The Harvest

And Kindle was, he hated to admit, not awfully young anymore. When asked, he gave his age as “about fifty.” In truth, he paid little attention to his age and disliked doing the calculation. When you live alone and work alone, who gives a doughnut hole about birthdays? Who counts ’em?

But he had turned fifty-three in January and wasn’t as agile as he used to be. Consequently, when he came up a muddy switchback where a fallen pine had carried off a square yard of the hiking trail, he wasn’t quick or ca

He lost consciousness when the leg snapped.

When he woke again, some vital instinct kept him immobile. He did not dare to move, only blinked up at a sky crowded with moist conifers and worked at interpreting this sensation of something gone terribly wrong.

He was light-headed and not ashamed of talking to himself—not that he ever had been.

“You fell down.” The basic datum. “You slipped off the trail, you asshole.”

He swiveled his head and saw his own flight path traced in broken saplings and churned topsoil. Long way down. He had fetched up here: in a sort of gully in the hillside, his ass soaking in a cold stream and his legs curled at the trunk of a mossy old hemlock.

He took particular note of something he did not like at all: the way his left knee had rotated at such a peculiar crooked angle.

“Well, shit!” Kindle said. The sight of his broken leg made him feel both frightened and angry. Of the two, the anger was more vocal. He cursed eloquently and loudly, and when he was finished the forest fell silent—blushing, perhaps. And then there was the new and essential question that had to be faced, like it or not: “Tom Kindle, have you killed your idiotic self?”

Maybe he had. The cabin was a quarter-mile downslope—more like a mile by trail. Suppose he made it back: The cabin lacked a telephone. Help was in Buchanan, or anyway no nearer than the closest neighbor—another three miles downhill on a dirt and gravel road.

And there was no guarantee he could move even as far as the next sapling without passing out again.

He shifted his body experimentally and nearly did pass out. The pain when he moved was a brand-new thing, a burning stick thrust into his leg all the way up to. the small of his back. He let out a shriek that sent birds wheeling from a nearby tree. When he was still, the agony subsided but did not entirely retreat. It was concentrated in his left leg between hip and knee; everything below that was numb.

The leg needed a splint. It needed to be immobilized, or he simply could not move.

He raised his head and inspected the injury. There seemed to be no blood, no exposed bone; and that, at least, was good. Kindle had once worked at a logging camp in British Columbia, and he had seen a man suffer a leg injury that left his femur projecting from his thigh like six inches of bloody chalk.

The bad news was that this might not be a simple fracture; the knee might be involved. If Kindle recalled his first aid correctly, you don’t try to realign a joint injury. You immobilize it and “transport to medical care.”

He sca

He pulled himself toward it, screaming.

He screamed throughout the process of binding his leg, an act that seemed to progress in waves. The waves were of pain, and when they crested—when he felt consciousness begin to slip away—he would lie still, panting and dazed, until his vision cleared; then he would work at the splint a while longer.

In the end, after a measureless time, the walnut walking stick was lashed around his thigh and lower leg with torn strips of his cotton shirt—a job he admired as if someone else had done it.

And if he moved?

The splint kept the leg more or less still and minimized the pain. Kindle dragged himself a short distance along the wet bed of the stream. The water was only a trickle, inches deep, but very cold. Not too bad on a warm afternoon like this… but it was late afternoon, and some of these end-of-summer nights got chilly when the sky was as clear and high as it was today. All this heat would leak away after the sun went down. And then he’d be wet and cold. “Hypothermia,” Kindle said out loud. Not to mention shock. Maybe he was in shock already. He was shivering and he was sweating, both at once.

He inched downhill along the bed of the stream. The stream crossed a trail some yards down. Then he could get out of the water. But not until then. There was no way he could drag his fiery, useless leg through the undergrowth of this dense Pacific Coast forest.

It occurred to him as he crawled along the rocky creek bed that if he had accepted the offer of the aliens he might not be in this position. He would be immortal. There would be a Place Prepared For Him, as Kindle’s mother used to say. His mother had been religious. Dakota Baptist. Cold winter Baptist. Her philosophy went something like: Kick me till I go to heaven. Kindle’s natural father had died of a heart attack while he was driving a snow plow for the municipality; two years later his mother married a carpet installer who got drunk every Saturday night. Oscar was his name. On the coldest Saturday night of a cold Dakota winter, Oscar had been seen, and become famous for, pissing out the second-story bedroom window while singing the Hank Williams tune “I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow.” Which was all well and good, and nothing Kindle would hold against a man, but Oscar was also a mean and petty drunk who used his fists more than once on Kindle’s mother. It was all right, she said, marriage was always a rough road and anyhow there was a Place Prepared For Her. Kindle, who was fifteen, put up with six months of this before he decided that if there was a place prepared for him, it was somewhere outside the city limits. He rode to New York City on a Greyhound bus, lied about his age, and served an apprenticeship as a merchant seaman. Five years later he took a trip back home. Oscar was unemployed, drinking Tokay on the steps of the Armory, not worth beating up even for the cold comfort of revenge. His mother had left long since. No forwarding address, which was probably a smart move on her part.

Thus Kindle was alone and suspected there was no Place Prepared For Him, a suspicion the following thirty-three years had done nothing to dispel. He did not believe in heaven, and he had turned it down when it was offered. Now, however, he wondered if he’d been too hasty.

A Place Prepared might be better than this damp forest, which was getting darker, now that he noticed.

The sky had turned a deep and luminous blue. Had the sun set? Yes, it had, but only just. These old firs and hemlocks were heavy with shadow.

And he was on the trail now, inching along the dirt, caked with mud. When had that happened?

And his throat was raw with screaming, though he did not remember screaming. He wasn’t screaming now. The sound he was making was more like a moan. It was a kind of song, not entirely tuneless. It reminded him of the song the flying monkeys sang in the movie The Wizard of Oz.

This thought made Kindle feel almost jaunty. He looked up at the stars—now there were stars—and wondered if he could sing a real song. Somewhere under all this pain, he had developed a conviction that everything was actually very fu

The trouble was, he didn’t know very many songs. Oscar’s bedroom aria aside, he had never paid attention to songs. He had learned “Jesus Loves Me” at the Baptist Sunday School, but he was damned if he’d sing a Sunday School song when there wasn’t even a Place Prepared For Him. He knew “The Streets of Laredo,” but only one verse. Maybe one verse was enough.