NEVER CAGE A WILD WOLF_CLIFFHANGER BLOGFEST entry

Here is my entry for Brenda Drake's CLIFFHANGER BLOGFEST :

http://brenleedrake.blogspot.com/2010/10/editing-prizes-from-ca-marshall-for-my.html

It is from the short story, NEVER CAGE A WILD WOLF, that I am writing just for my own amusement.

Samuel McCord and Mark Twain meet Pele and are abducted by aliens in Hawaii in the year 1866.

Horror and highjinks ensue :

From the moment we draw breath, we owe a debt. Only for a time do we get use of the earth, rain, and the other assorted odds and ends that go into our making.

Like the leaves, we bud and grow, drawing life from the sun and its tears, gathering capital on the investment they have put into us.

Then, like the leaves, we grow brittle and drop to the dark and bloody soil, returning its loan for the next soul round the pike.

Debt paid. And it comes due at the damnedest times.

I glanced over at the fitfully sleeping Sammy Clemens.

I ran my gloved fingers along the volcanic soil beneath me. This mountain was new if such a monstrous, high place could be called such.

I looked over to Sammy, still tossing in an uneasy sleep on his bedroll, his unruly red hair looking like nothing so much as a wig made from the feathers of a dozen of those parrots that dozed above us.

I had saved him from a nightmare come to life when he'd been twelve. I had kept track of him all these years. Now, he was thirty-one.

Sammy had a way of sailing from safe waters into treacherous, deadly ones.

I had taken to calling him Mark Twain, the name river men used to denote the place where the Mississippi went from secure to deadly.

The smoke of our campfire began to tickle my nose.

I sat in the far shadows of the fire. Being a Texas Ranger for over forty years had taught me caution, for even the undead could die the final death.

That was how I spotted the native woman creep up soundless from out of the darkness and sit in front of our fire. Her odd white dog sat beside her silent as a shadow’s passing.

I had never seen the breed before. But he sure was big.

He looked as if his father might have been a bear -- if those critters had roamed these islands. But it did make me wonder what his parents actually had been.

Elephants maybe.

She stared at Sammy, the fire playing odd shadow-games on her dried walnut face. Her dog, however, turned and looked right at me in the blackness I had carefully wrapped around me.

Apparently not carefully enough.

Sammy stirred and half-rose on an elbow, muttering to me as if I still sat by his side,

“I tell you, Captain Sam, these islands have the most magnificent, balmy atmosphere in the world. Why I swear I am surprised it does not rouse the dead from their moldy graves.”

He stiffened as he noticed my absence and the presence of the aged woman and her monstrous dog -- both of whom had neglected to bring their shadows along with them.

He cleared his suddenly thick throat. “Ah, speaking of which -- why, hello, madame."

He fought to clear his fear-closing throat.

"If you had just sent us a telegram, a letter, a carrier pigeon even, announcing your state visit, you would not have found me in so disheveled a condition. Ah, did you know that you and your delightful horse seem to have misplaced your shadows? Ah, Cap, --- CAP!”

“Right behind you, Sammy.”

“H-How far behind?”

I smiled. Same old Sammy.

When we were alone, it was always Captain Sam. But in front of others, even something supernatural like now, his pride would only let him call me Cap.

He kept on, his voice trying, and failing, not to shake.

“Cap, I have ransacked this island until I cannot walk for the saddle sores. I have surf-bathed til I nearly drowned. I have ridden by moonlight through a ghostly plain of sand strewn with human bones and contested with the shades of slain warriors there. But, Cap, I positively insist that all our visitors must have shadows!”

The old woman said nothing. The crackling embers reflected odd in her glittering eyes as it did in her dog’s , if dog was what it truly was. I drew in the night. I suddenly knew her.

She was Death ...

in the form of the Hawaiian goddess, Pele.

Not that it bothered me over much.

I breathed in the night breeze, the still of it, the life of it. In this wilderness there was no greed, no vanity, no hypocrisy. Only a lasting throb of green growth. And the eternal quiet.

I always knew that this was the way I would go. A knife or a gun in hand, my teeth bared at the enemy like an old wolf falling away into the endless void, defiant and fighting to the end.

But not quite yet.

Sammy depended on me. And I would not let him down. I would save him. Then my spirit could be caught up on the wings of the night. It even pleased me a little to think of drifting at peace into the endless depths between the stars.

The old woman turned towards me and croaked, “Soon or late, I always come to collect. How do you wish to pay? Easy or hard?"

I looked at the terrified Sammy who depended upon me and locked my eyes with hers. "Hard."
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Some more beauty :