Down The Path Read online

  The whole parade of villagers caught the scent too and many laughed while holding their noses. Cooper heard someone say, “You broke out the serious funk for your new friend, eh Rufus?”

  Then someone else, another man, younger than the rest, separated from the group and said, “I’ll go back and splash them off in the water,” as he clapped his hands and went playfully zig-zagging back the way they had come. The dogs were very interested in this, thinking it was another game, and quickly bounded after him.

  Another woman had dropped back to walk with Aria and Cooper. She was also wearing a flowing dress, much like Aria’s. She had blonde hair, but it was a darker blonde and it stopped at her shoulders. As she walked up to them she smiled, her eyes squinting nearly shut when she did and said “If the young man needs a place to stay for a while, Ash and I have plenty of room with Smith having moved out.”

  “That’s very nice of you Katherine, especially since I don’t believe we have any extra houses at the moment. Of course, Cooper you do not have to stay with one of us. We can leave you to your own devices if you would be more comfortable camping.”

  Cooper had only just arrived, he hadn’t even thought about sleeping yet. He was comfortable camping, but he didn’t want to seem unappreciative. Plus, if he stayed with them, he could be immersed in their lives, hopefully learning even more. “I would be happy to stay with you, Katherine, was it?”

  “That’s it,” she said gently shaking his hand. He noticed her hands were calloused as well and that she had freckles covering her one arm, but not the other. “You’ll like my husband Ash, he designs all the homes and they are wonderful! Our son, Smith, just moved out to live with his wife in their own house, he has red hair just like you!”

  As they approached a large opening in the forest, Cooper heard a sound like he had never heard before. It was almost a screeching but worse. It sounded like the rabbits the day he had slaughtered them, but only if they had slaughtered one hundred all at once. He began looking around for what was causing this, growing noticeably agitated.

  “Awww…drunk ol’ Ceannt’s scaring you with his pipes isn’t he? Don’t worry, it’s just that old timer over there stomping around by the kettle” said Katherine with a very heartfelt face.

  Cooper looked up and gathered his thoughts, amidst the chaotic squealing, and saw the beginning of the village. There were several houses, built of logs. Each had a chimney coming from the top and some had a grass roof, others had wooden ones. They were not laid out in the same grid pattern as all the boxes in his city were. Some were clustered in groups of two, some in groups of five, with well-worn paths between all of them. Each house had areas all around it that looked to be gardens that were well tended.

  He noticed that the sound was coming from a tall, gray haired man, stomping around a large bright metal canister set atop a wood fire. Steam was rising from the vessel and he could smell it, but he couldn’t place the smell. In his arms was a large bag and there was a tube he appeared to be blowing on with other tubes on the other side. He was squeezing the bag and that insane sound was coming out.

  Katherine was waving her hands at him to stop. He played another several ‘notes’ and took the pipe out of his mouth. Waving a giant mitt of a hand up in the air, waving back, “None of you remember a proper greeting! This is how we say hello” he said.

  Aria spoke up then, “That’s Ceannt, you’ll meet him this evening I’m sure. He is in charge of most of the brewers. That man can make beer out of just about anything,” she said smiling.

  The whole parade of people had stopped, while more were coming over from around the houses. Aria spoke again, “I am going to fight some of these people off so you can be shown around with a certain amount of peace. Then I must prepare for this evening. I will see you all then, enjoy your tour Cooper.” With that, she walked off and into the crowd of strangers that were quickly approaching their location.

  He noticed that as she split off into them, a great beast of a dog walked over to her from next to the fire. He was also black and tan colored, but much thicker of body, with a head as square as the blocks that made up the council of elders house in his own city. He had much shorter hair than Lupe, with a tail that was wagging vigorously as he waded through the crowd, thwapping nearly everyone with it as he pushed his big body towards Aria.

  ---

  Katherine turned to him and said, “Well, are you hungry or thirsty or do you want the tour first? We can either start at our house or end at it, so it’s up to you.

  Cooper indicated that he was ready to tour now, even though he was hungry. His curiosity handily won the battle against his stomach; which may have been the first time his stomach ever lost an argument.

  They set off down the larger trail and she explained that the little gardens around the homes were actually a large part of their food supply. All the crops were spread out so that if one person’s planting failed because of disease or insects, perhaps another planting elsewhere would survive. Cooper found this ingenious and nearly a total opposite to the way they did things in his city with one garden attempting to grow all of one type of vegetable for the whole community.

  They walked past the brewers and she didn’t say much about them, merely mentioning that they make beer and spirits and that they would talk his ears off about it the second they had the chance to do so.

  As they passed, he noticed the man from the suit, Doc, standing by the fire puffing on his cigar and talking to Ceannt while staring at a murky colored liquid in a clear tube. Doc saw them walking past and quickly downed the liquid and waved happily at them. Apparently this bothered Ceannt as he took a swing at the greasy haired younger man just after he skipped off and dropped the now empty tube.

