Chapter 11

Chapter 11 -

The changes that were dramatically taking place in their lives didn’t truly sink in until she stood at the summit of the plateau beside Keith and Venture, watching the first twelve horses being boarded on the specialty barge Valerie Harper financed for his brother Paul in exchange for an exclusive interview.

“ I’m never going to see you or Venture, or Storm on the Island again! “

She didn’t mean for her voice to be raised in a wail like that, but it escaped from her, like the stinger of a bee being torn out of its body! Tears started to pour down her cheeks when she would have given anything in the world to laugh and smile and wave goodbye to him like it was the most casual goodbye in the world. She went into his arms, unresisting, but her shoulders were shaking with sobs she couldn’t control, and event he giant yellow dog at their feet pushed his front legs up, raising the top half of his body, whining softly at the sound of pain in her voice.

“ I never realized how much you meant to me either, Kimmie. “ He said, then they both laughed in thin comfort, recognizing that he’d used the pet name for Apollo Noma in shortening her name. But somehow the linking of their first summer four years ago helped to ease a little of the pain.

“ I could leave Venture here? “

“ He’d be miserable without you. I couldn’t put him through that again. Besides, Maxi’d never forgive me. “

She pulled back from the warmth of his embrace, as she tried vainly to wipe some of the wetness from her cheek.

“ You’re probably right. “ The teen agreed, when his head was whirling with questions and statements he really wanted to make, but didn’t know how. “ I guess we’ll be meeting in Brussels for Thanksgiving, Summer. At least, that’s what father wants to do. I wish Dad still had enough tight to enjoy it! It’s a really beautiful place. “

“ He’ll have you right there to tell him what he’s hearing, and the music you write? Maybe you could describe the city that you see with your music? “ “ You have a lot more confidence in me that I do, Sparrow. But at least I know I’ll see you again....I....Every time I look at that blank wall of stone, I see Mother. I don’t think I want to come back, Sparrow. And I know that Paul can’t, losing Lisa like that, it was just too much...you don’t have to worry about us trying to take the Island from you anymore. “

“ Oh, Keith! It’s all my fault! I kept telling them not to worry, not to be afraid, that the Hansen’s Bell wouldn’t hurt them, and one of them killed them! It’s all my faultKeifer! And it was all for nothing! The species has been killed anyway! “

“ Stop that! Stop that right now! It could have been a horse kicking out at the wrong time when Lisa or Mom was bent over to pick something up! It could have been a cold that went bad, or a rock that fell on them! It just happened as terrible tragedy that an injured and nearly dying animal blundered in on them at a time when they were in the water! I wished it hadn’t happened! I wish with all my heart that it hadn’t happened, but so do you! “

She started to tremble so violently that she had to sit down on the summer warmed dirt, and he knelt beside her, holding her tenderly in his arms until she was finally calmed.

“ I love you. I loved my Mom. I was just getting to know Lisa, and I know that Paul loved her. But I had to leave here anyway. The time would have come when my father came looking for me and the most terrible thing in the world that I could imagine, being forced off the Island, turned into one of the best things that ever happened in my life! But what if it hadn’t? What if I just hated him because of what he did to my Mom and me and I sent him away? Then she died anyhow? You see? We don’t know! We just have to trust GOD’S heart and know that, in time, we’ll all be together again where death and fear and harm can never come near us again! You believe that, don’t you? “

“ Yes. “ She agreed tentatively. Rewarded by his tender smile as he let her go, and helped her to her feet..

“ Then let’s just enjoy and make the most out of every other day that gets us there, okay? “

She tossed her hair out of her eyes, like the proud young mare she used to be when they were young enough to run up and down these slopes pretending to be one of his father’s horses. That seemed a lifetime ago. Without warning a long limbed rabbit ran across the boulders in front of them, pursued by a Bobcat and Venture leaped to his feet with a booming bark that caused all four of them to catch their breath in surprise. The rabbit made it to his den, the Bobcat made a flying u-turn in the air and the two teens laughed away their seriousness as it was quickly evident the pursuer would never catch up with the former hunter in time to do either of them any harm. It took their mind off the fact that it would be his last long run and chase on the slopes of Mount Topaz the Lesser.

