Defenders of Destiny, book one, the Discovery of Astrolaris

by Brenton Barwick

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Run!”

  As the train climbed over a mountain pass, the moon-light revealed a large lake, lying serenely off in the distance a few miles from the track. “That’s a fairly large lake,” whispered Dad. “We could hide at the bottom for the day; I’ll bet we could be home sometime tomorrow night.”

  The robot silently veered from the tracks and glided over the forest to the lake and slipped unnoticed beneath the water.

  “Great breakfast, Mom,” complemented Joseph.

  “Are we just going to sit here all day?” complained Sharian-na.

  “Don’t you think we have had enough adventure for one week?” queried Mom. “Maybe we should just rest for the day.”

  “We might as well go for a swim and a hike,” suggested Joseph.

  “Well, you guys got some sleep last night, but Mom and I have only had a couple of hours. I’d like a nice quiet nap.”

  “We’ll be careful…” Sharianna trained her magical blue eyes on Dad.

  “Okay, but take Percy with you,” he admonished them.

  “Do you think he will be okay swimming in the space suit?” questioned Joseph.

  “I think he’ll be alright if you both hold onto him until you get to the surface. He did fine on the moon,” replied Dad. “He deserves to get out and run; he’s been cooped up inside for days.”

  “At least there won’t be any sharks,” commented Joseph.

  Percy seemed anxious to get out and run around. He even cooperated quite well when they put the spacesuit on him. He was a little apprehensive when the water began to fill the airlock, but Joseph and Sharianna held onto him and talked to him reassuringly.

  When the airlock opened up, they could see surprisingly far through the clear glacial waters of the lake. They swam with Percy up to the surface and looked around. Percy struck out for the nearest shore the moment they reached the surface.

  They could see the entire shoreline of the lake. It was bordered on one side by a mountain with jagged cliffs that rose directly up from the surface of the water. On the other side of the lake, the ground sloped up gently with a mixed conifer forest of spruce, pine and fir with a few stands of deciduous maples and quaking aspen that came nearly to the water’s edge, with small clearings of meadow grass visible here and there.

  From the north, a small river flowed into the lake, creating a shallow, marshy area with tall grasses and reeds, as it deposited sediments carried down from the mountains.

  On shore, they removed Percy’s space suit and put their own on a large, rounded boulder. Joseph stood on the boulder and surveyed the scene. The air was crisp and clear. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, enjoying the feeling of such incredibly clean air, and the fragrances from the pine trees and wild flowers that surrounded him.

  The robot was completely hidden beneath the water, alt-hough Joseph thought he could see a faint dark spot where he thought it would be.

  Sharianna gazed at the cliffs across the lake. There were several small, off-white patches set against the darker stone. One of the white patches moved. “Look, Joseph, over on the cliff. That white spot is moving.”

  “Mountain sheep,” Joseph stated, almost casually. “I saw a bunch of them when camping with the scouts in the Uintah Mountains.” He suddenly pointed at the head of the lake, “Look there! Moose!”

  In the shallow marshy part of the lake they saw two Bull Moose, knee deep in the lake. As they raised their heads, water plants hung from their huge antlers.

  “Do you have your camera?” asked Joseph.

  “Of course,” Sharianna replied, matter-of-factly as she reached into her pocket to retrieve it. She zoomed in on the mountain sheep as much as her small camera would allow, but they still looked like indiscernible white splotches on the cliffs.

  “Here, let me take one of the moose,” requested Joseph, impatiently.

  Sharianna quickly snapped her own picture of the moose, and then handed the camera to Joseph.

  “Where do you think you are going?” asked Sharianna, as Joseph began to make his way stealthily toward the feeding moose.

  “I’m getting closer, to get a better picture; the zoom on this camera is not powerful enough.”

  “Don’t you remember Yellowstone?” she called after him accusingly.

  Joseph felt a pang of old humiliation: last year, on a family trip to Yellowstone National Park, Joseph had recentlhy gotten a cheap little camera and aspired to get some award winning photographs of a huge bull elk as he protected his herd from the other bulls. Joseph had crept increasingly closer to the magnificent bull, which was preoccupied with chasing away the younger competition. The master of the herd suddenly spotted him and charged with his formidable antlers lowered. Providentially for Joseph, when the huge bull was only a few yards away, he suddenly stopped, turned, and chased after another, younger bull who was trying to steel some of his herd.

  Joseph remembered the embarrassment he felt as the other onlookers told him how stupid he was, and the scolding he got from his frightened mother. He wasn’t going to repeat his mistake.

  “But I got a great picture!” he retorted, as he tried to play down his previous foolishness.

  Sharianna followed him along the edge of the lake, staying within the cover of the trees, so as not to spook the feeding moose. She knelt down and grabbed Percy’s collar and rubbed his ears. “Now, you have to keep quiet,” she admonished, looking into his eyes. She kept hold of his collar.

  As they neared the moose, they came to a meadow that extended from the trees at the bottom of a hill to the marsh grasses at the edge of the lake where the moose were still feeding. A small stream meandered its way through the middle of the meadow. Purple and yellow flowers dotted the green grass. The scene was so peaceful and serene that Joseph felt comfortable stepping into the clearing. He raised the camera – as he did so, the largest of the bulls raised his head and looked directly at Joseph, sniffing the air. Joseph’s heart leaped and he froze in his tracks. The huge animal was probably only about a hundred and fifty feet away. Sharianna stepped behind the trunk of a large pine tree and watched, her heart pounding.

