Walking downstream along the riverbank they held hands, a girl in frayed braids and a boy in tattered Sunday clothes. Talking was impossible beside the deafening surge of white water. A granite wall bent the course of the river southward, between the jutting spine of hills along the horizon. They walked through the land clinging to one another, two flowers in an abyss of cactus and light.
When they came across a snake, the boy sat down in the dust watching as the girl looked around. Finding a stone big enough to wield with both hands, she walked over to the viper and dropped iton its head. She waited, hands on her hips, until it was still. Then, she reached down and seized the tail, stretching it out. The boy got up looking for sticks and pieces of driftwood to make a fire. When he had an armload, he raised his eyebrows. Fire. Since they escaped the raid, she had counted the sun coming up three times. They had traveled far, yet she was unsure about starting a fire. She stopped what she was doing, scanned around, then pointed toward shade where the bank met the rise. Then, she pulled the knife which was too large for her hands, took off the head and tail, and tossed the rattle to the boy. He shook it beside his ear while he watched her skin the snake and remove its guts.
After she cleaned the snake and the knife in the river, she dried the blade on her skirt, stood up, and looked all around. The endless green blur across the water along the other bank seemed full of eyes. Having seen nothing since they had struck out, her better judgement shrank in the wake of hunger and her brother’s smile. The meat seemed a heavenly gift indeed, and she wondered, why had Eve not done the same thing in the garden? Why had she not just taken the serpent’s head off before it had a chance to speak? Even now, we would be living in Eden, she thought.
Starting the fire reminded her of how they had fled from the billowing smoke drifting over the trees and the commotion. She had seen men on painted horses riding away, carry people off, dragging one man by his feet. Her aunt and uncle lay on the ground. She had dragged her brother into the trees, hustling him into the hollow and away, between the sandstone cliffs toward the river. She shook her head, considering how far they traveled, which was not so far, really, when she considered how far they had to go. It had been a long journey west, and to her, the distance back to civilized parts seemed, from here to Heaven.
They took turns cooking the snake over the flame, then ate it with abandon. She realized they were wasting the cool part of the daylight when they could be moving, but they needed food. Afterward, they kicked out the fire, covering it in dirt and gravel. Toward dusk, the river bottlenecked. Heavy Spring rains brought the branches and trunks to bear, clogging the way in a choke point of broken wood, too treacherous to climb with the green river sliding beneath it. The girl considered for a moment whether they should attempt it, then she imagined a branch snapping, sweeping them beneath the clog. She shuddered, taking the boy by the shoulders and leading him away.
She sat him down on a rock and motioned for him to wait. Scouting a different way, she found the going steep. Alone, she felt sure she could punch through here, but she did not want to take chances with her little brother. They were fed, but now they were stymied, and time was wasting. It seemed they were doomed to take the long way around, climb a little, then hopefully come down on the other side of the blockage, back down to the riverbank where the travel had been so easy, until today. She motioned to him and he followed her back down to the river’s edge. They got a drink, then melted back into the trees to wait out the endless night.
She chose a spot where they could huddle beneath the scrub on the edge of the bank. She dreaded another night of mosquitoes, but they did not have to suffer them because the wind kicked up. They hunkered against one another, fending off the chill as best they could, watching as the last light gave way to savage night, when the landscape came alive. Beneath the stars, they listened to the distant howl of the coyotes, barking out black homilies in their dark tent revival. She realized she must have fallen asleep when the boy touched her cheek, one of his hands over her mouth. He was close enough to bite her nose. He looked at her wide eyed, a finger across his lips. She nodded, he moved his hand away, and they held one another. There were men’s voices in the wind, beside the river. She could not decipher the words or the language, but she did not think her people or Mexican folk would be beside the river in the dead of night. No, there was only one kind of people she knew of who moved through the land so effortlessly, impervious to the darkness. The children could do nothing save listen, frozen until the voices faded.
When the light leaked back into the sky, she took the boy’s hand and they made their way around the choke point disappearing into the trees. Climbing higher than she hoped they would have to, they made it further downstream, bypassing a sweeping bend in the river. It would have taken them some hours to make the same distance, had they stuck to the riverbank. The more she thought about it, the river was getting too crowded anyway. She wondered if they could keep up this pace and get far enough east, back to one of the settlements they passed on their way out. If they went hill to hill, always staying with the river below them on the right, she thought they would make better time. She knew the climbs would be demanding, and they would have to find something more to eat and drink, but it seemed a better prospect than crossing paths with the Natives.
When they had crested the next hill, she rethought the new strategy completely. No two hills were alike. The first one was pretty easy, but the second hill was nearly impassible. Once over it, she took the red-cheeked boy by the hand and led him down to get a drink, weaving between great, square blocks of rock like ancient anchors dropped from the first ship lost long before Noah released the dove. Hundreds of tiny yellow butterflies flitted amid the foliage. A shadow fell over them like a cloud blocking the sun. It was a man holding a hand axe and a dead rabbit. He was painted black and ashy white, eyes filled with astonishment.
She grabbed at her brother’s hand so they could run, but he sat down amongst the pebbles, smiling as he had smiled in anticipation of eating the snake. More figures filled in the trail. So instead of running away, she sat down beside her brother and kissed his forehead. He wiped it away. She felt her knife slide out from the sheath as the strangers pressed in. She knew she would scream and it would hurt, but only for a moment, before the angels gathered them up and carried them away, out of the inverted paradise. But there was no agony, and the angels did not come. Instead, the men spoke amongst themselves, gathered the children up, and carried them away.
The people fed them dried meat in the fading light. The braves and the women regarded them reverently, as if they were tiny, wayward children of the gods, spilled down from the heavens. The boy stood up, removing his hat, and sang a song his mother had taught him.
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee…”
When he finished, the group murmured to one another approvingly.
Then, the men went off to hunt, and the women made a fire. When the night came and the moon rose the children ate with them and watched them dance.
Travis writes short stories about frontier life in Texas. Also a sci-fi writer, he just finished his first novel, East Walk. On weekends, he metal detects on a ranch in Llano County, Texas, where he and some friends are trying to substantiate a Spanish Colonial presence there during the 1700s.