A Grain of Wheat Page 7

  A great silver husky came crashing out of the underbrush onto the open ridge top and amiably loped up to Steve, wagging its tail vigorously. Steve’s mouth dropped open and his revolver dropped loosely around his trigger finger. At first he was at a loss what to say. But when the big soft eyes of the beautiful dog met his own, he exclaimed, “Well, hello there! So you want to join me for supper, eh? This is your lucky day. I have more here than I can ever eat.”

  That evening and for the rest of the summer, Steve shared every meal he cooked with his new friend whom he called King. Sometimes it was King himself who brought them their meal, usually a grouse, but once it was a huge wild turkey. Steve marveled that he was just as willing to share his catch with him as Steve was to share his catch with King. King especially loved trout.

  Steve and King became bosom buddies. The great dog accompanied him wherever he went, sleeping near him at night and roaming with him during the day. He was entirely silver and white except for a patch of black under his powerful neck. He had the keen intelligent look of a wolf, but there was nothing cruel or cold about his eyes. He seemed to talk through them. And through them Steve rediscovered his tongue. Or truer yet, Steve discovered for the first time that he had one.

  Every day Steve did only what he was inclined to do after the manner, so he told himself, of all the other creatures in the hollow. He hunted or fished when he was hungry. He hiked and climbed when he was curious. He spent hours observing his neighbors—playful catbirds, voracious pileated woodpeckers, grazing deer, flitting warblers of many kinds, and those always endearing chickadees. If he was hot he bathed in his bathtub, nibbled by curious trout if he sat still. If he had something to say, King always listened with a most knowing look in his eyes. But King didn’t mind at all if hours went by with nothing said. And hours did go by in which Steve was perfectly content to sit and absorb. King was the perfect companion—ready for action at a moment’s notice but content to lie low when Steve was deep in thought.

  Truth to tell, Steve was starting to love King.

  How tiny is the worm on entering the apple, almost too tiny to be of concern. Its work is scarcely noticeable as it bores down into the crevice around the stem. Even when it is inside there seems little cause for worry: the apple hangs plump and firm, a beauty to the eye. But in the core the worm is silently gnawing out an ever-widening cavity around itself. Every day the worm grows bigger and hungrier. And while the apple on the outside preserves its symmetry and grace, on the inside it grows hollow and putrid.

  With comparable insidiousness a tiny worm now bored its way into Steve’s soul and began to burrow down into its core. It was the old worm of restlessness. As long as he had been occupied with building his campsite, the worm had had no opportunity to attack him. He had been too busy making things just right for his summer of idleness! With all his energies enthusiastically enlisted in fulfilling his longed-for goal, there was nothing left over for the worm to feed on. But once his goal was achieved and the time had come to sit back and let life come to him, the worm of restlessness attacked. It was barely noticeable at first, but one morning early in his third week in the hollow, as the grays of dawn were slowly spreading, something happened that changed everything.

  Steve, sound asleep, was jolted to life by an outburst of howling and barking from King. The poor dog was stamping and leaping around in a mad frenzy. Steve jumped up. And then he saw it.

  The whole campsite was alive and creeping. Scores of embattled ants were crawling all over King. Steve’s first impulse was to get them off the dog. He called him to one side, off the battleground, and brushed the ants off King’s face and ears. Then he picked and pulled them out of his thick hair until not one was left. The bewildered dog charged up the hill to watch from a safe distance. In the nick of time Steve grabbed his bedroll and duffle bag, carried them up for King to stand guard over, and rushed back down to the campsite. In the few moments this took, he returned to find the ants swarming all over his cooking utensils. And in the few seconds it took for him to rescue these, the horde engulfed the lean-to. Having salvaged all he could, Steve backed off to watch the carnage.

