind Marble Mountain across the valley. It was growing clearer and colder. Odd, thought Cletus, it’s always coldest at daybreak. It was time to get on down and catch a couple hours’ sleep before the drive into Big Knife for work. He again reversed Ruby’s direction and lowered the reins, giving the horse her head. She knew the way.

Cletus drew more golden liquid from his bottle, swallowed, spun the cap tight and slipped it back into the saddlebag. He pulled his collar up and shrank into his shirt like a retiring turtle. Hugging his arms around himself, he leaned slightly forward and dozed.

 Ruby plodded down the trail.

A small flash of light flickered from the dark land across the valley at the base of Marble. Ruby nodded her head up and down at the sight of it. Four seconds later the sound of the explosion reached the horse and rider from across the flat land and bounced back in the still morning air. Ruby twitched at the sound but continued on her way. Cletus looked up sleepily, but then allowed his chin to again droop to his chest as he drifted into sleep.

            Unseen entities, Muha and Pahnu, struggled with each other while clinging to the atmosphere surrounding the quiescent murderer. White-hot sunlight pierced the top of Marble Mountain to the east; Marble’s peak temporarily disappeared with the flash. The struggling intelligences parted as Pahnu withdrew, offering no more resistance.

Cletus began to snore as heat from the sun touched his left cheek.

            Across the valley, nearly three quarters of the way up Marble Mountain, on a rock outcropping, jutting free of the snow field that ringed the southern border of Marble glacier, sat a man with long, wavy white hair, Osiahapahnu. He faced west, sitting at the end of a winding trail that led up from Marble Lake on the eastern side of the mountain.

This trail was a natural animal path that gave anyone who wished to exert themselves access to an ancient native burial site along the way. This was accessed from a much narrower offshoot path, which dropped from the main trail, leading down onto individually forested shelves. Smooth basalt rock walls enclosed these steps on two sides and at the far end of these flats, shear cliff falling to the valley floor. The rock walls bore white markings—petroglyphs, ancient graffiti that no one in modern times had been able to decipher, no record preserved their meaning.

A faint breeze ruffled waves through Osiahapahnu’s white, tightly-woven linen garment as he remained perfectly still on the rock, his attention focused on the tiny dot that was Cletus and Ruby moving down the winding trail, across the valley on the face of Biawihi. “Extelned,” he whispered, frowning. His eyes rose as he watched a streak of lightning shoot up and away from the horse and rider. “Pahnu has relented. I could have helped.”

The valley that lay between observer and observed was awakening. Smoke rose from the chimneys of a few houses in both communities that occupied opposite ends of the basin. The elevation of Marion, the smaller of the two towns in the northern end of the valley, was a thousand feet higher than the southern town of Big Knife, and was nestled in Douglas Fir. Big Knife, the county seat, was situated in the southern plane. A two-lane highway climbed the grade between these two towns, and was only half visible from Osiahapahnu’s position on Marble Mountain, before disappearing into trees as it wound its way north, up a cleft in the rim known as North Pass.

Startled, Osiahapahnu jerked his head, as if he had heard someone call his name. He scanned Big Knife, then above and beyond, to the south. Something--someone—called to him from a much greater distance.

A voice came to his ears, “Go to her.”  

He whispered his reply, “But Tap Neh Apahnu, this one isn’t my responsibility.”

“She is now.”

Lifting his face to the sky, he vanished into a streak of vertical lightning, shooting straight up. A few seconds later he was nearly eight hundred miles away from the Big Knife valley.