Uncertain Justice

"Okay, Zebidiah, old man ... what do we have here?" Miles asked the empty air. He cautiously unfolded the sheet of paper that had been placed inside the cover of the journal. The single page felt brittle and ready to crumble.

He opened the top half of the folded piece of paper gently to find a few lines of script followed by what must have been Zebidiah's signature at the bottom. There was a brownish stain at the bottom, something spilled on the paper that was permanent now. Turning the book so the light from the open door fell on it more fully, he read what Zebidiah had written.

To the Pilgrim who fins this

I, Zebidiah Cross Bornd Juli 18, 1806 an Kilt by a

dam ol' Bar in Aprl in the year of our Lord 1852. I figger I aint goin to make it throuh the Niht what with a brok Leg and bustd up bad insid lik the bar lef Me. I go to the Lord hopin he'll receev me in his flok.

Everthin I got in this werld is rite heer in Ston Howse and you kan heve it all Jest git me a decint Christon Buriel whenevir you can and if aint to much truble. I cut all the Animuls loos so they cud get to gras and watre. Take ker of Scar hes a fin old ridin Hors. Cain an Abel are gud pak horses to. Thay will serv You well if You treet em rite.You ken hav all the shinee Stuff an al my Posibles. If you ken let my Sister Abigal Johnson know of my passin. She's livin in Fancy Pennsilvania nowdays. She s a Good womin

Zebidiah Cross By his hand

It took a while for Miles to puzzle through the words old Zebidiah had written but when he did, he had a good time line on the house and its furnishings. If the old man's writing was accurate, he'd been dead for more than a century and a half. That explained the condition of the courtyard outside.

On the other hand, the things left inside the stone house were in pretty good shape. Evidently, the stone building had protected the interior from weather and animals. The dry conditions in the cavern must have helped preserve things that might have otherwise deteriorated.

Well, most things ... he had serious doubts about the seating arrangements. Miles experimented with a cautious wiggle and was rewarded with loud, protesting creaks.

He wanted to lean back to think better but checked himself. The ancient furniture complained about sudden movements. Miles grinned and watched dust motes dancing in the sunlight that spilled through the open door.

One heck of a tough man, Miles considered. It wasn't everyone who had the balls to announce his own death and have enough presence of mind to write out what he wanted done with his property and his body while he was dying. The old man had lived here before the before the airplane had been invented--even before the Civil War.

"Wonder what he would have thought about men walking on the moon," Miles mused. He smiled to himself. "Probably would have labeled anyone claiming to have seen that a damned liar." He reread a couple of the lines in the paper to see if he could make more sense of them.

The will, at least he assumed that's what it was meant to be, wasn't very clear at all. What was the 'shiny stuff' he talked about leaving to the person who found him.

Possibles? Was that a noun--a plural one at that--back in those days? Miles didn't have a clue. He let that go while he pondered the rest of what the old man had written. Suddenly he stopped reading. Zebidiah had asked for a Christian burial. How had that been accomplished ... and who had done it?

The shorthairs on the back of Miles' neck, unusually long in the absence of a haircut for many weeks, began to rise. Miles could feel the ripple of goose bumps forming on his forearms and he shuddered as a chill ran down his spine. His grandfather had referred to it as a rabbit running over his grave. He suppressed the disquieting thought. He looked out of the corner of his left eye, then the right. There was nothing there.

He twisted around, ignoring the chair's protests, to find nothing behind him either. The shadows in the corners of the little hut mocked him. They seemed to say they were hiding more than he knew. He fumbled the flashlight out of his hip pocket and stabbed at the switch. The bright light eliminated the shadows. He couldn't see under the old bunk but it didn't look like anything could hide there. He froze.

"Oh shit," he breathed. He'd assumed the cot held only a pile of old blankets. He hadn't checked them closely. In the flashlight's beam, Miles saw the finger bones of a human hand protruding from a corner of the covers and lying quietly alongside the mound he'd taken as nothing more than a pile of blankets.

Like most Americans, Miles had never seen an actual human skeleton. He'd seen any number of dead bodies in Afghanistan, but all the bones had been decently covered. Skeletons were something else again. The gaping jaws and empty eye sockets of skulls were somehow more evil and repulsive than even the remains of a soldier killed in action.

