Wounded by Percival Everett Read Free Book Online Page A

yards or so and at every bend. I had a sack of thirty. I didn’t plan to go exploring deep into the unknown parts, only to visit the big cavern. The room was big relative to the rest of the cave, about the size of a small church, not that I had had much experience with churches. It was nothing like the big caverns at Carlsbad or the ones I’d seen in photographs. It was perhaps forty by forty feet with a ceiling of thirty at its highest point. Zoe stayed close by my leg and that was fine with me. My lantern didn’t throw a lot of light and my headlamp threw less and only where I looked. Giant stalactites hung from the ceiling and stalagmites popped up from the floor, various shapes, sizes, and colors, yellow to red, some ghostly white. I sat and turned off my lights, keeping a hand on Zoe. The only light then was the green glow of the stick I’d broken and left near the entrance to the room. I tried not to touch the stalagmites near me. I’d read how people could damage the surfaces with oils from their skin. I listened to the quiet, interrupted only by the steady, random drips, the drips that came from the mountain above and left infinitesimal amounts of calcium carbonate to make and lengthen the stalactites. I decided I was a trogloxene, a creature that lives outside the cave, but returns frequently. I’d seen sign of small mammals near the entrance on occasion, but never deep within. I’d seen a couple of daddy longlegs, and knew there were probably other spiders. And there had to be something the spiders were eating. I imagined that there were some blind, colorless insects roaming about, but I wasn’t educated enough to find them.
    What I liked about the cave, and perhaps any cave, the idea of a cave, was the place where light from the outside ceased to have any influence. That was why I liked being in it at night. I turned my lamps back on and made my way back long before any of my light sticks might begin to fade.
    Back at my bedroll, I put a couple of medium-sized sticks on the embers and gave them a gentle blow until they showed orange and flared. I then added the split end of a fat log I’d dragged in earlier. Zoe trotted off outside to take care of business and I followed.
    I started back to my house well before first light. I couldn’t sleep because of Zoe’s snoring and for some reason my horse would not stand easy at the cave’s mouth. As I made my way across the creek and through the south gate, I thought something looked odd near the barn. As I reached the edge of the big field I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The mule was lying on his side, trying to wriggle his body under the bottom rail of the paddock fence. I rode up slowly and looked down at him. Only his head and neck were out, but they were well out. The mule opened his right eye wide and looked up at me, but, in that mule way, he didn’t panic. He just let his head slap into the dust and lay there.
    “So, what now?” I asked in a calm voice.
    The mule didn’t move.
    I dismounted and dropped to my knee in front of the animal’s nose. This was a potential disaster. If the mule got excited and tried to get up, he could be in real trouble. I couldn’t push him back because he might go nuts. I decided to back off and let the mule figure it out for himself. I tied the Appaloosa, unsaddled, then sat on a bale of straw and watched the mule from a distance. The damn thing lay motionless for better than half an hour.
    The sun was good and up and the animal hadn’t moved a muscle. The horses were getting antsy, waiting for breakfast.
    Gus came from the house. “You’re back. What are you doing?”
    “I’m watching one of god’s creations,” I said.
    Gus looked over at the mule. “What’s he doing?”
    “Hell if he knows.” I stood and stretched. “I guess I’ll feed everybody. I’ll be inside in a while.”
    “You want flapjacks?”
    “Sounds great,” I said.
    I made the rounds, throwing hay, scooping grain, dumping bad