the tree.
He had first heard the creature when he had crawled into the deepest
part of the shallow cave to marvel at the little heaps of bones and small
shattered skulls where the wildcat kittens, perhaps a century before, had
crouched and snarled at feast. Crouching where the baby wildcats once had
crouched, he had felt the presence welling up at him, coming up to him from
the depth of stone that lay far beneath him. Only the presence at first,
only the knowing that something was down there. He had been skeptical at
first, later on believing. In time belief had become solid certainty.
He could record no words, of course, for he had never heard any actual
sound. But the intelligence and the knowing came creeping through his body,
through his fingers spread flat upon the stone floor of the cave, through
his knees, which also pressed the stone. He absorbed it without hearing and
the more he absorbed the more he was convinced that deep in the limestone,
buried in one of the strata, an intelligence was trapped. And finally the
time came when he could catch fragments of thoughts — the edges of the
_living_ in the sentience encysted in the rock.
What he heard he did not understand. This very lack of understanding was
significant. If he had understood he would have put his discovery down to
his imagination. As matters stood he had no knowledge that could possibly
have served as a springboard to imagine the thing of which he was made
aware. He caught an awareness of tangled life relationships which made no
sense at all — none of which could be understood, but which lay in tiny,
tangled fragments of outrageous (yet simple) information no human mind could
quite accept. And he was made to know the empty hollowness of distances so
vast that the mind reeled at the very hint of them and of the naked
emptiness in which those distances must lie. Even in his eavesdropping on
the stars he had never experienced such devastating concepts of the
other-where-and-when. There was other information, scraps and bits he sensed
faintly that might fit into mankind’s knowledge. But he never found enough
to discover the proper slots for their insertion into the mass of mankind’s
knowledge. The greater part of what he sensed, however, was simply beyond
his grasp and perhaps beyond the grasp of any human. But even so his mind
would catch and hold it in all its incomprehensibility and it would lie
there festering amid his human thoughts.
They were or it was, he knew, not trying to talk with him — undoubtedly
they (or it) did not know that such a thing as a man existed, let alone
himself. But whether the creature (or creatures — he found the collective
singular easier) simply was thinking or might, in its loneliness, be talking
to itself — or whether it might be trying to communicate with something
other than himself, he could not determine.
Thinking about it, sitting on the ledge before the cave, he had tried to
make some logic of his find, had tried to find a way in which the creature’s
presence might be best explained. And while he could not be sure of it — in
fact, had no data whatsoever to bolster his belief — he came to think that
in some far geologic day when a shallow sea had lain upon this land, a ship
from space had fallen into the sea to be buried deeply in the mud that in
later millennia had hardened into limestone. In this manner the ship had
become entrapped and so remained to this very day. He realized his reasoning
held flaws — for one thing, the pressure involved in the fashioning of the
stone must have been so great as to have crushed and flattened any ship
unless it should be made of some material far beyond the range of man’s
technology.
Accident, he wondered, or a way of hiding? Trapped or planned? He had no
way of knowing and further speculation was ridiculous, based as it
necessarily must be upon earlier assumptions that were entirely without
support.
Scrambling up the hillside, he finally reached the point where he could
see that, in all truth, the tree had been cut down. It had fallen downhill
and slid for thirty feet or so before it came to rest, its branches
entangled with the trunks of other trees which had slowed its plunge. The
stump stood raw, the whiteness of its wood shining in the grayness of the
day. A deep cut had been made in the downhill side of it and the final
felling had been accomplished by a saw. Little piles of brownish sawdust lay
beside the stump. A two-man saw, he thought.
From where Daniels stood the hill slanted down at an abrupt angle but
just ahead of him, just beyond the stump, was a curious mound that broke the
hillside slope, In some earlier day, more than likely, great masses of stone
had broken from the cliff face and piled up at its base, to be masked in
time by the soil that came about from the forest litter. Atop the mound grew
a clump of birch, their powdery white trunks looking like huddled ghosts
against the darkness of the other trees.
The cutting of the tree, he told himself once again, had been a
senseless piece of business. The tree was worthless and had served no
particular purpose except as a road to reach the den, Had someone, he
wondered, known that he used it to reach the den and cut it out of malice?
Or had someone, perhaps, hidden something in the cave and then cut down the
tree so there would be no way in which to reach it?
But who would hold him so much malice as to come out on a night raging
with wind working by lantern light, risking his life, to cut down the tree?
Ben Adams? Ben was sore because Daniels would not permit hunting on his land
but surely that was no sufficient reason for this rather laborious piece of
petty spite.
The other alternative — that something hidden in the cave had caused
the tree’s destruction — seemed more likely, although the very cutting of
the tree would serve to advertize the strangeness of the place.
Daniels stood puzzled, shaking his head. Then he thought of a way to
find out some answers. The day still was young and he had nothing else to
do.
He started climbing up the hill, heading for his barn to pick up some
rope.
4
There was nothing in the cave. It was exactly as it had been before. A
few autumn leaves had blown into the far corners. Chips of weathered stone
had fallen from the rocky overhang, tiny evidences of the endless process of
erosion which had formed the cave and in a few thousand years from now might
wipe it out.
Standing on the narrow ledge in front of the cave, Daniels stared out
across the valley and was surprised at the change of view that had resulted
from the cutting of the tree. The angles of vision seemed somehow different
and the hillside itself seemed changed. Startled, he examined the sweep of
the slope closely and finally satisfied himself that all that had changed
was his way of seeing it. He was seeing trees and contours that earlier had
been masked.
His rope hung from the outcurving rock face that formed the roof of the
cave. It was swaying gently in the wind and, watching it, Daniels recalled
that earlier in the day he had felt no wind. But now one had sprung up from
the west. Below him the treetops were bending to it.
He turned toward the west and felt the wind on his face and a breath of
chill. The feel of the wind faintly disturbed him, rousing some atavistic
warning that came down from the days when naked roaming bands of proto-men
had turned, as he turned now, to sniff the coming weather. The wind might
mean that a change in weather could be coming and perhaps he should clamber
up the rope and head back for the farm.
But he felt a strange reluctance to leave. It had been often so, he
recalled. For here was a wild sort of refuge which barred out the world and
the little world that it let in was a different kind — a more primal and
more basic and less complicated world than the one he’d fled from.
A flight of mallards came winging up from the pond in the river valley
arrowing above the treetops, banking and slanting up the long curve of the
bluff and then, having cleared the bluff top, wheeling gracefully back
toward the flyer. He watched them until they dipped down behind the trees
that fringed the unseen river.