He didn't get the impression of a serene passing from the thin dried finger bones that were, it seemed, pointed accusingly at him. The blanket twitched in a sudden breeze that blew in through the open door.

Miles lunged out of the old chair, sending it careening across the small room to slam against the back wall. The abused piece of furniture finally gave up its attempt to stay together. Two legs splintered at the contact with the rock and the chair broke up; the seat bounced across the room and over the hearth into the fireplace.

He wasn't there to see the chair's final destruction. Miles bolted for the door and was in the process of getting out of the house as fast as he could. His right boot slipped in the dust on the floor and he nearly fell. Regaining his balance, he found traction and catapulted out the door, banging his left shoulder against the doorframe as he passed through.

He caught himself at the low wall, skidding to a stop before he could run right off the cliff. He slumped on the old wall, suddenly drained of energy. He massaged his sore shoulder and watched the doorway, half expecting a pursuit. After a bit, he remembered to switch off the flashlight.

In minutes, his pounding heart eased and laboring lungs were filled with oxygen. He wiped sweat from his face. Suddenly he was ashamed of having raced out of the little house where the journal's author had lived ... and apparently died.

"Damn, Zebidiah," he complained. "Give me a break would ya? I don't need this, man."

He stood, still rubbing at his shoulder.

"Hell," he chastised himself. "A damn skeleton never hurt anyone. What the hell are you running from anyway? Stupid!"

He was abruptly furious with himself for giving in to instinctive revulsion at the sight of the skeleton. He goaded himself with assorted insults until he was humiliated enough to walk back inside the little stone hut.

Snapping on the flashlight, he walked slowly inside the stone house and up to the old bed with its lumpy blankets. He knew what the lumps were now. Nerving himself, he bent to study the blankets covering old Zebidiah's body. The dying man had pulled them over himself, even dragging a piece of one over his head to cover himself decently. The left hand he'd used to position the covering over his eyes was the only part of his body visible.

The skeletal fingers had seemed to be reaching out for Miles when he first caught sight of them. But that wasn't the case at all. The hand was only lying where it had fallen when the old man breathed his last. Zebidiah had done what he could to make all the arrangements ... the only thing he couldn't manage was his own burial. He'd had to leave that to someone else.

Miles grabbed a corner of the blanket at the foot of the bed. The material hung almost to the floor there and was as far away from the skeletal hand as he could get. Holding the time-ravaged fabric between his thumb and forefinger, he tugged the blanket away to expose the body. Half expecting to see rotting flesh, Miles held his breath. As he pulled the cloth away, the skeletal hand slipped off the blanket and settled beside the hipbone as if the dying man had intended that all along.

He was relieved to find only dry bones, some of them still inside the remnants of deerskin pants and some kind of cloth shirt. Dried and brittle calf-length moccasins still covered the bones of the feet and lower legs. Broken ribs on his left side showed where the bear had mauled him. A few bits of matted hair clung to the top of the skull and the jaw hung open. Old Zebidiah was laughing, having one last joke at Miles' expense. Miles relaxed. He dropped the blanket--the old man's shroud--back in place and stepped back to consider. He glanced at the rude table where the journal lay.

Zebidiah had asked for a Christian burial but no one had come to the little valley in all the decades since his death. Miles was the first visitor here, or at least the first to enter the house in a hundred and sixty years.

Okay ... if Zeb wanted a burial, he would get one. Perhaps someone else would see that Miles was decently buried some day....

Leaving the hut, he walked to his tent against the cavern wall. The surplus entrenching tool, the all-purpose shovel issued by the Army to all its soldiers, had been fastened to the outside of the pack for the past few weeks and had been removed to dig latrines and cover fires. It could also be used to dig a grave for the old mountain man.

§

It took hours to get the grave finished and old Zebidiah settled inside. Miles had decided to bury him down in a grassy area near the foot of the cliff where a huge boulder fallen from above formed a natural tombstone. He dug a hole as deep as he could but it wasn't the traditional six feet in depth; he struck solid rock little more than half that distance into the soil. He tailored the edges of the hole, making as neat a rectangle as possible and gathered a pile of rocks to heap over it in lieu of the extra three feet in depth.

