That the soil was harder’n the skin of a pachyderm was his first surmise. The second was that he didn’t have the faintest of what to lay eyes on. Every lump in the ground looked like the next, nothing special to the senses. His tools clanked and stopped short at the surface, scarcely raising up enough dirt to bury a rodent. The Seeker was given to any kind of trial, especially the ones that contorted his limbs and loosened his self-consciousness, ways that no man would make his own body in company. He tried to remind himself to resist appointing knowledge and would just learn what could be learnt from a scant survey out here on God’s red earth. He trotted along what he thought to be obvious looking places, swaying his arms from side to side with a gait that all men comfortable in their faculties possess.
When he arrived the sky had been like a tarnished copper pot, darkest at its horizon with a palegreen oxidation atop its wide expanse. By and by it had become fully corroded, like a colonial patina. He leaned on his shovel and wiped his brow as he watched the evening drained of its last light. This land, he felt, was a bona fide hearth brimming with treasures. The Seeker had always prided himself on his common sense and was content to give the day no more. What he needed was a studied hand and a learned eye. He stroked his coarse wiry beard and held himself to reflect on the prospects of his venture. Reaching down into his pockets he pulled out an assortment of rocks and dirt clods and began to roll them along the contours of his palm, eyeing them for a clue of artifice.
The Seeker wondered if the hand of God could have also carved rock and sediment to purpose the patterns to the tribe of man, his effigies and imagined designs. He turned from the field and made his way to the fence that gave him entry. The fence hugged a great patch of trees. The Seeker couldn’t remember where he came in, so a spot with the least amount of obstructive growth would do. He hooked his left boot onto the highest wire he could manage and steadied himself on a fence post as he hurled the rest of his body up and over, praying that his weight would not compromise the makeshift barrier. Back into the woods he struggled for orientation. Best bet, he thought, is to make like the crow till he meets the clearing. Follow the hunting trail then back to the road.
Several meters through the thick and he heard a lone cry. The first prompted the Seeker to feverishly pirouette, attempting to locate the source. He did not like its mystery, that it was a sinister bark, sickening in tone. Soon a chorus swelled like the voracious gnawing of bone, an atonal cacophony. Every rustle of leaves and gust of wind was then the gaping maw of a great dark beast jostling and lumbering in anticipation of blood. The ancestral grounds pounded and heaved like a taut hide and the Seeker felt their pulse and his too. His tools ching’d and tinked at his side as he danced crazily through the trees like a deranged marionette.
In the clearing his delirium subsided and he lay still under the moon listening to the evil drones. The Indians must have enchanted this place long ago, he thought. Their savage magic was cast into the land to protect the last vestiges of their earthly remains. He would return only at daybreak when the forests were far from the accursed afflictions of nightfall and the dew beaded on every surface like orbs of nectar.
