"That doesn't seem possible. They have to have mail! What about tax returns and junk mail and letters to Santa? And how are we navigating then? You said before we left Virginia that you had a couple of routes completely worked out."
"Uncle Jack sent directions to me for these last few miles, I'm simply following them."
"Swell; for navigation we're relying on letters from a non-existent post office about a non-existent road to a non-existent town." Ed put the truck into low gear, slowly inched it out of the grass and began driving along the road. The road itself wasn't really any smoother than the bumpy grassy clearing had been he noticed; the truck and its contents rattled and banged almost continuously. It will be a miracle if nothing gets broken, he figured. No, amend that: it will be a miracle if everything doesn't get broken. It also didn't help that fallen leaves half covered the road surface, making it slippery and hard to judge where the road was in some spots. Driving on this road was a real bitch! "How far did you say we still have to go according to Uncle Jack?"
"Thirty miles as the crow flies, maybe. Maybe sixty-plus, if the crow follows all the road curves. Giants' Rest is near the middle of the Adirondacks."
"Wonderful! That could take most of the afternoon on this cow-path of a road, traveling between ten and twenty miles an hour. I don't dare go faster around curves and over bumps, or we'll have nothing but a truck full of busted goods by the time we get there, or I'll lose track of the road in the fallen leaves and drive us off a cliff."
"There would have been over twice as many miles over mountain roads if we had come more directly up from the south-west, and we would still end up on this road."
"Yes, things could indeed be even worse. Thanks; knowing that always makes me feel much better." He shifted the semi-automatic transmission from second gear to third as they crested a hill. At least there was no clutch to deal with, and trees and hills often blocked the direct sunlight that they would otherwise be driving into as they made their way west. Yes, things could be even worse. Swell.
"Wake me up when we get there, Grumpy," Mary responded, as she curled up in her passenger seat and pulled her baseball cap down over her eyes.
"How will I know when we get there?" Ed asked. Now they were going uphill again already. He shifted from third gear back into second again as he glanced at the truck's fuel gage. The tank was almost full; Mary must have gotten gas while he slept. Smart girl! They would burn a lot of gas driving in the lower gears.
"You'll know. This road ends at Giants' Rest."
"Great! That sounds easy!"
It wasn't. After only half an hour of guiding the big U-Haul truck along the twisting road Ed was already becoming weary. At least traffic was super light. He passed two empty pickup trucks driving in the opposite direction and that was all. In both instances opposing vehicles had to pull half-way off the narrow road in order to avoid head-on collisions. But it could have been worse, Ed constantly told himself. At least they weren't climbing over mountain ridges; the Adirondacks were in the form of mounds rather than the long ridges that formed the Appalachians. This road mostly twisted around the mountains without having to climb totally over them. Ed wasn't disappointed. There was still plenty of uphill and downhill to suit him, thrown in with the endless curves.
To make things more mysterious and interesting, after perhaps twenty miles all signs warning of coming curves and how fast to drive when rounding them totally disappeared. In fact except for the lousy road there was no sign of civilization whatsoever. No phone or electric lines. No houses or shops. There was only the endlessly twisting gravel road.
They did pass one side road. Signs indicated that it was a dead-end road that led to a landfill. Perhaps even the Mohawk created trash! To Ed it was a promising suggestion of some degree of civilization beyond longhouses and out-houses. Perhaps Running Bear had indeed exaggerated how primitive the Mohawks lived!
The bumps, curves, and hills continued. Mary slept through the whole damn thing. Mary could sleep through anything. It was a gift.
Ed could already use another nap himself, but sheer terror thankfully kept him awake throughout it all. This was indeed more a cow path than a road he decided, for insane cows with a death wish, a path that wound dangerously around huge boulders and trees and along the edges of cliffs with no guard rails. All of the leaves on the road, many of them wet, made it like driving on a gazillion banana peels. Aided by wet leaves they could very easily slide off the road and end up at the bottom of a deep ravine where they would never be found. Hell, maybe there were already dozens of wrecked U-Haul vehicles at the bottom of the ravines that surrounded this shitty road, loaded with the skeletons of prospective Giants' Rest school teachers and their families!