Moments before he died, the lone mountain man had wrapped himself in the wool blanket and Miles left that in place as a shroud. Ancient though it was, it held together well enough with the assistance of three of Miles' safety pins to transport the man's remains. He carried the skeleton respectfully to the gravesite, pulled the pins from the old fabric, and secured them in his shirt pocket before carefully arranging the bundle containing the old man's bones in the hole.

It didn't take long to shovel the dirt back into the grave and piling loose stones on the low mound took even less. Cutting a branch from a nearby pine, he used his hatchet and knife to fashion a makeshift marker. Lashing two pieces of the branch into a cross with a length of rawhide, Miles used the shovel to pound the assembly into the ground at Zebidiah's head. He scrambled to his feet and stood quietly at the foot of the old man's grave for a while.

"Well, Zeb--mind if I call you Zeb?" he asked.

The soft breeze that stirred the treetops carried no rebuke.

"Anyway, old man ... it isn't perfect, but it's the best I could do for ya." He paused to inspect the rectangular mass of rocks and the rough cross. "I'll work on a proper headstone for you, but it won't be much, pardner. It'll have to be of wood. I've never carved letters into a slab of wood, much less rock. Sorry." He stood quiet a moment longer and then turned to walk to the steps on the other side of the alcove and began the circling climb to the cavern.

§

It took a few days to clean out the courtyard, sweep out the stone house and get Miles' meager belongings arranged inside to his satisfaction. The two windows at the front proved to have unbroken glass panes in both of them. Once the many layers of dirt on the outside were brushed and washed away, they illuminated the interior quite well.

The windows weren't much good for looking out of, though. Images tended to swim dizzily if you moved while trying to focus on something outside ... but they did let in the light and that was what was important.

A hunting trip a few days into his stay more than replenished his store of meat and wet tendons from the deer's legs provided fresh sinew with which to shrink-bind the axe head he found to a crudely fashioned handle.

The handle wasn't exactly the correct shape; it didn't feel right in his hands but it did its job well enough. It was easy to bring enough sturdy branches from pine trees to spread over the supports over the terrace. They provided a satisfyingly fragrant and cooling shade from the afternoon sun.

Another trip brought in a supply of pine boughs to replace the ones that had crumbled to dust at a single touch in the old bed and Miles rested comfortably there at night. If Zeb's ghost walked the cabin, he surely didn't mind Miles' presence. Miles slept more soundly than he remembered ever having done in his comfortable home in San Antonio.

Miles used his hatchet and knife to contrive a rough replacement for the chair that had been splintered when he panicked at the first sight of old Zeb's bony fingers. He laughed ruefully whenever he thought of the incident, still ashamed of his reaction.

The heavy table Zeb had put together so long ago had one leg that could have used some work, but the table was shoved hard into the corner of the room and seemed stable enough. Miles didn't bother to even think of replacing table or leg.

After his first hunting trip, Miles used the repaired axe to chop out a large chunk of wood from a freshly fallen tree not too far away across the stream and hacked away at it until he had a roughly shaped monument for Zebidiah's grave. Using the pencil he'd brought with him, he drew Zeb's name and the dates of his birth and what he knew of the date of death on the flat side of the heavy slab of lumber. He carved everything with the heavy blade of his hunting knife, working as carefully as he knew how.

When he finished, he was surprised how good a job he'd managed. He'd carried it to the grave and presented it to Zeb. He showed the old man what he'd done before he inserted the head "stone" in a narrow trench at the head of the grave and pounded rocks into the dirt against it for support.

Miles thought the old man would have approved.

§

The stream was full of both rainbow and brook trout. As an alternative to fishing with hook and line, and after a particularly graphic dream sparked, Miles was sure, by an event Zeb described in his journal, Miles carved a spear from a straight tree limb.

After several attempts, he found the correct length of time it took to properly harden the sharp tip in the coals of an open fire. If left too long, the spear tip burned. If not charred enough, there was no hardening.

