The Man From Forever. Dawn Flindt
aimed at unlocking the key to a way of life that no longer existed. Consumed by those documents and studies and strategies and jockeying for position, she’d forgotten to take the time to focus on the actual people who had once lived the life she was so determined to record.
But here at The Land Of Burned Out Fires not enough had changed. Although the wolves and grizzlies were gone, the deer and antelope that once sustained the Modocs still roamed free. The eagles they had turned to for guidance continued to soar through an unspoiled sky. And because ancient volcanoes had rendered it inhospitable to so-called progress, most of the land remained as it had always been. Only the Modocs had left.
Feeling a little overwhelmed, she turned on the battery-controlled radio and chose an all-news station. While she did what cleaning up she could, she caught up on the outside world. By the time she changed to an easy-listening station, she’d gotten back in touch with what she’d long believed herself to be—an up-and-coming cultural anthropologist with more than thirty years of productivity ahead of her. Sentiment didn’t get the job done.
She’d intended to do a little reading, fiction for a change of pace, but had read no more than five pages before hours of walking and fresh air caught up with her. She turned off the radio and climbed into the double bed with its sagging mattress. An owl kept hooting. She heard what seemed like a thousand crickets, and if she listened carefully, she caught what must be a few frogs somewhere in the sound. Just before she fell asleep, she asked herself when she’d last heard nothing except the sounds of nature. She couldn’t remember.
He came into her dream, a whispering presence, heat and weight. She was standing in the middle of a ring of rocks, but this time there were no weeds obscuring the dance area. A sound that was part crickets and owls and frogs and part something else spread over the night breeze like music from an ageless source. Bare toes digging into the sparse soil, she lifted her head so she could pull the incredibly clean air deep into her lungs. She felt her hair sliding over her shoulders and realized with no sense of shock that she was naked.
He walked toward her. This man, this warrior, wore no more than she did, and yet there was nothing vulnerable about his body. He strode out of the desert as if pride were as vital a part of him as the blood coursing through his veins. His mouth, firm and yet strangely gentle, briefly held her attention and kept her from losing her sanity in the rest of what he was. If he hated her for intruding on his land and his ancestors’ land, his mouth gave nothing of that away. Although her need to take in his entire body and commit it to memory was all but overpowering, she deliberately turned her attention to his eyes.
His fathomless eyes.
She felt herself begin to shake, knew her reaction had nothing to do with cold. The moon emerged in the space of a heartbeat. It bathed the warrior with white-silver rays, feathers of light that slowly and sensually revealed muscle and bone, strength and power. Still, she couldn’t stop staring into his eyes.
They were black. More than black, they seemed to have been alive forever and born at the earth’s core. She wondered if he had his grandfather’s eyes, maybe the eyes of the first Modoc to walk this land. In them she saw generations of a proud and resourceful people who understood the seasons and land and sky in a way that had been lost. His mind held the knowledge to gather and hunt throughout the summer so there would be enough to sustain the tribe through the harshest winter. His eyes knew to scan the horizon for the first glimpse of the winter birds that came to the vast waterways.
This warrior with his war-hardened body had hands made for hunting and fighting, for wrestling what he needed for life from land that offered nothing to more civilized people. Although they now hung along his naked thighs, the fingers curving in slightly, tendons standing out in stark relief beneath deeply tanned flesh, she imagined them cradling a child.
What would those hands feel like on her?
Made breathless by the question, she tried to step outside the dance ring, but the rocks expanded until she was trapped within the walls they’d become. Despite that, she could still see him and shrank a little from a gaze that told her he had the power to control these hard stones. She gaped in amazement and yet acceptance when he used his powerful hands to push one boulder aside so he could step inside.
She couldn’t take her eyes off his thighs; a dusting of black hair draped flesh that had known years of heat and cold and physical life. Beneath the sheltering skin lived muscle and bone. His calves and ankles and feet were like the rocks that held her, made for eternity. She saw in them the runner he must be, the tireless hunter, protector of women and children.
He hadn’t said a word. Still, she knew what had brought him here. The answer lay in the way he used his body, the arrogant strength of him, the blatant sexuality. Although she shrank from him, at the center of her being she wanted what he was. She faced the challenge and danger, the volcano. Their coupling would be as rough and wild as the land he called home. There’d be no gentle whispers, no lengthy foreplay. Instead, he would take what he needed from her, and she would do the same to him. Again and again until her strength gave out.
He lay on his back on his bear-pelt bed. Since awakening—he could think of nothing else to call it—he’d cleared the brush from the slit of an opening above him. Although it was too narrow for him to get his body through or give the enemy access, it allowed enough sunlight to enter during the day that he could easily study the countless etchings that were his people’s history. At night, especially when the moon was full, the cave took on a silver cast.
Staring at the opening, he tried to imagine how the land his people called The Smiles Of God had looked when it was painted in the colors the creator had used to bless the moon. But although he gave thanks to Kumookumts for his generous gift to the Maklaks, he couldn’t keep his thoughts on what the world must have been like when Kumookumts was creating it.
The woman filled him. He’d watched her today. Often her car—how he hated the harsh word—took her far from where he was, but she seemed to have no purpose to her wanderings, and several times came close enough that he could truly study her. Like so many of her kind, she carried that thing they called a camera. He would like to know what they did with their cameras once they were done pointing them. At least they didn’t make a noise like a gun, and he guessed they weren’t weapons because they often pointed them at each other.
She’d come here alone. He’d seen loners before, but there was something about her that made her stand out from the others. He’d tried to tell himself it was because he held her responsible for his awakening, but tonight, with Owl foretelling of death and his body restless with his man-need, he knew it was more than that.
He wanted her. He’d been awake for six moons and looked at women with lust and then acknowledged that he couldn’t have them. He’d spent his lust-need by running until his lungs screamed. But what he felt for her was different. Like the power of a volcano, it held him in its fiery grasp and warned him that if he didn’t run until his legs gave out, he might take her. If he did, she would alert the army men and they would kill him.
Was that Owl’s warning? That his need for this woman would mean the end to him?
A growl of anguish rolled up from deep inside him and pushed its way past his lips. Shaking his head, he tried to deny the depth of his craving, but it was no good. He’d had a wife, a woman chosen by his family because of her social standing in the clan. Although she’d been older than him with interest in little more than digging camas bulbs and drying and storing them for winter, she’d let him climb atop her and he’d spent his energy inside her. She’d given him his son. For that he would always be grateful to her.
But she was dead and energy fed upon him the way lightning-born fire feeds upon trees and brush.
When another cry threatened to find freedom, he shoved himself into a sitting position. The moonlight now slid over his head and shoulders, carved his legs in shadowy relief. Gripping a calf, he thought about the great distance he’d walked today, not hunting as he should have, but searching for the woman again.
She carried herself as few of the enemy did. Instead of lumbering like a grass-fattened cow, she walked with an ease that drew reluctant admiration from him.