At the last minute, Keith stood beside the sedated stallion, watching over his damp neck and mane as they waited for a second shot to take hold. The red stallion was fighting the sense of loss of control even though he could hear and smell that his mares were trapped inside the floating building. The instant his forelegs touched the plank and it dipped under his weight, he reared again, bellowing his fear and rage.

“ Take the lead and walk him back! “

He said curtly to Summer, shoving the hemp rope in her hand, ignoring her shocked look. Then reaching up, he stripped off the blindfold, allowing the horse to wee where he stood. Then he ran across the broad plank and reemerged leading a blanketed horse.

Kim didn’t even recognize Dixie until the trim, frightened palomino colt raced out after her. More frightened of being left behind by its dam than it was the strangeness of the wood plank to solid ground.

Storm’s dark Majesty whickered to the shaky mare, his entire body vibrating with the effort of his challenging blast toward the darkly lit house which still contained the rest of his family, but he was too dazed to do more than stand, straddle-legged, with his head hanging down as the second shot of sedative started to overcome his massive will.

“ When his head clears, take him and Dixie and Regina to the Meadow. I want to buy three Andalusian when we get to Portugal and send them here. Okay? I’ be back in five years, have Merlin trained for me, Sparrow. Will you do that for me? “

“ Yes! “ She demanded breathless with surprise and resolve. And then she was left just breathless as he leaned over the stallion’s bowed neck and kissed her full on the mouth.

“ I’ll keep my promise to you, you keep your promise to Her. “

She nodded, with tears of joy in her eyes, knowing he meant the Island they both loved. Then his brother ran up to him, and pulled him away by the arm roughly.

“ What are you thinking? Those are three of the most valuable horses we own! “

“ No, Paul. Those are the three horses, I own. “

Paul Talbot glared at her as fourteen year old Kim wiped away her first kissbut the memory of it lingered even after the heavily weighted flat bottomed barge was caught up in the swift current of the straits and pushed southward toward the channel which would lead them eventually to Skagit Bay and SeaTac airport, and the two customized cargo planes which would fly Bobby’s heritage east to Montana with his father, his blind grandfather and his Uncle Keith. Following the route that had first lead Captain Billy and the crew of The Marie Sao Ault northward to the San Juan Island chain.

“ Let her be. “ William suggested gently when Jillian would have rushed over. “ It’s no ever ’a day a gurl gets her first kiss. “

“ Oh, Bill! “ She exclaimed in disgust. “ Kimmy's only fourteen! She hadn’t even noticed boys yet! “

The bearded Scots man just smiled. A father’s small, knowing smile.

Kim and Susan sat on the edge of the pond, their faces intense with concentration as they eyed the friendly acaleph bobbing on top of the pond water.They were still discussing the same thing they had since Kim’s fifteenth birthday party on van Dantz Island. Either the little male didn’t know that he was supposed to swim to great depths, or he’d been afraid to because of his youthful injuries while being dropped from the eagle’s talons. It seemed to take forever for her grandfather to finally get off the phone with her mother and walk up the hill to where they were waiting, since they had promised not to go into the water until he was with them. It was becoming more and more difficult to put up with his old fashioned ways and his constant concern for their safety as their friend- ship and their desire to explore this island underwater to see if there were more caves hidden in the short amount of time left to them before their families flew to Brussels to join Keith and Sidney Carmichael for a three-week train exploration of the ancient cities and culture of the Old World.

“ Maybe we could just grap it in our arms and pull it down, Suz? “

“ No way Jose! If it thinks we’re going to hurt it, its going to fight back, Kim! But if we go down I think it will follow us and it’ll find out that it can! “

“ We’ll have to have some kind of food ready to reward it, or it’ll have no reason to repeat it. I wonder if that would invalidate any of our studies? I.... “

“ Wait ju’st a minute. ye tae! While I respect yer curiosity as budding scientists, us men hae tae stick tae-gether! Ye can no teach him tricks that a wild umbrella wud’ no duplicate und then try tae say the things ye see him do are real. Whose to know which ye taught him und which he knew? “

Kim wanted to argue with him, wondering if she had the same look of disappointment on her face as her friend Susan?