He got in the habit of carrying the seven-foot staff wherever he went. The two-inch thick shaft was half weapon, half replacement for the walking stick he'd abandoned in the canyon.

He practiced until he could make automatic allowances for the refraction of a fish's images under water and skewer one in a single thrust. It was useful as a probe for the piles of leaves under the hardwood trees too. He hadn't actually seen any snakes, but he thought he heard the disconcerting warning of a mountain rattler more than once.

In the late afternoons, Miles got into the habit of taking the old mountain man's journal out to the restored courtyard and thumbing carefully through the brittle pages. He raced through the tasks he set for himself each day so he could reward himself with an hour or two of slow puzzling through the words Zeb used to describe his travels. He found the old man's account of his life utterly fascinating. He finished the final pages and happily began again, discovering passages he didn't remember seeing the first time.

When it grew too late to see the writing, Miles would lean his chair back on its two rear legs and prop his feet up on the old wall to watch the shadows deepen and expand over the quiet little valley. Alternately extending and relaxing his legs, he rocked back and forth in the gathering twilight. The only thing he could think of to make things better would be the actual rocking chair he'd dreamed of when he first arrived.

§

The big brown bear's shambling gait was clumsier than usual. He hadn't been eating well this spring; he had not, in fact, ever really recovered from the deprivation of the long winter's hibernation. Every so often he stumbled as hunger weakened limbs gave way under him.

The deep wounds were only now beginning to heal on his left hindquarter. He'd been surprised by the attack of the desperately hungry mountain lion nearly three weeks ago. The cougar was herself dead, surprised in turn by the speed of a full-grown grizzly who whipped around to rip out her throat with one powerful slash from the six-inch claws in his massive forepaws. The damage had been done though. Nature seldom shows any compassion for the weak and injured.

Crippled and weakened by the injuries inflicted by the cougar, the grizzly lost a confrontation a few days later with a younger and temporarily stronger grizzly who wanted the elder's territory. Demoralized and growing weaker, the older bear couldn't face another male; he would surely lose again and this time it would mean his death.

The deposed monarch began drifting south, stopping where he could to nurse his wounds but pushing on when challenged. Grizzlies routinely roam territories of a thousand square miles, more when they can push competing males off adjacent land. Being constantly on the move wasn't too extreme an adjustment to make for the old bear.

He crossed the international boundary and lumbered through the mountains of Montana, still ambling south and east. Confused by the increasing profusion of paved roads and people, he fled into deep brush whenever he could. Even so, he was seen often enough. His wound dictated a path through the lower elevations where travel was easier but where contact with humans was almost certain to occur.

The oldster stumbling out of the bar near Missoula, Montana could barely focus his eyes well enough to recognize the huge shape in the parking lot and stopped in his tracks to make identification easier. For his part, the bear sniffed in confusion at the rank odor emanating from the man's clothing.

When the old drunk figured out what was blocking his path, he shrieked in terror. Bear and man fled in opposite directions, both convinced they were in mortal danger.

West of Casper, Wyoming, the grizzly supplemented his usual diet of berries, roots, and grubs by attacking and killing a calf that wandered away from the herd. Two days later he left the remnants of the calf to the coyotes and wolves.

The scavengers' teeth slashed at the meat and bone still left on the carcass, masking all evidence the kill had been made by a bear. Heavy rains plaguing the area this spring washed away his tracks.

Ranchers had been cursing environmentalists who were reintroducing wolves to land where cattle grazed. Several wolves died suddenly at the hands of ranch hands who knew better than to speak of what they'd done. No more calves were killed that spring and the ranchers congratulated themselves on solving the problem. A number of cowboys enjoyed unexpectedly generous bonuses when the fall roundup was done.

A young boy tried to get his dad's attention when he saw the bear just inside a grove of trees near U.S. 40 in northern Colorado. He was watching out the side window of the car while his parents peered through the grimy windshield. Seeing nothing, the father scolded his son for making up stories. Annoyed, he drove on a little faster than he should have.

The boy added the incident to a list of grievances he didn't even know he was compiling. One day, the collected injustices would cause an irreconcilable split between them.