The Monarch of Bull Mountain --DONE!--

[Trumpkin the Dwarf]

ttt

[Doc Nock]

Man, this thing is like a icey slope on a steep mountanside, jus keeps slipping to the wrong page...

[ron w]

  Chapters are to short and to far apart...lol........  

[hardwaymike]

TTT! Just trying to remind jhg that we're still waiting,lol. Love it jhg! Keep it coming please.

[Trumpkin the Dwarf]

Up for the night!

[jhg]

More soon- been swamped...


Joshua

[turkey522]

[jhg]

"Dad...?"

It was his daughter calling ahead of the season.  It was also Sunday. She always called on Sunday.

The plan was he would hike in to their bivy camp over the first week and cache some foods. Anything to save them from heavy packs going in the first night. They only had three days.
If he happened to cross the path of the Monarch that first week and alone, well, then he would take his chance.

The archer told her about his visit to the shanty and the arrows Husky had made for him.

"They flew okay? Really?"

"I shaved a fletch second arrow..."

"Sweeet!"

"I know. And he did it guessing my draw..."

"You like him a lot don't you" It was more a statement than a question.

"Yes."

"Dad?"

"Hmmm?"


"Did Husky really shoot a Robin Hood with the self bow he made?"

"I saw it pumpkin. Third arrow."

He could almost hear her thinking. He thumbed a button on his shirt, letting her the time.
Then finally,

"Wow."

"No kidding..."

Dad?" The archer loved it when his daughter asked him a hundred questions.

"Is Husky like Grandpa?"

The archer could hear the slight fuzz of the connection in the ear piece. A clock ticked from inside the darkness of the living room. She didn't remember her Grandpa. Sometimes he wasn't sure he remembered him. The memory of him sometimes seemed entangled with the longing.

"Yes sweetheart. He is like your Grandpa."

"Well, then I'd like to meet this Husky mountain man arrow wizard person." She laughed at herself and her word-smithing and the archer knew he loved her as deeply as a father could love .


Dawn found the archer a quarter way up the long bush-whack to the high top of Bull Mountain. He took care to pace himself. The air coming down off the slope above him felt thick and cool against his hot cheek. He opened his vest, then shed it. The grade continued to rise like a relentless wave in front of his tilted body. His lungs pulled in large doses of air. He found his pace just on the edge of physical discomfort where the contest between the need for more oxygen balanced with the equally great need to clear his system of carbon dioxide.
He knew the way and hiking under his headlamp he had allowed himself to fall into a sort of trance. He was hypnotized by the methodical rhythm of his own legs, his breathing and the ground rising to meet him. But when light began to sift through the canopy of mixed aspen and spruce and lit the secret woods places, he became alert and brought his bow to his off hand. It felt light resting there and familiar. The archer checked his compass every few minutes until he could see as needed to understand exactly where he was on the mountain side.

Finally he stopped. Laying down his bow and taking off his pack, the archer allowed himself to listen to the forest around him, slowing down his breathing until it calmed, a mirror of the mountains own profound stillness.  The archer listened carefully. Husky had said something  that he remembered now. He felt his body blending into the mountain until he was of it. When he looked into the forest around him he didn't see a place any longer. He saw an extension of his own self same soul. He knelt down and pushing his hands into the thick duff under him he inhaled deeply the aroma of generations of life and death there among the needles and composting leaves.
Someplace up and ahead of him the archer knew was the Monarch of Bull Mountain. Some place up and ahead the Bull was waiting...

[Trumpkin the Dwarf]

 You should know better than to stop there!  

[Huntrdfk]

Great story, love reading this!


David

[Doc Nock]

Excellent... Grandpa, indeed!

Son, you've been in those places more than one time, felt that damp dank earth in your nostrils and the exertion pulling at your arteries... to be able to pen such graphic scenes.

Thank you for taking us along... When you're ready...    Like I said, you've got enough sub-plots running in this to keep it alive all summer!

A novel in the making...  

[jhg]

The Bull tilted his head and the massive rack that crowned it swayed like a bone limbed tree. He took one step forward and the other bull had seen enough, turning in place to put some timber between them. The rut had not even started and there was no shame in retreat so as to perhaps consider another day. The Monarch stood still and listened to the younger bull climbing the slope. Motionless, the muscled shoulders of the Bull still seemed to undulate with power and even the small squirrels storing seeds gave way to his majesty, scolding as his presence dominated everything around him. The Bull was showing the fine results of a summer of rest and thick browse, his coat a healthy sheen. He tested the scent laden drifts of cool air that brought him their secrets and tattle tales, assessing each bit of information, dissecting its meaning, balancing its message against his years of experience and innate caution. He didn't like being away from his secret canyon. He was not afraid to leave it behind for many days either, especially in the fall when the urge to spend more time walking his old familiar haunts and reasserting his place among the elk that lived there became strong.

A downey woodpecker climbed a tree nearby, his rat-a-tat-tat workman-like. The Monarch watched him, not in focus, but as one piece of a larger reality without a beginning and with no end. The Bull simply experienced everything around him as an extension of himself.
He walked forward and soon found himself among a small group of other elk that had been feeding along the break between black timber and aspen. Here was good water, plentiful grasses and forbes,   tender aspen shoots from spring growth and reliable breezes to bring warning. He knew this place well and walked out among the other elk almost ignoring them in a display of regal assertion. It was his habit from many years of total and unconquerable certainty that his place was unique and unassailable. But the Monarch knew he would be challenged. It was the way of things wild and he welcomed it. He was more than willing to play his part in the ancient struggle, even if it meant death.
He quietly bugled to assert his position. It was an invitation and a warning. An invitation to any cows that he was welcoming them into his protection and a warning to any other bulls nearby that in the coming weeks they might well consider carefully their actions. But during the coming rut, there were always bulls that could not control their desire even under the red flag of better judgment. This is when the Monarch would tender them no mercy and if he was given the chance he would put them down into the black dirt of the high top on Bull Mountain so that there would be no doubt as to who was in charge or who was to be punished.

As the years had passed the Bull found himself less and less willing to waste his energy on encounters that could be determined in other less physically expensive ways. Without knowing it and without thought, the Bull had simply adapted to the realities of elk life. He unconsciously understood that to prevail he must portion his physical expenditures against the deposits that had been carefully made all summer. It was not wisdom that had taught him this, but an innate knowing that he was not as quick as he once had been in his youth, nor as strong. Therefor he waited his chance carefully so that the outcome was certain and always in his favor. He sensed that to ever falter would be the end of his reign as Monarch of Bull Mountain.  This chafed against the reality that the Bull could not ever accept a lesser position than the one he had fought for and earned so many years ago against the Black Bull of Deadman Gulch. It was that moment the die was cast that separated the Bull from the others.  He wanted to be King. No other role would ever be satisfactory and the Bull would have died in the struggle to attain it.  This one fact, more than his size, was what made the Bull special. It had been mere luck that so many years ago the Black Bull had relented long enough that the Monarch, with no foe in front of him, had thought the contest over and somehow limped away. If the contest had been pressed he would have fought on until killed. He simply could never surrender.

[Pete Patterson]

You are, indeed, the Monarch of word crafting.  Were you once an elk?

[4dogs]

Very good, very good indeed. I am really enjoying this story.

[Cyclic-Rivers]

 THANK YOU!

[lovethehunt]

I can even see it happening! Keep it coming  

[AZStickman]

Your writing is like watching a runner hitting his stride down the home stretch..... Good stuff..... Terry

[23feetupandhappy]

I can smell it, see it, and tast it..........

Well done "O Weaver of Words"  

[ScottV_7]

Good stuff sir!    

[giff]

WOW