This was unsatisfactory. A road should be straight and smooth and have stripes and warning signs and so-forth. Ed had read somewhere that taxes in New York were among the highest in the country. Where the hells were those tax dollars going? Not to this road, that's for damn sure! If he lived through the day he vowed to Twitter some very nasty words about this road. He was up to five followers on Twitter. They'd pass on his road rage to their five followers and so-forth until the whole world was outraged! Then again, maybe this wasn't a government road; maybe it was private. Perhaps that was why the curve warning signs had disappeared.
Government road or private road, it seemed endless. Even Ed's Jerry-transformed body was tiring. His arms were sore from wrestling the big truck steering wheel and gear shift; his legs were sore from alternately working the brake and gas peddles, and his mind and his seat-sore butt were numb from the entire damned experience. If Running Bear only realized how lousy this road was, he could have used it as a very convincing argument against any foolish attempt to move to Giants' Rest. Left turn, right turn, uphill, downhill; it never ended. The good news was, after the first hundred or so hairpin curves Ed was well experienced in how fast to drive through them. The bad news was that he was too exhausted to properly apply what he was learning.
He considered waking Mary and asking her to drive for a while, but quickly gave up on that notion. He was the husband; it was his husbandly duty to protect his wife from terrible ordeals of any sort except childbirth. Besides, he had his foolish manly pride to consider. But those were all fleeting thoughts compared with his need to relentlessly focus on not crashing the truck, even though he had purchased the extra U-Haul insurance.
"DO NOT CONCERN YOURSELF WITH CRASHING; WE JANTS WILL SURVIVE ANY CONCEIVABLE WRECKAGE SITUATION," chimed the jants after a particularly bad curve that strained Ed's driving skills to the limit.
"THAT'S JUST SWELL," Ed responded mentally, with as much sarcasm as he could muster under the circumstances. He was getting better at telepathy; he seldom spoke aloud anymore when communicating thoughts to them. They were getting better at listening too; lately they even seemed to detect sarcasm and other nuances of speech and thought. Right now Ed was too tired and stressed-out to care what the hell the jants thought about his thoughts.
Every so often now Ed drove past crude hand-painted signs that indeed confirmed that he was driving on a private road on private property and that trespass without Mohawk Tribe permission was illegal and strictly forbidden. This was usually followed by convenient turn-about loops that provided law-breaking trespassers with ample opportunities to turn around and leave. Ed seriously considered doing just that. He could give some excuse to Mary that he got confused driving the twisty leaf-obscured road and got himself turned around the wrong way by accident.
But no, that would only mean that Mary would insist that they try again, and he'd have to needlessly repeat this arduous drive. Besides, he kept telling himself that he was more than half-way now, past the fabled point of no return, such that driving out of these mountains would prove to be even worse than continuing forward. No, he was stuck; he had to drive all the way through to Giants' Rest somehow.
****
CHAPTER III
Giants' Rest
Following a r
idiculously tortuous curve in the suddenly steeply climbing road Ed caught teasing glimpses of an enormous mountain ahead; perhaps Giants' Rest Mountain at last? The peak was soon lost to sight behind interceding cliffs and foliage, as often was the case with mountains when you got closer to them. A few miles later however, the road opened into a surprisingly extensive and flat valley populated by several nearby wooden buildings sheltered behind a high barbed-wire fence. It was the first significant sign of civilization encountered since Mary woke him several torturous hours ago!
Trees and the buildings themselves obscured whatever else was in the town but a few miles beyond them a great granite dome towered above everything. Unlike the other Adirondack Mountains that Ed had seen, this one appeared to be made of solid light-colored rock that was nearly devoid of trees or other vegetation. It reminded him of famous El Capitan in California's Yosemite Park. Immediately in front of the truck, the road ended at a low but massive gate constructed of heavy wood timbers. The gate was closed, and there were no friendly 'Welcome to Giants' Rest' signs to be seen. Instead there were dozens of signs ardently warning trespassers to go away.
