Ancient Shores

Jack did not pretend to understand it. Like the buck, he simply accepted it. In his compassion, he drank slowly. When he was done, he folded the cellophane bag in which his sandwich had been wrapped and pushed it carefully into his pouch. (He had seen people drop trash in the woods from time to time, and nothing enraged Jack like litterers. Last year, about this time, he had come upon one, a guy leaving a trail of beer cans, and he’d left him bleeding by his campfire.)

Time to end it.

The moment had come, and Jack would finish it, as he always did, with a single shot.

“I’m coming,” he said, his ritualistic response to the final phase. He climbed onto the snowmobile, turned the ignition key, and felt the surge of power through his loins. Startled birds launched themselves into the wind.

He rolled back onto the trail, ru

It was an eight-point buck, and when he finally came upon it, the creature was trying to hide in thick snow-covered vegetation. But of course it could not conceal its tracks. He unsnapped his rifle and inserted a cartridge. Their eyes locked, a final moment of mutual recognition, and it tried weakly to back away.

Jack raised his weapon, put the animal’s heart in his sight, and squeezed the trigger. The shot ricocheted through the woods. Surprise flickered in the buck’s eyes. The trees came alive, and a storm of birds fled into the sky. Blood appeared on the buck’s breast.

The animal’s front legs sagged. It went down, spasmed and relaxed.

He stood enjoying the primal beauty of the scene, waiting for the quivering to stop. When it did, and the deer lay still, he turned back to the snowmobile for the sheet of plastic in which he would wrap the carcass. In that moment something dark passed across the sun.

He looked up, expecting to see a cloud. But the sky between the tangle of branches was hard and white. He retrieved his plastic, and the snow crunched under his boots while he spread it out beside the carcass and smoothed it down. The animal had got tangled up in a bush, and he had to break off a few branches to get hold of the front legs.

The temperature began to drop.

He glanced nervously back along the trail to the point at which it curved out of sight, roughly thirty yards away. And ahead almost as far, where it topped a low hill.

A gust of wind shook the trees. Deep in his psyche, far back in the emotional tangles among which the real Jack McGuigan lived, something stirred. Some thing that was not part of him.

And he felt waves of anger.

Crazy.

Birds and small game were everywhere. A warm air current touched him. The distant rumble of traffic, out on the highway, merged with the pristine silence. He grew disco

He felt the treetops, warm and alive, under his hand. They shook. Snow and broken twigs rained down.

Something moved among the branches. The sunlight changed, shifted, coruscated. Someone was here with him. He lifted his weapon and turned to look behind him. The air was getting warmer, and the deer’s blood was bright on the snow.

“It’s a nightmare,” Taylor said. He muted the sound and pushed back in his chair.

Tony Peters massaged the place over his left eye where his migraines always started.

The television images were from the UN, where a demand for international access to the Roundhouse was about to be presented to the Security Council. “Where,” the president said gloomily, “we will have to veto the damned thing.”

Peters thought they could ride out the storm, and he knew his role now was to reassure the president, to prevent precipitate action. “They all know,” he said, “that you can’t just give away sovereign territory. We couldn’t do it if we wanted to. It’s private property.”

Taylor laughed. “Don’t know,” he said. “There’s plenty of precedent for giving away private property. But it really doesn’t matter. It would be wrong.”

“It would also be political suicide.”

“So you think all that’s happening here is that we’re being sent a message?”

“No. Of course not. Everybody’s scared. But there are still a lot of people who wouldn’t want to miss a chance to embarrass us.”

“They’re doing a hell of a good job of it.” The president refilled his sherry glass and offered the bottle.

Peters shook his head.

“Tony, who would have believed there’s oil in paradise?” Matt Taylor sighed. “We just don’t get a break.”

“It shouldn’t matter,” the aide said. “How much oil can you throw into the world market bringing it through that whatsis one barrel at a time?”

That was a point, and the President seemed happy for that small bit of good news. “But it will matter,” he said. “Eventually. If there’s a lot of the stuff out there, we’ll find a way to get it back. And everybody knows it. But that isn’t really the problem, is it?”

“No.”

Taylor understood there was more at stake here than economics and elections. Incredibly, a stairway into the sky had opened. He hardly dared consider the implications. He did not want to close it down. The man who did that would not look good a century or two from now. And Matt Taylor, like any president, was determined that history think well of him. He had believed attaining the White House would be enough. But once in the door, he began to envy Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Truman. Theirs was a rank he had thought would be denied him because greatness is possible only in crisis. Every administration had its problems, but until the Roundhouse surfaced, his had been relatively mundane: no government to establish, no Union to save, no Hitler to oppose.

Now the crisis was here. In spades. And he had only to choose the right course.

What in hell was the right course?

“Tony,” he said, “I think we’ve had enough. The Sioux won’t cooperate, so we’re going to have to find another way to close the operation down. I don’t care what it takes, but I am not going to let this country come apart on my watch.”

Walhalla, ND, Mar. 27 (AP)—

A North Dakota man died this morning when he ran out of the woods off Route 32 south of here, directly into the path of a moving van. The victim was John L. McGuigan of Fort Moxie, who was apparently hunting out of season. His snowmobile was found abandoned about a mile away. It was reported to be in good working order. Police have not explained why he left the snowmobile or why he was ru

McGuigan is survived by his wife, Jane, and two children.

“Dr. Deekin, are you absolutely certain about what you saw?”

Cass looked into the TV cameras. “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”

“Why haven’t the people at Johnson’s Ridge said anything about this? Is there a cover-up?”

Deekin thought it over. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, this thing, whatever it was, was invisible. They may not know it exists.”

“So what you’re saying is that something that ca

“I believe so.”

“And is now loose in North Dakota.”

“Yes. I would think that is true.”

The interviewer turned toward the camera. “So we may have an invisible visitor. We’ll be back in a minute to try to determine whether there’s a co

25

It is I who travel in the winds,

It is I who whisper in the breeze.

—Ojibwa poem

Excerpt from The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, March 28. Conversation with Doctor Edward Ba