  The arena of the most active conflict was ten or fifteen feet wide, he guessed, and maybe twice as long. At the head of the moving column were the retreating ranks of the colony on the defensive. They were much larger than their attackers, likely wood ants that had colonized a large rotting snag. They were formed in a tight phalanx around one enormous ant measuring at least an inch in length, their queen.

  Mildly surprised at first that the larger more fierce-looking ants were in retreat, in surveying the whole battlefield he soon discovered why. They were vastly outnumbered by the smaller variety whose strategy seemed to be most frustrating to their larger cousins. He never saw them engage the giants head-on or singly, but from each side and in groups of two or three. The furious wood ants would snap in one direction only to be nipped from the other. The earth ants, as he supposed they were, seemed to know that to fight alone was suicide. And as there were enough of them to win by attrition, they contented themselves with wearing down the enemy, crippling him bit by bit. The unfortunate earth ant that got in the path of a pair of the huge jaws of a wood ant was instantly severed in two.

  Spellbound, Steve became curious about what the path of battle looked like behind the advancing ranks. He had no trouble tracing the wreckage down the hill, over a log across the creek, along the opposite bank, right up to the catastrophic event that had occasioned it all. In the wind the night before, a mammoth snag filled with wood ants had apparently snapped off its base and landed directly across the top of a very large mound of earth ants. The two colonies doubtless had blamed each other for their respective disasters and gone on attack. The ensuing battle must have been apocalyptic. Decapitated bodies of earth ants littered the ground all over the site, overwhelmed at first. But then as both colonies vacated their homes to join the call to arms, Steve surmised, the tide began to turn. Just beyond the mound the carcasses of wood ants were liberally sprinkled among the earth ants, but they were not decapitated. They were stripped of their limbs, often still alive as indicated by their antennae waving in the air. If he brushed a blade a grass between their jaws, they snapped them together and hung on. Walking back to the lean-to, he noted that the proportion of the dead from each colony was about the same as the proportion of those that were still alive and fighting. This did not bode well for the future of either colony, he mused. And all over a misunderstanding….

  All day he kept track of the battle. At some points it appeared that the tide was turning the favor of one of the combatants, but then it would seem to swing in favor of the other one. Steve learned that the wood ants were retreating not because they were being outfought in the long run but because that was the only way they could hope to engage the pressing earth ants one on one. They were like boxers with one killer punch who were constantly backing off from the annoying flurries of their opponents, until one of them got careless and exposed himself to the fatal blow. In the process, of course, they were often simply overwhelmed. The phalanx around their queen had thus far proved a complete success. No earth ant had yet seriously attempted to break through that powerful line of jaws. No side of Her Majesty was exposed, no limb vulnerable. But as the conflict wore on, it was becoming evident that in the end only the phalanx would be left to defend their queen. Over time numbers were proving the decisive factor in the battle surrounding the phalanx.

  By two o’clock in the afternoon only the phalanx of the wood ants remained, and their queen. Steve had followed the battlefield all the way up the hill to the place where the trail leading into the hollow petered out. “So they’re going to make their last stand on the roadbed, are they?” Steve muttered out loud. “They don’t know and they don’t care that I’m watching them, or that I could put an end to it all with a few twists of my heel. This is too weird….”

  Before long the earth ants had disabled every wood ant except those forming the phal
anx around the queen. The remnant of their once countless host, still an impressive number, gathered for a mass attack on the phalanx. Steve counted about eighty wood ants against three or four hundred earth ants, all of whom lost no time in charging the living wall of defenders from all sides as a body. The first row in the phalanx cut down the foremost chargers as fast as they came. Behind them were more, and still more, cascading forward over the bodies of their comrades. Attacked from all sides, there was no direction in which the phalanx could retreat any more. The second row of the phalanx swung into action as earth ants scrambled over the first thrashing row. Soon the third row was in the fray. A small tight circle of wood ants fell out of their rank in the phalanx and closed in around the queen. Bedlam raged on every side. Even with their losses, the earth ants still vastly outnumbered their larger opponents.