  “They are a fun group of people, those brewers; just don’t listen to a word they say. Very little of what they say is true, in fact most is nonsense, like talking is just something for their mouths to do between beers.” Her own words were amusing to her as she did that same, squinting smile that Cooper was finding very endearing.

  The pair of them continued down the path to a larger garden. This one was full of barley and she said they had others for wheat and many other grains further down the valley. Katherine explained that these grains didn’t work as well planted on the small scale of the plantings around the homes; those were mostly vegetables and berries.

  They also passed a large building without walls that she called a pavilion and said that was where they would gather tonight. It was a beautiful structure with tall timbers supporting a massive roof. Cooper couldn’t imagine how such a roof could be built. It had many long tables on the ground beneath the roof and several people were moving the tables around and placing collections of flowers on each table after sweeping them off.

  As they walked around he was awestruck at how organized, but still beautiful everything was. They had several giant animals called cows that Katherine said they ‘milked’. They were housed in a structure similar to the pavilion, but much narrower and apparently could come and go from it as they pleased. Most of them were walking around in the woods directly outside this structure, chewing on the growing plants.

  “Katherine, can I ask you a question” Cooper said, just now remembering something she had said when he first met her.

  “Of course, sweetheart, ask away”, said the smiling blonde.

  “Well, you mentioned your son moving out…so he lived with you? You knew which child was your son?” Cooper was a little chagrined at asking this before any of the other thousand questions raging to get out of his brain.

  “Yes, Smith was born in our house actually, and we raised him there. I’m one of the teachers for the village so I got to see him almost constantly…” she trailed off, realizing the context of his question. She looked down while quietly asking “Honey, where you’re from, do the kids get taken from their parents?”

  Cooper began explaining the process of the child rearing in his city. At first, Katherine seemed beyond horrified
but as he began to explain the reasoning, she just looked sad, so very sad. Realistically, he knew that their methods were the best they could come up with under the conditions in the city. He had not thought it bothered him very much, but then again, he never really knew any other way. He wondered what made her the gloomiest, the difficulty in having kids within his city or that they were never told who their actual parents were.

  Katherine understood the logic, but what little she had just learned of life in their city had greatly depressed her. She had tried to put on a happy face for the new stranger, but instead just grabbed his hand in hers and they walked along the path in silence for a short while.

  Cooper enjoyed this silent time with her. He was also not used to such a loving community. Not wanting to upset her further, He asked about the forest, noticing there was not honeysuckle anywhere in sight.

  She perked up at this question “We call it Lonicera, but it’s the same plant. It is one of the invasive plants. It will take over the whole area if you let it and it doesn’t give us or most of the big animals any food or material of real use.” She went on to detail how these invasive plants move into an area and shade out the good ones until they are nearly all that is left. As she spoke, she had a very official and steady tone to her voice, different than the bubbly, happy voice, but not bad by any means; he could tell she knew what she was talking about.

  “We control most of these plants by lighting the woods on fire”

  Cooper stopped walking, greatly confused. “To save the forest, you burn it down?” It made no sense to him, but he remembered seeing the vast columns of smoke rising through the air off in the distance back when he was still on the river.

  “The forest right here, next to the village, was burned off just 3 years ago, yet it still stands. These woods have adapted to the fire over eons, like all the native plants. The invasives aren’t from here, so the fire hurts them,” she said, very matter-of-factly.

  It made sense to Cooper, but why didn’t the trees burn up? They were made of wood. Even he knew that living wood would burn, albeit slowly and without giving much heat.

  Katherine answered this very question before he could even voice it by explaining that the tree’s bark protected them from the fires, even though some would get scarred a little by it, most would come through the fire no worse off.

  He had been processing everything she was saying. Did that mean they could burn all the honeysuckle outside the city? Certainly fire would kill those spiders, right? They didn’t have any bark! The possibilities were twirling through his mind so quickly; he had not noticed that they were standing directly in front of one of the log homes.

  This one had a very nice porch across the front, with large chairs made out of bent sticks. The roof of the home extended out over the porch providing nice shade and protection from the rain.

  The gardens around this house had many different things growing in them, most of which he didn’t recognize at all. In fact, the only thing he thought he recognized were the rows upon rows of what appeared to be lettuce greens. The lettuce was much more colorful than in his city though. These leaves were all different shapes; some even looked like the leaves from the nut trees. Most were green and splattered with dots of red and even maroon. It was striking to look at and he hoped very much to try some soon, if it was actually lettuce.

  “Come on in, this is our home,” she skipped up the steps to the porch and held the door open for him. It was such a beautiful porch. It made him think of all the evenings spent sitting on his ‘porch’ outside his box; drinking honeysuckle tea and talking with John.

  He wondered what John was doing and hoped he was getting by fine. In all the excitement, he hadn’t had much time to think about the people from the city. Did they still expect him to come back? He had only been gone a month, after all.

  He hadn’t been paying much attention, but Katherine had led him to his room and left him to unpack his things. The room was nice; it had two large windows looking out into the forest. The bed was much more comfortable than the ground he had grown accustomed to sleeping on. He even had a small set of drawers to put his things in.

