So Wild A Dream

ChapterOne Eden. Sam always took a long time looking down into it first, and listening. His eyes would sweep up every detail, his ears soak up every breath of sound and silence. The sounds would be songbirds, this early in the morning chickadees and blue jays, when the sun was higher, cardinals and song sparrows. Silence would mean something out of order, an intruder. Perhaps himself, if he was careless. Perhaps a bear or other danger. He stood still and let himself taste Eden's climate before he eased off the trail, onto the slope below the ridge and down to the creek, where limestone outcroppings offered a lookout. He slipped down, like descending into another world, an enchanted place. Eden. This was a childish fantasy, he knew. Eden, where the human race was born, where the first man saw all the things of the earththe fliers, bird or bee or wild turkey or screech owl; the four-legged, squirrel, coon, deer, bear; the crawlers, snake, worm, snail; the rooted grasses, wild roses, beeches, poplars, the great oaks, the rambling vines; the swimming fish, and myriads more, beyond knowing and again and again beyond. The perfect place, Eden, and at the same time the home of the snake. Sam was deathly afraid of snakes. Now he stepped softly into the little hollow, putting his foot gently on the winter-dry leaves to lessen the noise of his passing. He padded softly down the long slope. When he got to the limestone, he climbed the jutting he knew would give him the best view up and down the stream. He set down the long rifle he inherited from his father and stretched out on the rock. In a few minutes the forest would accept him, and again would breathe normally. Sam came here to remember and to balm his loneliness. Two years ago on Christmas Eve, an afternoon nearly as warm as this one, his father came to Eden to die. Last year and this year Sam came down here the day before Christmas, his own seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays, to be alone with his father on the day of his death, as near as could be. Lewis Morgan, who liked to call himself the Celt, didn't say anything about dying that pleasant winter afternoon, said he was feeling better and wanted to get out of the house for a while, walk around his own place, smell the air and feel the fragile sunshine. No one suspected, though they should have, since the stomach trouble had been eating at him so many months. Lew's wife pooh-poohed the ideayou need your rest. The Celt's other son and his daughters shook their heads at such foolishness. But the Celt asked Sam to walk down to Eden with him. It was their favorite place, their father-son place. Nothing much really, a dip between two hills with some limestone outcroppings and a creek. But it was graced with a kind of beauty, and it felt like theirs. The Celt had spent hours and hours, days and days here, teaching Sam to see a forest, how life circled through it in a thousand ways and back again. Owen, the Celt's eldest, had no interest in such things. To him the forests of young America were a blackboard left blank by the Creator for men to write on. Owen was eager to get on with that job. The Celt had founded a mill. Owen was bringing in a blacksmith, a tinsmith, a cooper, and a store for the far-flung farmers. Lew Morgan's little clearing was now a town. The twenty-mile track to Pittsburgh was becoming a road. Soon all things would be decent, and civilized. Other times the Celt would tell Sam stories about his Welsh ancestors. Sam liked those stories, but he liked even more the tales of Daniel Boone, and especially Simon Kenton. Kenton fought with Boone in Kentucky, and fought the Shawnees across the river in Ohio. Kenton came to be the kind of man people looked up to and told tales about, even tales that couldn't be exactly accurate but in some way said some truth about theBlevins, Win is the author of 'So Wild A Dream ', published 2004 under ISBN 9780765344816 and ISBN 0765344815.