Rose Eagle by Joseph Bruchac Read Free Book Online Page B

comfortable boots on my feet.
    A considerable crowd of people gathered just outside Big Cave to wave good-bye. Uncle Lenard was among them, with his arm around Aunt Mary. That was understandable, seeing as how he could not stand on his own. Though there was no need for her to be holding his hand like that.
    I looked over at Phil. His outfit was pretty much the same as mine. We looked like twins — fraternal, not identical, and me being the bigger and uglier one. But there were some differences in the way we were geared up. First of all, I did not have a big compound bow and a quiver of arrows over my shoulder like he did.
    I knew where that bow and those arrows came from. They were a gift from Lenard Crazy Dog. Aunt Mary had told me about some of the conversation that Phil had with Uncle Lenard. How after Lenard had ascertained that Phil was pretty good with a bow and arrow, he’d told my traveling companion how to locate the stash where his spare weapons were hidden, which also included the big .45 revolver now holstered on Phil Tall Bear’s belt.
    And also there was no little mouse on his shoulder like there was on mine, half hidden by my thick black hair and squeaking encouraging sounds in my ear.
    As he waved to the crowd, a smile on his face, Phil spoke to me out of the corner of his mouth.
    â€œI don’t know about you, Rose Eagle, but I am scared as hell.”
    All I said back was “Me, too.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    W e followed what used to be one of the main highways leading into the Ridge, old Route 2. Its cracked pavement had never been removed, even after the advent of the new modes of transport that didn’t need conventional roads but could hover and then whiz across the countryside over any surface, whether rough or smooth.
    The sun was still rising above the plain, its light no longer the deep gold of past centuries. It was still bright, but with a strange sheen to it as it shone through the Silver Cloud that now cloaked our planet. Fortunately, that Cloud seemed to let through enough of our star’s energy for photosynthesis to take place. In fact, plants now seemed to be growing better and faster than they had before. Another reason why our gardens outside Big Cave were so abundant with produce.
    If not for the monsters set loose on the land, that Cloud might even have been seen as a blessing in some ways. It had ended the rule of people who had become less human with every passing year, more indifferent to those they ruled, more capricious in their behavior. We never knew back then what strange edict they’d pass from one cycle to the next. Not just the Freedom From Religion Laws, but rules about what we could wear on certain days, new games they would invent that proles could play for the amusement of the Overlords, changes in the vid-feeds so that one week all we could watch were viddys about animals and the next it would be a steady diet of ancient movies from the twentieth century. Apparently only two things never changed — that we ordinaries were a source of amusement for them, and that we had no hope of anything but lives of work without real meaning. For us who labored in the Deeps, that meant endless work that was likely to eventually kill us.
    The morning sun was in our faces as we trudged along. Our destination was to the northwest, but we were going in the opposite direction for now. That was because of the monsters. If we’d headed west to start with, we’d have been traveling straight into the realm of Old Three Paws and his pack of firewolves.
    I paused and looked back over my shoulder. Phil’s legs were almost as long as mine and the two of us had already covered several miles. Big Cave was no longer in sight, hidden by the folds of the land. But I could see the Black Hills in the distance to the west — our old sacred lands where an evil man named George Armstrong Custer found gold. If he’d lived in the time just