The Ozark Howler and the Search for the Snawfus

Chapter 6 - The Valley

Henry crouched with his back against the stone wall of the cave, the canteen in his hands, trying to reconstruct the events of the night before. Over the gray, faintly smoking ashes of the fire that had kept him warm, he peered warily into the woods, trying to decide which direction held the least risk.

There was no sound but the calling of songbirds. Henry felt foolish for his hesitation, and reminded himself that there was no reason to believe he would be safer in the cave than anywhere else in the woods. Whichever way he went, he would remain lost for quite some time.

Whatever he heard last night, it sounded large, and aggressive. Henry did not feel large himself in this moment.

Nonetheless, with the kind of forced movement he used to jump into the cold lake at the summer camp he attended as a child, Henry launched himself away from the wall and toward the woods. In that moment, he heard a metallic sound at his feet, and watched as a small metal box tumbled forward over the rocks in front of him.

He walked over to the mouth of the cave to pick it up. The box was rectangular, and had been painted a dark blue, but the paint had flaked off and been replaced by rust in most places. It was barely bigger than the palm of Henry's hand. The lid was hinged on one side, and he pulled it open to find a single piece of paper, just a couple of inches across, half buried in a thick layer of lint.

On the paper was a note, written in pencil. It read, "This box holds all the answers to life, death and everything in between."

Then, in smaller writing in the lower right hand corner of the paper were the words, "Go south."

That was all.

Henry put the paper back into the box, closed the lid, and slipped the box into his back pocket. He lifted his gaze to the sky, to try to find the sun. The trees cast shadows roughly in the direction he was facing. The opening of the cave, he reasoned, must be facing north, or something close to it.

Tentatively, Henry stepped out of the cave, ready to retreat if he needed to. Nothing emerged from the undergrowth to attack him, so, with more confidence, he turned around and looked at the hole of the ground from which he had just emerged. The cave was at the bottom of a hill, covered in trees. He wasn't sure what kind. The slope seemed more gentle to the right of the cave entrance, so Henry began to climb there, hauling himself upward using tree trunks as handholds.

It took him a long time to reach the top of the hill, where the pitch of the ground became easier to deal with. In a few minutes, he had crossed the peak, and come to a stony outcrop where he could see the landscape before him. There was not a sign of human activity in sight, not a town, or a road, or even a telephone pole.

In front of him was a long valley with a turbulent, stone-filled river in the middle of it. The water seemed to be flowing south, and Henry decided to follow it to keep his sense of direction clear.

Henry enjoyed a descent into the valley that was as quick and easy as his climb had been slow and arduous. Within minutes, he was down by the river, walking briskly, the terror of the night forgotten.

He was walking upstream, making the current of the river seem even faster than it really was. Time seemed to move differently here, Henry thought, as he watched small insects flying in great looping swarms above the water, their wings catching the sunlight.

By the time Henry reached the head of the valley, the sun was low in the sky to the right of him, bringing out the color of the stones by the side of the river. He could now see that the air above the river was filled with tiny motes, pollen, he thought, amidst the swarms of insects. He breathed in deeply, but felt no allergic response. To the contrary, he felt refreshed, as if the air itself was alive.

At its end, the valley turned toward the east, to a steep-walled glen in which the river came down from the surrounding highlands in a waterfall twice Henry's height.

Pleasantly exhausted, Henry filled up the canteen and sat down on a patch of moss close to the waterfall. With the last sun of the day on his face, Henry closed his eyes to enjoy the warmth. Listening to the falling water, his mind relaxed its grip on the many worries he was confronted with, and allowed itself simply to be.

After some time outside of calculation, Henry opened his eyes again, and saw that the air around him seemed to have turned blue. It wasn't just that his eyes were readjusting to the light. Henry saw that the little specks he had seen above the river before were now glowing, and not with the golden light of reflected sunlight. They were glowing blue, like the color of the sky, but more vivid.

Instead of falling, the tiny blue particles seemed to be slowly rising into the air. Henry followed their movements back down to the ground, where he watched them emerge from underneath a ring of small dark brown mushrooms he had not noticed before. 

Henry reached down to stroke the cap of one of the mushrooms with his fingertips, and saw a thick blue mist of spores escape the fungus, curve into a spiral around his arm, swirling toward his face. Not thinking to turn away, he breathed them in, feeling his throat and lungs tingle with the sensation. 

Within moments, his eyes lost their focus, and vivid golden geometric patterns overwhelmed his field of vision. Gripping the moss in his fists, Henry realized that he could no longer sense any direction, not even up and down. Gravity seemed to have disappeared, and he joined the eddying dance of the particles he had inhaled. Realizing there was nothing to do but to lie on the ground and accept what was happening, he felt the world join in the fungal dance, sensing directly for the first time in his life the 250 mile per hour rotation of the planet beneath him.

As his mind spun around in the careening valley, Henry heard a familiar sound approaching from the hills behind him, a low moan and a screech mixed together like the sound of metal scraping on metal.