“ The only problem is, if this species dies out, whose going tae care what we do, or don’t do, Pops? “

“ Aye. “ He agreed gently, walking to their side. “ Ever ’a day we lose new life from this ole earth. Our Government is spraying defoliant on the Amazon tae try und stop the traffic in cocaine, killing how many hundreds of species o’ wee beasties we’ve never even had time tae name und study? Ever’a creature, from a tree frog tae a water buffalo in Laos has its place in the course o’ Nature, but this may o’ may no be one that Nature has decided tae discontinue, like the dinosaurs, even widout man’s conscious interference. It’s one o’ the cruel ironies o’ growing up that we hae tae stand by and no be able to change the future, o’ know if the changes we make now might not cause greater harm down the road? “

“ I just want to go swimming, Pops. “ Susan said angrily, brushing at the tears in her eyes because she suddenly felt so helpless against threats she hadn’t even guessed until that moment.

He gathered the girls tenderly to his side. Reaching down to kiss the top of his granddaughter’s head in sorrowful apology.

“ Und that’s what we will do. We’ll laugh again tae day, I promise. We’ll swim und we’ll play wid our little friend here, und we’ll teach him while we learn from him. I hae no crystal ball tae know what the future will bring, but I know what’s happened in the past. The world we see around is ver’a different from what the pioneers saw, but if we truly care fer each o’ther und this gud earth till the LORD returns, then we’ll hae no reason tae hang our heads in shame when we walk beside Him und the animals can talk tae us again, und we tae them. I wonder what that little guy will say? “

“ Oh, Pops! I love you! “ Susan exclaimed, throwing her arms around her grandfather’s neck. Her fingers brushed Kim’s hair as she pulled back, but as she remained near them, with tears in her eyes there was a joy and a sense of belonging she hadn’t felt in a very long time! A new sense of contentment and peace settled into her heart as she sat down beside the bearded Scotsman and the other girl and began to unlace her tennis shoes as well. Taking care of one individual ‘umbrella’ wasn’t like making a life’s commitment or anything! Kiefer was willing to take the next five years to explore his own place in his father’s world. Why couldn’t she? A giggle escaped that was shared by the shorter girl, and a lightness filled Kim’s heart. At least for the rest of this afternoon she could just be a girl with a new best friend, seeking to help something unable to help itself. This afternoon was far ahead to plan, with the bearded Scots man so near to protect them as well!

Drawn by a powerful instinct buried deep in its primitive brain, a undersized Hansen’s Bell cautiously used his newly discovered ability to chemically inflate its hull to ease the unpleasant grate of contact with the rocks stirred by the secondary currents at the edges of the Island where the sea and the bare skeleton of the mountain merged at sea level. The weight of the oversized fish he’d blundered into kept pulling him under where there was the most turbulence and a moment’s annoyance had caused the automatic release of the hormones necessary to active the unused buoyancy of his tough outer shell. With the curiosity of a child discovering the hidden pleasures of a new toy he tentatively tried several things, including an attempt to lighten the inert fish tangled in his stunning tentacles. Nor was he was able to pull the bulky object inside his central pouch despite the frenzy of smaller fish who darted in to snatch mouthfuls of his prize and rocket away before he could push them away or defend his prize, no matter how hungry he was. But in the struggle, a floating piece of skin and raw fish struck one of his larger tentacles and he discovered the cobra shaped pad could also be used as a scoop to bring things near his mouth. Once the stillness of the water allowed him to better direct the floating mass of stinging tentacles suspended under his football shaped hull the feeding swarm disappeared as quickly as it began, and he was left with a sizeable amount on which to feed hungrily. With all of his coppery blood now concentrating on breaking down and digesting his first full meal in weeks, his intellect dozed in the warm, sun filled water, totally oblivious to the very real dangers to his existence by remaining so close to the water’s surface. To his good fortune there were no large birds hunting on that side of the Island as he sunned himself, the monarch of all his four eye packets surveyed. Though he lacked the intelligence to have made those changes by reason, depending on Instinct for his survival these first hundred years of existence in the moist blackness of the deepest ocean trenches as the globe circling currents lead him back to a familiar taste in the water, he had begun an unwilling rise toward a vague, buried memory and a new anxiety as each fathom’s rise brought him in contact with faster moving predators, demanding his primitive brain awake and memorize the acts which helped it to feed and to survive.