  Bodies of earth ants flew in every direction. But as the conflict shifted around on the roadbed, limbless or mostly limbless wood ants were left helpless in its wake. The inner circle around the queen and her few bodyguards was now the only portion of the phalanx left intact. They gave it all they had in Her Majesty’s defense. The ranks of the inner circle were thinning. The earth ants took immediate advantage of this and closed in on the queen herself. Her tiny bodyguard defended her valiantly. No earth ant had touched her yet, and for a short while it looked as if she would be safe.

  It didn’t take very long, however, before the bodyguards had all broken rank and were engaged in individual combat and the queen was forced to defend herself. Breathless, Steve watch the end approach. He had no idea who would win. Pieces and segments lay twitching everywhere. Active battle was raging only right around the queen. Five wood ants against eleven earth ants! Three wood ants against seven earth ants! One partially crippled wood ant and the queen against three earth ants. But these odds were unfair. The queen and her valiant knight made quick work of two of the earth ants, but this permitted the third one to slip around behind them. In one fell slash the gallant but doomed earth ant crippled one of the queen’s legs and turned and snapped off the only remaining leg on the right side of the wood ant. The queen whirled around and easily decapitated the earth ant.

  Et le combat cessa faute de combattants.

  “They call that a Pyrrhic victory, King,” Steve mumbled, shaking his head as he watched the queen hobble from one helpless wood ant to the next in search of a surviving escort. “Now what will she do?”

  They watched as she dragged herself into the undergrowth beside the roadbed, presumably to wait in comfort for death to overtake her. Leaving her to her solitary reflections under the leaves, Steve trudged heavily down the hill.

  “Should I have killed her? Would it have been an act of mercy? It was all so senseless. So much death and destruction for nothing.”

  That night after supper around the campfire, King came over to Steve where he was sitting with his back up against a tree watching the moon rise over the hills. The great dog lay down beside him, put his head in the young man’s lap, and looked up into his eyes.

  “I’d give anything for a pencil and paper,” Steve said out loud. King whined in sympathy. They sat in silence for a long time. Every passing minute gnawed away at a cavity forming deep in the core of Steve’s soul. He should do something about what he had just witnessed, so it wouldn’t all go for naught, all that pointless suffering and death. It had taken up his entire day. There had to be a reason he’d watched it all…. O really?… Really!

  He gazed off into the lowering darkness. A light moved along the horizon out on the lake. The whip-poor-wills were bouncing their calls off the valley walls again. The owls and the hawk and the gurgling stream and the glittering stars were all there, right where they were supposed to be. There was the breath of air on the glowing coals, a breath that ran its cooling hand across Steve’s brow and then disappeared into the evening stillness. But tonight, for some reason, it didn’t fill him. He moved over and lay down flat on the ground gazing upward. King lay his head on Steve’s bosom. Steve nudged it gently into the hollow spot he felt down in the pit of his stomach somewhere. This was a new feeling for him. It didn’t feel good, but it didn’t exactly feel bad either. It was sort of heavy and hollow at the same time, and the more beautiful the evening became in its silence and in its sounds, the heavier and the hollower it got.

  That night Steve had a dream. King was in the dream and so were the ants, and the forest, and the deep evening. But there was something else in that dream, something that went straight for the hollowness in his heart and filled it as it had never been filled before: a woman was in his dream too. And not just any woman.

