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Shades of Night; Collected Short Stories: 1996-1999
Oak of Ropes
Chapter 1 Page 1
Shades of Night; Collected Short Stories: 1996-1999
Oak of Ropes
Chapter 1 Page 1
1. Oak of Ropes
Oklahoma Territory
December, 1864
Dawn's gun metal gray sky absorbed the sun irrevocably, dispensing its light like a miser dolling out pennies. A soft snow was falling. The wind was a whisper through twisted branches of sage brush and beaux d'arc trees. Autumn's fallen leaves rustled with the wintry stir to tumble into drifts, which grew in the clay draws of a creek. Frozen into a sparkling ribbon of crystal, the creek snaked through shallow valleys, from one low, rocky hill to the next, roughly following an outcropping of slate that formed a ridgeline pointed southeast. Where this ridge ended, the frozen stream turned sharply due south to flow over a rough, graveled bed. Somewhere in that direction, the Red River marked the boundaries of Texas, and warmer lands beyond. As though mourning its fate, a towering live oak stood rooted at the bend, just where the slate disappeared once more beneath a cover of topsoil.
Its thick boughs were gnarled and much twisted, but were not unhandsome. Its lowermost branches drooped down to within a man's height of the ground, only to rise up towards the sky at their distal ends, reaching to the storming heavens high above. Climbing more than two hundred feet into the air, the great oak shadowed hundreds of square feet with its evergreen leaves, and was by far the tallest thing to be seen for many miles in all directions. The scrubby beaux d'arcs and marauding mesquites that populated this wilderness were no match for its majestic growth, and offered nothing nearly so hospitable as the oak's shade in times of summer, or its shelter in times of winter.
William Morgan, known to most as Point, cinched his coat collar tighter around his makeshift muffler and huffed a great plume of steaming breath. It was cold. Too damned cold. What I need is a nice, hot fire. Only he didn't have his tinder box, and most everything he saw was days damp. There was plenty of natural flint lying around, some of it of the dark, glassy kind best for making sparks, but no amount of chipping rocks was going to start a flame in this weather. Point knew it. Just like he knew that he was a dead man if he didn't find shelter soon.
Thus he was drawn to the gigantic oak tree and its harboring arms. Point had herded market bound cattle along the creek for many years, so he knew the territory well enough to recognize the run of that sway backed slate ridge and its accompanying creek.
Even now, as he stumbled along, often cutting his bare feet on sharp stones and thorny twigs, Point could see the oak's uppermost branches outlined in silhouette against a dimly glowing sky. Almost there. Just keep goin'. Don't stop. You're almost there.
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