Chapter 1
When I awoke I wasn't sure where I was, but when I tried to move my body felt like rams had used it for butting practice. I was laying on a large flat rock at the edge of a cliff that dropped about twenty feet. I raised my head enough to look over the cliff and saw the river for which I had so desperately ran throughout the night as the forest fire chased me down the animal trail.
I remembered hearing the water running lazily down stream and the wet smell permeating the odor of the soot that covered me as I had fallen at the cliffs edge, exhausted. I hadn't bothered looking for a trail down to the water when I reached the cliff, as I thought I would have to do. My plan was to break a reed at the waters edge and use its hollow tube to breath through if I had to go under water to keep from frying to death in the fire, but the wind had ushered the fire into another direction before I reached the river. I hadn't stopped running, though. The wind is a fickled traveller, and I knew it could easily change directions again, and I had to be far ahead of the fire to survive.
Now, as I looked down at the river in the early morning light, I could see its turqoise color, which implied that it was a glacier fed river, barely above freezing. Had I been forced to go into the river I probably would have died from hypothermia. My two choices would have been death by fire or death by freezing.
Forest fires don't burn in a steady line through the forest. The flames engulf and roar to the top of the trees, tossing glowing embers into the wind that it creates, bombarding the pristine forest for hundreds of feet like an artillery barrage. Where ever the embers touch a new fire begins. A fire can easily over take a person running from it, and actually get in front of you and block your escape.
I thought back to my escape. I was lucky. I could see the trail clearly in the light of the fire that blazed around me as I ran through the night, feeding itself so greedily on the surrounding air that I could feel it being sucked away from me.
Tendrils of tree roots, half buried in the trail and half submerged rocks offered leg breaking obstacles as I ran for my life, but I felt oddly light as I ran, barely touching the earth, hardly paying attention to the dangers that I flew over. It was as if I could sense the protrusions on the trail more than see them. Somewhere before my there had to be a river and I would not stop running until I found it.
Now, the fire lingering only in my nostrils, I could see in the first dim breath of morning light a black bear sitting on a sandy alcove across the river from where I lay prone on the flat rock. He sat on his butt, his legs straight out in front of him with his paws folded in his lap. He gazed at the river with half closed eyes as if he was meditating. The river was about thirty feet across and the cliff upon which I sat at the edge of was about twenty feet above the river. The bear did not notice my presence, or didn't care
In another sandy alcove next to the one where the bear sat was a cow moose and her calf. They grazed with their noses submerged in the waters edge, oblivious of its freezing temperature. Large boulders with trees growing from their cracks separated the bear and the moose, giving each a peaceful seclusion and an unawareness of the others presence.
The scene had almost a spiritual effect on me. Perhaps it was the contrast of serenity I was looking at to the one of desperate flight for survival in which I had spent the night before that struck me as it did at that moment. I lay as still as I could, not wanting to disturb the animals below me, not wanting the scene to change to anything else other than what I saw.
Suddenly from the corner of my eye I saw a bald eagle appear around the bend of the river. He glided inches above the water as he followed its rushing surface. Suddenly his legs lowered and his talons spread as he dipped down and snapped a large salmon from the rivers surface. The eagle stroked the wind with his large wings and rose into the air, the salmon wrestling against the eagles grip, drops of water flying from the fish like sparkling diamonds in the first light of the rising sun. As the eagle rose and came level to where I lay on the flat rocked precipice of the cliff, he glided over to me and hovered on the updraft. He was so close I could have reached out and touched the tip of his wing. We gazed into each others eyes until he started to lose the updraft, and then he stroked the air and flew into the morning, becoming a diminishing silhouette against the rising sun.
I rose to my feet as I watched the eagle disappear, no longer noticing the soreness that I felt upon awakening. I could not explain why, but the experience I had just had with the eagle overwhelmed me. I could feel tears coming to my eyes and a sense of belonging within this timeless setting filled my being. I felt that I could spend the rest of my life right here within this moment and never question my existence again.
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