Because he had lived, enduring each successive change awakened along his DNA codes, he gradually added his own decisions to the acts needed for survival that Instinct provided to all of his kind. Few survived long enough to reach the depths where he had dwelled in sleepy limbo, and fewer still survived the rise to sunlight demanded by the changes occurring within their maturing bodies. And those who did were still required by a fluke of chance to first cross a boundary filled with deadly enemies that would inevitably sting them to death except during the short time all of the mature Spiny Urchins had been killed by the dying mother acaleph so she could release her hatchlings into the great salt expanse she’d left to reproduce her own. Had it arrived only two weeks earlier all of his new found wisdom would have died as quickly as the fish that blundered into his stinging tentacles and all that he gained would have been lost to the cleansing actions of wave and bottom feeding sea creatures. With no sense of destiny, he pulled himself unto the Kim warmed rocks, grateful to find rest from the relentless southern currents between the two former mountaintops. Unglimpsed by predatory bird or human eyes, it rested on the rounded, exposed rock until the chemical and nutrients used up by the difficult passage could be replenished inside its twin layered hull. Enjoying the strange flight of memories that the taste of this weathered rock was reawakening.

He could remember being pressed very near others of his own kind as they lay in their tough, leathery shells waiting to hatch in the sand. He recalled the measured clicks and whistles from his brothers and sisters still in their shells, and a ‘song’ sung to calm and reassure them by the creature being a mother for the first and last time in her long life. Led by Instinct, just as he had been drawn back here by a force he couldn’t comprehend, or deny! She had released her young to the waiting sea as her last breath ebbed from her body. A mother’s sacrifice to ensure the lives of her young. The constant fight for survival at these sunlit heights since it reached sea level sharpened its natural defenses. Once the greenish copper flow returned to the central cortex, to be carried to every part of its body with renewed vigor and necessary nutrients for thought and movement, it began to watch with three eye-packets for the swift wings of sure death from the sky, while the fourth looked over the barrier of impassible rock which kept it from being able to enter into the relative stillness of the fresh water near enough to touch and taste with one of its cobra shaped hoods.

Whether by accident or design, there was a bead of curiosity embedded in the bean sized medulla oblongata that normally withered away by the time the maturing medusa was strong enough to survive the change in water depth and salinity with its slow passage to the surface, and escape the enormous number of predators ready to devour itin a mindless gulp. At the first burning sting of the maturing Urchin the startled youngster pulled back the fleshy pad he’d used for exploration, saving his life. Soaking away some of the sting and the fire in the chill salt water, he used his limited intelligence to draw conclusions from the shocking and painful experience, to avoid it in the future if possible. Unaware that his back was becoming speckled with dark desalination ports, as hormonal changes automatically began to reshape his internal makeup within the durable hull, making him more difficult to see from the air and allowing him to enter the fresh water on the other side where he would live out the two hundred years remaining of his existence, if he survived the swim across the length of the crystalline lagoon. He had no way of knowing he would die if he attempted to return to the salt environment where he’d lived since being released by his mother; his primitive brain stem was functioning blindly along genetic codes embed in its DNA. All he knew for sure was that he was thirsty for the first time in his life and that the rocks above him were on fire! It might have ended there, with Nature’s emphasis on the species rather than the individual, if the ground hadn’t begun to shake at the exact moment he began to loosen the draw string on his inner sac to release his feeding tentacles back into the salt water. The sea began to broil around him, where there had been only calm water in the deep pool formed by eons of flowing water the moment before!