  XIII

  Vaguely she shimmered in and out of his dream’s eye, an elusive, haunting apparition of tantalizing beauty. No, she was not a Greek goddess or a Nordic nymph whom to behold stirred up only erotic sensations. Hers was rather the softer beauty of a compassionate heart, of a pure heart overflowing with love and an intense concern for others—including Steve, the ants, and the whole wide world. She hovered at a little distance from him, never looking him straight in the eye but yet encompassing him somehow within her aura. Her golden shoulder-length hair, her full brown eyes, and her slender form slightly stooped as in sorrow, all of her, yes, all of her seemed to be shimmering and wavering behind a thin veil of tears, tears he sensed were there because she was seeing into his heart and feeling the pathos which the ant war had plunged him into. But it was clear that her tears were not just for him. They were also for the ants and for the world, tears of love and, in a most mysterious way—as Steve later struggled to describe it—tears of unrequited faithfulness, leaving him to wonder if he was in fact the faithless one over whom she wept. Hers seemed like a love as faithful as King’s, but infinitely deeper. Even in the dream his heart broke because he knew that from her point of view he was closer to the ants and the world than he was to her, detached from this heavenly Maiden and yet tenderly touched by her. There she stood before him, fading in and out, alone but illuminating everything, motionlessly beckoning, a solitary figure of irresistible charm in search of a love to respond to her own. Everything within Steve screamed “Yes!” in the dream. But in the dream he was paralyzed. He could not move. The gulf between her and him remained.

  Her gentle melancholy sorrow grew more painful by the moment, especially as Steve could not get to her and the ants would not cease fighting. This pushed him over the boundary of dreamland and he awoke to find himself on the point of sobbing. So he let himself go and sobbed sweet tears into his bedroll. He was too moved even to ask himself what it all meant, but there was a wondrous satisfaction in it somehow, an infilling.

  He couldn’t get the image of his Phantom Maiden out of his head. Her slender trembling beauty and especially her tears bathed him in thoughts and feelings entirely new to him. This time when he drifted off to sleep it was into her arms and a warm and guiltless love.

  Steve spent the entire next day walking under the halo of his nocturnal visitor. She muddled, soothed and disturbed, and excited him all at the same time, giving rise to a level and quality of restlessness he had never known before. He didn’t know what to do about her, and he had no idea what to do about the ants. But he had to do something! She had wept over them! And, in the end, so had he, thanks to her.

  A dismal and awesome heaviness hung over him because of those ants. He knew that what he had witnessed was important or she would not have been weeping over it. He also knew that there was nothing he could do in the hollow to bring any good out of it. And so, it seemed to him, she would continue to be sad, all on account of him. Sometimes in those first days after the dream all of this struck him as irrational, but most of the time it didn’t. Most of the time, whether he was walking noiselessly along woodland trails in the full glory of the daylight or lying motionless under the canopy of stars at night, the image of two highly organized nations that had lived side by side in harmony for years annihilating each other under his very eyes over a misunderstanding kept reappea
ring in his mind’s eye. It was as though she wouldn’t let him forget it.

  That was because he could not forget her! Over and over again when he should have been absorbed in the glories and harmonies of his immediate surroundings, he found himself drifting off into another dimension in search of his nocturnal Maiden. Her silhouette appeared everywhere, it seemed. Once he imagined he was actually seeing her behind a clump of chokecherries. It startled him—it was so realistic. But these vivid moments disappeared like soap bubbles in the air. Try as he might he could not escape from her, and most of the time he didn’t try very hard. He had fallen in love. It was that simple.

  These two strange new impulses (the one to tell, the other to love) grew within him unbidden as the days went by. When they were in control of him, they became pure torture for him. Of course, given a bit of distance from them, his rational mind saw the folly of the whole business of letting a dream run your life. It was all insane nonsense. The price of trying to make something rational of that crazy dream would be to deny everything he had discovered to be true the previous year, and so help him, that would never happen! Why should he care whether anyone heard about the ants or not? He had no duty to the world he had intentionally left behind, a world that was just like the ants in so many ways. It was as useless to try to get a message across to the world as it would have been to try to get the ants to stop killing each other. People would think he was crazy for trying.

  And what reason could there possibly be in the real world for getting tangled up with a woman, any kind of actual woman? They lure you in and then they chain you down. You’d always be at cross-purposes with each other under a veneer of social conformity. It’d be the end of your freedom.