"I think we're there," Ed announced loud enough to wake Mary, as he pulled up close to the gate, put the truck into park, set the parking brake, and wound his side-window open. Refreshingly cool outside air rushed in.
"I know for sure that we're there," he amended, as a half-dozen heavily armed men carrying automatic rifles hopped nimbly over the still closed gate and surrounded the truck, guns pointed towards the truck cab. They moved quickly, confidently, and silently, as though they had done this sort of thing hundreds of times before. Ed would have thought that they were an ordinary well-trained army, police, or nut-case survivalist death squad, except for their distinctive Native American appearance.
They all wore what appeared to be colorfully dyed, loose, home-spun clothing, with leather moccasins tied on with leather straps. They had baggy cotton trousers at least, and not the leather breach-cloths and leggings of their ancestors, but other than that and the modern rifles their Native American appearance looked authentic to Ed, though he admittedly didn't know very much about anything Native American except what he had gleaned from old Hollywood movies and TV westerns.
Most tellingly their grim faces were dark and reddish, and they each sported the Mohawk hair style for which the Mohawks were famous: a vertical crest of black hair that ran from fore-head to the backs of their heads, while the rest of their heads were shaved hairless. The crest of hair spiked straight up unnaturally, defying gravity and gusts of cold wind with the likely aid of bear grease or its modern equivalent hair gel. As a final touch their cheeks, foreheads and shaved heads sported darkly painted jagged shapes and runes. War paint, Ed figured. Good grief!
One of them approached Ed's side of the truck, rifle pointed at Ed. "State your names and business here, trespassers!" he demanded menacingly.
Ed found that he didn't have a voice. At the moment he was thinking of the nice friendly New York gate guards encountered early that morning and how much more pleasant encountering them had been.
"We're Ed and Mary Rumsfeld, school teacher and wife," Mary answered loudly for them. "We are expected."
"And we have PIDs," Ed added lamely, though they didn't seem to be the sort of border guards that would care much about PIDs.
"Yes, you are expected," the guard replied, though he didn't lower his rifle and his fierce grim expression remained.
"Drive the truck through the gate and park it where I show you to park it," the guard commanded.
The heavy wooden gate swung open ponderously, and the guard walked through it, motioning with his rifle for Ed to follow him with the truck. Ed did so cautiously, taking care not to drive over the fellow, which probably would have been a serious mistake. The other guards followed, still surrounding the truck with their weapons aimed at their expected guests. Ed tried not to imagine how they would welcome unexpected guests!
Ed soon parked the truck in front of one of several house-sized log buildings as instructed. A large sign on the building declared it to be the Giants' Rest Mohawk Reservation Administration Building. Ed was surprised to notice that its roof was covered in solar panels. Like the automatic rifles that the guards carried, solar panels seemed to be distinctly out of place in this otherwise primitive looking setting.
A United States flag hung to one side of its front door, and a flag unfamiliar to Ed adorned the other side. Ed didn't get a good look at it, but he recognized several animal symbols on it, including a turtle, bear, and wolf. "That's the flag of The Six Nations of the Iroquois," Mary informed him. "That's the Tree of Peace in the middle, and clan symbols arranged around it. I'm going to have a closer look." Heedless of the armed men that still surrounded them, Mary climbed out of the truck and approached the Iroquois flag.
Ed was too utterly exhausted to care about flags or what Mary was doing with them. After looking in a side mirror to confirm one last time that the Ford was still safely being towed, Ed at last turned the truck off. Engine noise and vibration stopped and the silence was heavenly. With a deep sigh Ed slouched over the trunk's steering wheel. His driving ordeal was complete and he could rest at last!
He was comfortably drifting off into a well-earned nap when Mary opened his door and after some nagging and poking helped him down from the truck cab and put on his jacket to protect him from the cold air. Only with her help could he stand up steadily. "You should have woken me if you were this tired!" she admonished. "What were you thinking?"
"Foolish manly pride, I suspect," cackled a strange, squeaky female voice. "We use two or three drivers when we travel the full length of the entrance road. Using fewer is dangerously foolish."
