The Postman (26 page)

On the south bank, however, there was nothing—only scorched, crumbled ruins slowly succumbing to the relentless blackberry thickets.

No fortifications overlooked the river fords. The travelers found the absence puzzling, for this valley was supposed to be where the defense against the Holnist enemy had dug in, and finally held.

Calvin Lewis tried to explain. The wiry, dark-eyed young man had guided Johnny Stevens since his earlier journey to south Oregon. Cal’s hand gestured left and right as he spoke.

“You don’t guard a river by buildin’ strong points,” he told them in the low, lazy, local drawl. “We protect the north bank by crossin’ over ourselves, from time to time, and by knowin’ everything that moves over on the other side.”

Philip Bokuto grunted, nodding in approval. Obviously,
that was how he would have done it. Johnny Stevens made no comment, having heard it all before.

Gordon kept looking into the trees, wondering where the watchers were. Doubtless both sides had them out, and observed the party at intervals along the way. Occasionally he caught a glimpse of motion or a glint of what might have been a binoculars lens at some height. But the trackers were good. A damn sight better than anyone in the Army of the Willamette—excluding, perhaps, Phil Bokuto.

The war in the south did not seem to be one of armies or companies, of sieges and strategic moves. It was more as battles had been fought among the American Indians … with victory measured in quick, bloody raids, and in the number of scalps taken.

Survivalists were expert at this type of sneak and run warfare. Unaccustomed to such terror, the Willametters were their ideal prey.

Here, though, the farmers had managed to stop them. It was not his place to critique their tactics, so he let Bokuto ask most of the questions. Gordon knew that these were skills one acquired over a lifetime. He was here for one reason and one reason only—not to learn, but to persuade.

The view was spectacular as they climbed the old Sugarloaf Mountain road, overlooking the merging forks of the Coquille. Snow-covered pine forests looked much as they must have before man came—as if the horror of the last seventeen winters was a matter of significance only to ephemeral creatures, irrelevant to the abiding Earth.

“Sometimes the bastards try to sneak by in big canoes,” Cal Lewis told them. “The south fork comes this way almost straight up from the Rogue country, and by the time it joins the center fork here, it’s movin’ pretty fast.”

The young man grinned. “But George always seems to know what they’re up to. George is always ready for ’em.”

There it was again, that affection mixed with awe in mentioning the leader of the Camas Valley communities. Did the man eat nails for breakfast? Did he strike his enemies with lightning? After all the tales, Gordon was ready to believe anything about George Powhatan.

Bokuto’s broad nostrils flared as he suddenly reined back, stopping Gordon protectively with his left arm. The ex-Marine’s machine pistol was upraised in a blur.

“What is it, Phil?” Gordon drew his carbine as he scanned the woody slopes. The horses danced and snorted, sensing their riders’ agitation.

“It’s …” Bokuto sniffed. His eyes narrowed incredulously. “… I smell bear fat!”

Cal Lewis looked up into the trees beside the road and smiled. From just upslope there came bass, throaty laughter.

“Very good, my man! You have keen senses!”

As Gordon and the others peered, a large, shadowed figure shifted between the Douglas firs, outlined against the afternoon sun. Gordon felt a brief thrill as a part of him wondered, for just a moment, if it was a human being at all, or perhaps the legendary Sasquatch—Bigfoot of the Northwest.

Then the shape stepped forward and was revealed as a craggy-faced, middle-aged man whose shoulder-length gray hair was bound by a beaded headband. A homespun, short-sleeved shirt exposed thigh-like shoulders to the open air, but he was apparently unbothered by the cold.

“I am George Powhatan,” the grinning man said. “Welcome, gentlemen, to Sugarloaf Mountain.”

Gordon swallowed. What was it about the man’s voice that matched his physical appearance? It spoke of power so casually assumed that there was no need for bluster or display. Powhatan spread his hands. “Come on up, you with the sharp nose. And the rest of you with your fancy uniforms! You caught a whiff of bear fat? Well then, come look at my down-home weather station! You’ll see what the stuff is good for.”