  After he had unpacked, he enjoyed just sitting on the bed and looking around, taking it all in. His journey was a success. He had found what appeared to be a fully functioning city, although they called it a village. It would take longer to get home, but with ample food and water along the rivers, that wasn’t a real problem.

  He started thinking back to the stupid prophecy of his hair. Had it been right all along? No, anyone could have made this trip. Heck, Christopher probably could have done it in less than a week. But no one had ever come back. He had gotten lucky surviving his illness. Something which, the more he thought about it, the more he attributed that luck entirely to Lupe. Without that pointy faced pooch dumping ice cold water on him, he would probably still be in that tent, slowly decaying like all the others who had tried to leave his city.

  As if by thinking about her, he heard her bark outside the house. He could hear Katherine talking to her, so he exited his room and walked towards the sound of her voice.

  As he approached behind her, he could hear Katherine gently explaining that she was not allowed inside until she was dry. Lupe was lying on her belly on the porch, seemingly ok with this pronouncement.

  Katherine spun on her heels when she sensed him behind her and startled. Then she began laughing and telling him not to sneak up on her. Cooper apologized amidst his own laughter as well.

  “By now you must be hungry,” she said with a slight accusatory tone to her voice. With that, she headed off towards the kitchen, Cooper close behind.

  The kitchen had many more drawers and a large table in it to work on. She explained that most things that needed to be cold were held in one of the buildings they had passed, inside something called a ‘freezer’ and that Scoob was trying to make enough power so that people could have their own in their house.

  By this time, hunger was gripping him tightly, and most of what she said bounced off his face, never even getting near his brain.

  “Would you like a salad, from the greens out front? It’s my specialty.”

  “Oh yes, very much,” said Cooper. And after what seemed like an eternity to his stomach, she slid a large bowl in front of him, filled to the top with those colorful greens and also some nuts and other vegetables he had never seen. Covering the bowl was some sort of dressing that smelled like herbs.

  He wanted to ask about the vegetables. He wanted to ask about the dressing. His stomach allowed none of this. Instead, he began shoveling the salad into his mouth. He was desperately trying to both satiate his immediate need for food while retaining his manners.

  After the first few bites, his hunger was pleased with the food and quieted the roaring from his stomach. Cooper finally slowed down enough to actually taste the salad. It was amazing. The lettuce had crunchiness, and the vegetables and nuts were sweet. The dressing did taste like herbs from the forest, some he thought he may have tried while camping along the river. It was a wonderful snack, and one he thanked Katherine for many times.

  After chatting about the vegetables and learning that his favorite was called a ‘pepper’, Katherine turned the conversation in another direction. She got up from her seat and grabbed up a tightly rolled piece of paper. Spreading it out on the table before him, Cooper could see it was a map, but very different from the map back home.

  This map looked hand drawn, but that wasn’t the main difference. On his maps, the river continued to flow much farther down, on this one it ended into a wide lake, larger than any other on the map.

  “Do you know where you are from?” Katherine asked him politely. She was trying not to insult him but she had no idea if he had ever even seen a map before.

  Even with the obvious changes to the map, and without the names all over it, he could see the lake that his city rested next to. These people had been nothing but kind, still, he hesitated in revealing where his city
was. He did not know why, there was nothing there that these people could possibly have any use for.

  Pointing at it, he said “my city is right here, at the edge of this massive lake.” He was proud to be able to teach her something and began pointing out other things about his city. Where the gardens were as well as the major dwelling area along with where the great city of Sharcago stood, and the place he thought he picked up the river the day he began to feel ill.

  He was obviously very interested in that map and ran to get one of his so they could compare the differences. As he brought in back in he saw a man was on the porch, scratching Lupe on the head.

  He walked in and Cooper assumed this was Ash. It became clear it was Katherine’s husband when she met him at the door with a hug and quick smooch on the cheek, either that or this town was even more different than he thought.

  The man had a thin build, but you could see the muscles in his legs and he had a confidence in his stance. Like Lupe, he thought this man might be built to run. He had short hair and a well trimmed beard, both of which were sprinkled liberally with white amongst the dark brown. He wore thin glasses and had a thick bag in his hands. Putting the bag down, he extended his hand to Cooper for shake.

  “Hi there young man, I’ve heard a lot about you. Welcome to our village and our home” he said with a happy grin. “I’m guessing Kat here showed you around?” He gave her a little squeeze when he said this nickname for her and she smiled.

  “Yes sir, this place is amazing, and the salad I just ate was delicious!”

  “You bet. This lady grows a mean green, that’s for sure” he said, squeezing her again lightly.

  “I’m so happy you’re home early, did you finish work already?” She asked him.

  Looking down at the floor, Ash responded, “well, I have to go tweak a few things near the brewery before days end, and I figured the boy here might want to come along to meet the fellas and have a pint”

  “This is what we call a beer after work, Cooper, I suggest you go, its some kind of sacred rite” Katherine replied while laughing at his obvious excuse to go drink a beer.