Beside them stood a tiny woman shrouded in a gray home-spun hooded robe-like coat, crooked and wrinkled with age. She stood by aid of an absurdly crooked walking stick that looked like it was even older than she was. "Old Mother here is a tribal leader and a member of the School Board that hired you," Mary explained to Ed.
"My proper name is Tsino:wen," the old woman announced, as she smiled and extended her hand to grasp his.
"Glad to meet you!" Ed managed to mumble. The wrinkled little old woman could have been seventy years old or several hundred years old; Ed couldn't tell, but her bony grip was firm and warm, and she didn't immediately release his hand. "Mouse?" he asked. "Your name is Mouse?" The name fit well her diminutive size and high pitched, squeaky voice.
"You know the Mohawk language?" she asked, clearly surprised.
"Not at all," Ed replied. "I READ YOUR THOUGHTS AS YOU SPEAK," he added telepathically. Indeed, Ed was himself surprised to 'hear' this woman's thoughts in his own mind very clearly when she spoke. Other than Jerry and his jants, before this he had not encountered anyone that was strongly telepathic.
"MOST INTERESTING," the woman replied in kind. Ed couldn't tell if she was thinking English words or Mohawk words; in either case it seemed to be English to him. "THE TURTLE MAN AND I WILL WANT TO SPEAK OF THIS WITH YOU AFTER YOU HAVE BEEN FORMALLY ADMITTED AND HAVE RESTED. WE WILL ALSO NEED TO DISCUS THE STRANGE SPIRIT FORCE THAT YOU CARRY IN YOUR TRUCK. IT IS A SOULLESS SPIRIT OF MANY TINY MINDS, THINKING TOGETHER AS ONE. JANTS YOU CALL THEM?"
"OF COURSE!" he replied, startled that the jants had been detected by her so readily, and that his own thoughts were so transparent to her.
"For now the Bear Clan welcomes you, Ed Rumsfeld," she pronounced aloud, as she released Ed's hand. "Nice meeting you both," she directed to Mary, then turned and hobbled away with surprising speed, using her crooked walking stick. She paused and waved one tiny wrinkled hand and the half dozen fierce looking warrior guards that had been closely watching them also dispersed and disappeared from sight in the general direction of the gate.
"Mary! Ed!" a familiar voice redirected their attention. Jack O'Brian erupted from the log Administration Building, grinning in delight. He and Mary ran to each other and hugged warmly. He looked much as he did when l
ast they met, Ed thought, as the two of them shook hands vigorously after he and Mary finally broke their embrace.
Jack was a small thin man in his mid-fifties, hardly larger in stature than Mary, but he exuded limitless energy and friendly charm. He was dressed head to toe in khakis with dozens of bulging pockets, and was laden with satchels, cameras, and binoculars strapped over his small shoulders. His head and face were covered with curly hair that framed dancing blue eyes that sparkled brightly behind thick brass-rimmed glasses. Altogether he looked every inch the geeky naturalist and anthropologist that he was. However Ed detected a few grey tinges in his otherwise light-brown hair; grey that hadn't been there three years earlier when they had last met in Virginia.
"Welcome to Giants' Rest!" Jack told them. "I have astounding things to tell you both, once you pass muster with the tribal elders!"
"Tribal elders?" Ed asked. "Do you mean the Giant's Rest School Board?"
"That is one of their functions. I watched you already charm old Tsino:wen, and she is the leader that you most had to impress, aside from old A'no:wara Ronkwe himself."
"Does A'no:wara Ronkwe mean Turtle Man?" Ed guessed. He hadn't been able to read Jack's thoughts.
"Wow!" Jack marveled. "You are simply amazing, Ed. No wonder she was impressed. It took two years before she would talk to me at all, and it was two more before I could speak directly with A'no:wara Ronkwe."
"I'm befuddled," Mary said. "What the hell just happened?"
"Just what you suspected, Mary," Jack explained. "Ed has apparently shown that he is indeed a mind-reader of some sort. He can communicate telepathically with Tsino:wen and probably with ants, and he can apparently translate foreign language effortlessly. Astounding!"
Ed was indeed also astounded by his wife. "You knew about my mental telepathy and the jants?"
Ice Giants Wake! Page 3