The visitors relaxed and put away their weapons, put at ease by the ready laughter.
No
Sasquatch
, Gordon told himself.
Just a hearty mountain man—nothing more
.

He patted his skittish northern horse, and told himself that he, too, must have been reacting only to the smell of rendered bear.

The Squire of Sugarloaf Mountain used jars of bear fat to predict the weather, refining a traditional technique with meticulous, scientific record keeping. He bred cows to give better milk, and sheep for better wool. His greenhouses, warmed by biogenerated methane, produced fresh vegetables the year round, even in the harshest winters.

George Powhatan took special pride in showing off his brewery, famed for the best beer in four counties.

The walls of the great lodge—the seat of his domain—featured finely woven hangings and the proudly displayed artwork of children. Gordon had expected to see weapons and trophies of battle, but there were none in sight anywhere. Indeed, once one passed within the high stockade and abatis, there were hardly any reminders of the long war at all.

That first day, Powhatan would not speak of business. He spent all of it showing his guests around and supervising preparations for a potlatch in their honor. Then, late in the afternoon, when they had been shown their rooms in order to rest, their host vanished.

“I thought I saw him head west,” Philip Bokuto answered, when Gordon asked. “Toward that bluff over there.”

Gordon thanked him and headed that way down a gravel-lined path through the trees. For hours Powhatan had skillfully avoided any serious discussion at all, always diverting them with something new to see, or with his apparently infinite store of country lore.

Tonight could be more of the same, with so many people coming to meet them. There might be no opportunity to get to business at all.

Of course he knew he shouldn’t be so impatient. But Gordon did not
want
to meet any more people. He wanted to talk to George Powhatan alone.

He found the tall man seated, facing the edge of a steep dropoff. Far below, waters roared with the meeting of the branches of the Coquille. To the west, the mountains of the Coast Range shimmered in purple haze that was rapidly darkening into an orange and ocher sunset. The ever-present clouds burned with a hundred autumnal shades.

George Powhatan sat zazen on a simple reed mat, his upturned hands resting on his knees. His expression was one Gordon had seen sometimes, before the war—one he had called, for want of another name, “The Smile of Buddha.”

Well, I’ll be …
he thought.
The last of the neohippies. Who would have believed it?

The mountain man’s sleeveless tunic showed a faded, blue tattoo on his massive shoulder—a powerful fist with one finger gently extended, upon which was delicately perched a
dove
. Below could clearly be read a single word,
AIRBORNE
.

The juxtaposition didn’t really surprise Gordon. Nor did the peaceful expression on Powhatan’s face. Somehow they seemed fitting.

He knew that courtesy didn’t require that he leave—only that he not interfere with the other man’s sitting. He quietly cleared a space a few feet to Powhatan’s right, and lowered himself to the ground facing the same direction. Gordon did not even try to get into a lotus. He hadn’t practiced the skill since he was seventeen. But he did sit, back straight, and tried to clear his mind as the colors shimmered and changed out in the direction of the sea.

At first all he could think of was how stiff he felt. How sore from riding and sleeping on hard, cold ground. Puffs of wind chilled him as the sun’s warmth hid behind the mountains.
His thoughts were a churned antheap of sounds, concerns, memories.

But soon, without willing it at all, his eyelids began to grow heavy. They settled down, microscopically, and then stopped about halfway, unable to rise or fall any farther.

If he hadn’t known what was happening, he surely would have panicked. But it was only a mild meditation trance; he recognized the feelings.
What the hell
, he thought, and let it grow.

Was he doing this out of a sense of competition with Powhatan? Or to show the man that
he
wasn’t the only child of the renaissance who still remembered?

Or was it simply because he was tired, and the sunset was so beautiful?

Gordon felt a hollow sensation within him—as if a pocket of each lung were closed, and had been for a very long time. He tried to inhale hard and deep, but his pattern of breathing did not alter in the slightest—as if his body knew a wisdom that he did not. The calm that crossed his face with the numbing breeze seemed to trickle downward, touching his throat like a woman’s fingers, running across his tight shoulders and stroking his muscles until they relaxed of their own accord.