Dust and pent up gases belched out of the rocky entrance to Greshon Falls a hundred and twenty feet over his head, as the portion of the waters held back by the landslide fallen across the lake deep in the Vault gave way, rumbling up and over the natural barricade like a runaway locomotive, picking up speed, debris and living animals from the water in its path. Though some of the water was pulled down through the new fissure by gravity, centrifugal force carried the bulk of the water forward, pouring out of the worn stone, resuming the spectacular waterfalls without warning.

Most of the blind, and soft fleshed creatures it carried with it died in the plunge to the sea, but the first wave of water that struck the hard, flat surface of the inland sea bounced skyward, as if off of concrete, washing the shocked, football shaped acaleph up and over the band of lava where the Urchin colony was flourishing.

The Urchins mature enough to be dark brown or black with scarlet bands burst open in a brown dust as the returning water raised the height of water inside the narrow troth, but many of the immature medusa that were still anchored to the inside of the rock survived. Despite thousands of microscopic young being washed into the deep water of the lagoon, to be eaten or crushed by the weight of the water, enough survived to repopulate their narrow environmental range, and the remainder of the water sprayed down on the motionless lagoon with care for the calamity of near extinction for another species on the Earth.

The uninjured juvenile bobbed upside down in the lagoon water, unable to comprehend why all four of its eyes were seeing the same view. Its belly exposed to the air while the hundreds of finger-like cillia around the base of its football shaped hull waved frantically in the air, as helpless as a turtle on its back! The motion drawing the attention of the hungry young eagle following the air currents from van Dantz Island to his home.

Seeing the familiar food source on top of the water, Bruno dove, his wings arched back, gathering weight as the moisture from the air slipped over the flight feathers, streamlining and speeding his armed descent. But the young juvenile managed to right himself and deflated his hull just in time to avoid a direct hit by the outstretched talons. Unaccustomed to the weight and the slap of the water after months of hunting a prey incapable of deep water flight, the disappointed young eagle dropped the formidable object and raised back up sharply to avoid flying head long into the poxed lava wall surrounding the lagoon.

By the time he cleared the high wall and returned, the familiar object was disappearing into the narrow cave at the base of the lagoon. However, an abundance of dead fish and eels bobbed up and down on the sea current, as if they were still alive. Warning off the squabbling Gulls with a throaty cry, Bruno swept across the choppy waters just below the returned if lessened flow of Gresham Falls, seizing up a sizable white eel from the white-capped water. By now his wings were tired but he had young to feed, and no longer any mate to share his burdens in meeting their new young’s voracious appetites.

Alighting on the edge of the platform where Eddy Logan carefully raised him by hand from a gawky hatching, he used his strong yellow beak to rip the lifeless eel into manageable chunks, dropping the larger share into the gullet of the larger female chick, responding solely to the fact that she was the stronger and more agile of the two. For this meal at least there was more than enough to feed both chicks for the rest of the afternoon. He ate quickly, watching the sky for other predators or anything that might threaten his young from the clouds of Mount Topaz the Greater.

The juvenile male rested easily at the mouth of the cave, feeling the water bubble up from deep in the earth and flow past him, out into the warm, predator filled sunlight he was only too glad to escape. Keeping his place was easy in the passive upwelling of water now that much of the flow was no longer backed up by the recent landslide. The tastes on the water were new and exciting to him, forming images on his primitive brain that few others of his species bothered to experience of remember.

He’d never come this far before. His mother had made her nest on the sunlit sands outside the cave. Releasing her young directly into the sea under strong moonlight, after defeating every adult enemy who would otherwise have stung them to death on contact. Everything was new and exciting to him. But having learned by experience that anything could happen this close to the surface, he tightened the draw string on his pouch which protected his most delicate and vulnerable tentacles. Allowing the enduring acaleph to sink slowly downwards into the welcoming darkness of the fourth tunnel, moving toward the greater unknown with renewed confidence; in Nature’s promise of continuation, and change.

The End

Chapter 11

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