  Joseph snapped the picture, but otherwise remained motion-less.

  He didn’t know if it was true or not but he thought he re-membered hearing that moose had poor eyesight. He hoped it was true.

  The bull lowered his head and continued to feast on the lush water plants.

  “See, no problem.” He turned to look at Sharianna as a mother moose with two babies enter the meadow only a few yards away. She stopped and sniffed the air. She lowered her head and turned toward Joseph. Suddenly, she leaped forward into a full charge, her sharp front hooves flailing formidably, intending to stomp to death any threat to her babies.

  Joseph sprinted for the trees that, luckily, were only a few steps away. Percy broke free from Sharianna’s grip and ran toward the charging mother.

  “RUN!” yelled Joseph.

  “Percy! Come back!” she shouted.

  Avoiding the dancing hooves, Percy nipped at the moose’s nose, ran a circle around her, and then darted for the trees. They ran for fifty yards, until they realized that the moose hadn’t even entered the forest. Joseph sat down on a fallen tree while Sharianna bent over with her hands on her knees to catch her breath.

  “You crazy dog,” she softly scolded, as she knelt down to give Percy a big hug and rub his ears.

  “Too bad we didn’t have a stop watch; I’ll bet we set a new fifty yard dash record,” gasped Joseph, in between breaths.

  “Yeah, and you don’t have to dodge trees and leap boulders on the track at school.”

  “And it’s not uphill either,” Joseph huffed with a smile, as he handed the camera back to Sharianna. “I got a great picture!”

  “Let’s see…” Sharianna pushed a button and looked at the screen on her camera. “I guess you did.”

  A tree squirrel began chirping
a warning to its friends in a nearby tree. A small stream flowed close by and they could see the water and hear its soothing sound as it tumbled over the rocks toward the meadow that they had so hastily retreated from.

  Joseph bent over to tie his shoe, when he noticed some red fruit growing on some low-lying plants. “Look, wild strawber-ries.”

  “Don’t eat them, they might be poisonous.” She was too late, Joseph had already plopped them into his mouth.

  “Mmm, they are small, but sweet. Don’t you know that strawberries are indigenous to America? There aren’t any poisonous varieties.”

  Joseph got up from his log and started looking for more. Sharianna joined him for the delicious harvest. Their strawberry picking led them up the hill.

  “I think it would take all day to get enough for a meal at this rate,” complained Joseph, as he straightened up to stretch his back. Through the trees, a little further up the hill, right at the base of a cliff he saw a very old log cabin. “Hey, look at that.”

  “Cool, let’s take a look.”

  The roof was in severe disrepair, but was mostly intact with only a few cracks here and there between the thick, hand-split, cedar shingles. There was no glass in the single, small window and the door was lying on the ground, its old leather hinges fallen apart long ago. They peered through the small doorway; the interior was lit by the window and door with some shafts of light streaming through the cracks between the logs where the mud chinking had fallen out.

  Sharianna stepped into the interior and looked around, quickly followed by Joseph.

  The floor had been simply hard packed dirt; the grasses and other vegetation had encroached into the cabin wherever enough light and water would allow their growth.

  Below the window, against the wall was a narrow rough-hewn table. On the table was a tin washbasin accompanied by a pie tin, a tin cup, a rusty old bowie knife with a horn handle and a large spoon. In front of the table was a section of log that served as a stool.

  On the opposite wall rested a rusty old rifle on two wooden pegs driven into a crack between the logs. Two more pegs, directly below, held a double-edged axe. The rest of the wall was covered with an assortment of old jaw traps ranging in size from one a trapper might use to catch a bear, or a cougar, to one small enough for a squirrel or a muskrat.

  “It must be an old trapper’s cabin,” deduced Joseph.

  The cliff face actually served as the back wall of the cabin. In the middle of the back wall stood a rustic hand-hewn cabinet with several shelves, holding two antique oil lamps and a few tins of lamp oil, along with some deteriorated blankets and clothing. The cabinet seemed to be hung on the wall with the bottom only an inch or two from the dirt floor and reached to a height of about seven feet.

  To the right of the cabinet, in the corner, was a small stone fireplace, its chimney extending up above the roof. It had a single large flat stone for a hearth. A black kettle lay in the old ashes where it had fallen when its supporting stick had long ago broken.

  Along the wall, near the fireplace were the remnants of a narrow makeshift bed.

  Joseph picked the old rifle from its resting place on the wall and examined its mechanism.

  Sharianna stepped across the small room; bending down, she looked into the small fireplace. Suddenly, she heard a noise from inside the chimney. She jumped to one side and accidentally banged into the cabinet on the back wall; it swung away from the wall, like a door, revealing an opening in the face of the cliff behind it.

  The cause of the noise burst from the fireplace and ran across the floor, onto the table, and leaped out the window.

  Percy, who had been at Sharianna’s side, streaked after it, leaping from the floor to the table and then out the window.

  Joseph burst into laughter as he stepped to the table and set the rifle down on it. “It’s only a squirrel,” he teased, as he stood watching Percy tree the squirrel in a nearby pine tree.

  Sharianna returned her view to the opened cabinet; she could see a short distance into the passageway behind the cabinet. She took a couple of steps into the cave to get a better view, when the cabinet suddenly swung closed behind her. An involuntarily cry escaped her lips as she stopped in the darkness and turned back toward the door.