The Beyond by Jeffrey Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

tail. It appeared to be a person, standing still, gazing down into the moving water. When he reached the spot, he spun slowly in a circle, staring sharply into the trees.
    â€œShow yourself,” he called out. He listened for the sound of breaking twigs or rustling in the underbrush. “A bear?” he wondered. Something inside told him to run, and he did, all the way back to the cave, Wood following at his heels.
    He insisted upon using the rocks to start a fire. Because of this, they did not eat until the moon had risen in the star-filled sky. As he prepared his blanket to lie down, he heard the owl suddenly call from outside the cave. Although the bird came now almost every night, on this particular visit its cry set Cley’s heart to pounding. The dog looked over at him and then toward the mouth of the cave, sensing his master’s anxiety. For the first time since early winter, the hunter loaded a shell into the rifle’s chamber. He kept the weapon across his knees as he read to Wood, and slept that night in a sitting position, his finger wrapped lightly around its trigger.
    On the day that Cley took the last deer needed to complete the tent, he wandered back toward the cave past a stand of gray, barren trees he had passed at least a hundred times throughout the winter. On this trip, though, he noticed something he had never seen before. In among the trunks he spied an unusual object sticking up out of the ground. He moved cautiously over to it, and there he found, of all things, a pickax, its handle half-buried in the ground. Dangling from a strap off one of the points was an old helmet, tiny holes eaten through the rust.
    He lifted the headpiece to see if affixed to the front there was a device to hold a candle. When he found what he was looking for, he knew he had discovered one of the graves of the explorers who had struck out years earlier from Anamasobia. It had been told to him by Arla Beaton that they had been dressed in their mining gear, on a quest to discover the Earthly Paradise. He remembered the story—sixteen of them, and the only one to return was Arla’s grandfather. Cley could not help but smile at the ridiculous equipment they had brought, as if they had intended to excavate miracles from the Beyond. The wilderness had wasted no time in turning their tools into grave markers. Still, the hunter felt a sense of camaraderie with the fallen miner and knelt before the crude memorial. He tried to think of something to say, but remained silent. A minute later, he took up his pelt and whistled for Wood.
    On a clear patch of frozen ground, he scratched out with his knife a crude design for the tent carrier he imagined. It had to be light with thin runners since it wouldn’t be pulled over snow but instead the grass of the plain. He determined that the perfect branches for the device would be those of the carnivorous tree that devoured sparrows and starlings, since they were long, straight, and pliant enough to shape.
    It was one thing to draw on the ground with a knife and quite another to hack the limbs off a tree with a volition to eat flesh. The one he chose to attack was not strong enough to lift him and stuff him down into the opening at the top of its trunk, but it tried to. He could hear the tree’s digestive juices bubbling within as he hacked at its limbs. The grasping twigs at the ends of the constantly moving branches kept pulling at him, and it hurt madly when they wrapped around his hair and beard. All the time Cley worked, Wood paced nervously a few feet away, barking at the giant with which his friend appeared locked in combat. Occasionally the dog charged in and tried to bite the many-armed enemy but was unsure as to where to sink his teeth.
    After much struggle, the required branches wriggled on the ground like a brood of snakes. From their cut ends oozed a dark green sap.
    â€œThat’s the damnedest thing,” said Cley, waiting for their life to drain