The colors
 … he thought, seeing only the sky. His heart rocked his body gently.

Had it been a lifetime since he last sat like this and let go? Or was it just that there was so much to let go of?

They are …

In an easing that could never have been forced, the locked sensation in his lungs seemed to let go, and he
breathed
. Stale air escaped, to be swept away by the western wind. His next breath tasted so sweet that it came back out as a sigh.

“The colors …”

There was motion to his left, a stirring. A quiet voice spoke. “I used to wonder if these sunsets were God’s last gift … something to match the rainbow he gave Noah, only this time it was his way of saying … ‘So long’ … to us all.”

He did not answer Powhatan. There was no need.

“But after many years watching them, I guess the atmosphere is slowly cleansing itself. They aren’t quite what they were, just after the war.”

Gordon nodded. Why did people on the coast always assume they had a monopoly on sunsets? He remembered how it had been on the prairie—once the Three-Year Winter had passed and the skies were clear enough to see the sun at all. It had seemed as if Heaven had spilled its palette in a garish splash of hues, glorious, if deadly in their beauty.

Without turning to look, Gordon knew that Powhatan had not moved. The man sat in the same position, smiling softly.

“Once,” the gray-haired squire said, “perhaps ten years ago, I was sitting here, just as I am now, recovering from a recent wound and contemplating the sunset, when I caught sight of something, or somebody, moving by the river, down below. At first, I thought they were men. I pulled out of my meditation quickly and headed down for a closer look. And yet something told me that it was not the enemy, even from this range.

“I approached as quietly as I could, until I had come within a few hundred meters, and I focused the little monocular I used to keep in my pouch.

“They weren’t human beings at all. Imagine my surprise when I saw them strolling by the river bank, hand in hand, him helping her over stony banks, she murmuring softly as she carried something wrapped in a bundle.

“A pair of chimpanzees, for Heaven’s sake. Or maybe one was a chimp and the other a smaller ape or even a monkey. They vanished into the rain forest before I could be sure.”

For the first time in ten minutes, Gordon blinked. The image was so stark in his imagination, as if he were looking over Powhatan’s shoulder into the man’s memories from that long ago day.
Why
is he telling me this?

Powhatan continued, “They must have been set free from the Portland Zoo, along with those leopards running
wild in the Cascades, now. That was the
simplest
explanation … that they had worked their way south for years, foraging and keeping out of sight, helping each other as they headed for what they must have hoped would be warmer territory.

“I realized that they were moving down the south branch of the Coquille, right into Holnist territory.

“What could I do? I thought about following. Trying to catch them, or at least divert them. But it was doubtful I’d be able to do anything more than frighten them. And anyway, if they had come so far, what need had they of
me
to warn them of the dangers of being around man?

“They had been caged, now they were free. Oh, I wasn’t foolish enough to conclude they were happier, but at least they weren’t subject to the will of others anymore.”

Powhatan’s voice was subdued. “That can be a precious thing, I know.”

There was another pause. “I let them go,” he said, finishing his story. “Often, as I sit here watching these humbling sunsets, I wonder what ever became of them.”

At last, Gordon’s eyes closed completely. The silence stretched on. He inhaled and with some effort made the heaviness fall aside. Powhatan had been trying to tell him something, with that strange story. He, in turn, had something to say to Powhatan.

“A duty to help others isn’t necessarily the same as being subject to the
will
of …”

He stopped—sensing that something had changed. His eyes opened, and when he turned, he saw that Powhatan was gone.

That evening people gathered from all over, more men and women than Gordon had thought still lived in the sparsely settled valley. For the visiting postman and his company, they put on a folk festival, of sorts. Children sang, and small troupes performed clever little skits.

Unlike in the north, where popular songs were often those remembered from the days of television and radio,
here there were no fondly recalled commercial jingles, few rock and roll melodies retuned to banjo and acoustic guitar. Instead, the music went back to an older tradition.

The bearded men, the women in long dresses tending table, the singing by fire and lamplight—it might easily have been a gathering from nearly two centuries ago, back when this valley had first been settled by white men, coming together for company and to shake off the chill of winter.