Day 5

I lay in bed for a while listening to the sounds of the night creatures and thinking about the previous night. I got up, dressed and quietly made my way down to the compound. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but it seemed to me that it was about an hour before everyone usually rose for the day. I stood outside for a few moments and watched the night sky. There was so much to see here. At home, in Eastboro, there is too much light around to see much of the night sky. Out here, the night sky is the only light, and it’s gorgeous. I watched a tiny dot make its way across the sky. What I was looking at could only have been a satellite. I had never seen one before, and I had no idea that you could see them with the naked eye.

As I watched the sky, a light drew my attention to the west. There was a fire up on the hill behind the Monastery compound. It looked as if it was coming from the stone outcrop or from close by it. I watched the faint flickering light for a few minutes, and then made a decision to walk up there myself. I was pretty sure that the person who tended the fire must be Brother Grant. I walked through the orchard and saw several forms running along the top of the ridge silhouetted against the woods behind them. Deer. White tail deer. The sight thrilled me and then they disappeared into the woods. I continued along the trail as it penetrated the woods. I used the technique I had tried the night before, and by defocusing my eyes, I was able to pick my way along the trail with a certain amount of confidence. A couple of times, there were rustlings in the brush around me as creatures disturbed by my presence took flight. Finally, I approached the outcrop, where I could see the fire burning out toward the middle of it. As I stepped out of the woods, I saw a man sitting in front of the fire. It was clear that this was not Brother Grant, in fact, the man sitting before me was an Indian. His straight gray hair hung to mid back, and he wore a sort of a turban on his head. His clothing was made of deer hide, and the fire he tended was small. He hunched over it and it looked as if he was feeding something into it. I couldn’t see what it was, though. I stood there and watched him for a while, and he began to sing softly into the night. I could not understand the words of his song, but the melody was haunting as it rose and fell with his thin voice. I looked down at my feet to make sure of my footing. When I looked up again, he was gone. I looked around wildly as fear shot up my spine. He was gone. Nowhere in sight. The fire remained, so I knew that I had not been hallucinating.

I stood there, paralyzed with fear. I watched the rock, which began to show some color. First there were some faint greens and purples and then I picked up some pinks and blues. I realized that what I was watching was the sun rising and pulling the colors out of the lichens on the rock. I finally moved when I heard someone approaching from the woods. I whirled around and there stood Brother Grant. "I had a feeling I would find you here." He looked at the remains of the fire and then back at me with a quizzical look. " You had company?" He asked. I explained what happened. He sat down next to the fire and stirred it slowly with a stick. "He must have wanted to see you, so he called to you." He said. "He never called to me. I just happened to come outside and I just happened to look up at this hill. He had no way of knowing that I would see his fire." "Uh-huh," he said. "And how often do you get up that early and come out by yourself?" "Strictly coincidence." I replied. "I woke up early from a dream I was having and…" I thought about the dream, whose feel and texture was different from my usual dreams. Hmmm. "The man you saw is called Jonathan Hidden Spring. He is a Cherokee Indian, and a Shaman. He has lived on the Monastery land for about 17 years. If he had not wanted you to see his fire, you wouldn't have seen it. The only way you could have seen it was if he wanted you to." "Well, how did he disappear?" I asked. "I don't know. There are a lot of things that Jonathan can do that I can't explain. You will get to meet him pretty soon. He has asked me about you." "Why was he asking about me?" "He has seen you around the Monastery, and he was curious about you. He said he likes the way that you look at things." "But this was the first time I have seen him. He couldn't have seen me before." I insisted. "You'll find, when you get to know Jonathan, that he sees quite a bit, and it isn't always easy to see him."

I asked Brother Grant to explain what he meant by that, but he just turned and walked back down the trail. I followed him, and I had to run just to keep up with him. We made it back to the community building in time to wolf down some breakfast before it was time for work. Today, I was to accompany Brother Tom to repair something. The cook prepared us some lunch to take with us, and we packed it into a leather backpack. Brother Tom and I each carried one of these packs, which also contained some knives and some cordage. We set out about eight O'clock and walked to the Southwest. Crossing the fields, I watched as two turkey vultures circled on a thermal. Their wingspan was impressive, but their bare heads looked tiny compared to the rest of their bodies. After we crossed the fields, we entered a thick pine forest, which covered some gentle, rolling hills. We followed what appeared to be a game trail until we reached a river. The river was the color of tea, and it crawled lazily along.

There was a large tree that had fallen across it, and Brother Tom scrambled up onto it. As he began to cross it, I called to him. "I don't think I can cross that. I'm not very graceful. I would probably fall in." He laughed and said, "Hah, Grace is not what you need to cross this bridge. At least not physical grace. Climb up there. That's right." I climbed up onto the log, and held tightly to a branch that stuck straight up in the air off of it. Brother Tom walked quickly across and stood on the other side. He looked back at me. "Now," he said. "Look at me. That's right, look at my eyes. Let yourself be afraid, it's all right. Just keep looking at my eyes. I want you to stare at my eyes as you cross the log. Just tell yourself that your can cross it. Don't look anywhere else. Just look at my eyes." "I think I can cross it." I said. "No, tell yourself that you can cross it, and you will do so." He said. "Okay." I looked at Brother Tom's eyes and I began to walk. As I did so, I told myself that I could cross it. I repeated this over and over like a mantra. "That's right. Keep coming. You can cross it. Tell yourself that." I walked slowly across, one foot in front of the other. Before I knew it, I was across. "There," he said. "You did it." I looked back at the log, which was only about a foot in diameter, and knew that I couldn't have crossed it alone. "Thanks." I said quietly.

As we continued along the trail, the hills got steeper and the forest changed from mostly pine to a mixture of oak, beech, and birch. We climbed a particularly large hill, and on the other side, we entered a valley. There was a small river that ran through the middle of it, and some open meadows that bordered the river. There was a large marsh at one end, and some low forest covered hills on the other side of the valley from where we stood. I was awestruck. It was a beautiful place. Brother Tom looked at me and smiled. "Lovely, isn't it?" "Uh-huh." I answered. I was speechless. There were deer at the other end of the valley, and they watched us as we made our way down the sloping trail. There was a steep rock cliff up on the other side of the valley. I wondered if we would have time to climb up there before we left. Brother Tom led me into a grove of pines. There in the center of the grove, was a shelter. It was round, and it was covered with some kind of thatched grass. On one side, a pine tree had fallen and crushed part of the shelter. I figured that must be what we were there to repair.

The inside of the shelter hid a frame of saplings, which ran about the width of my wrist and a little smaller. They were lashed together with the type of cordage that we carried in our packs. We spent an hour pulling the tree off of the shelter and repairing the broken frame. Then we went out to the meadow and pulled up two large bundles of grass and hauled it back to the shelter. Brother tom then showed me how the thatching was done. There was a second shell of smaller branches outside of the larger ones. These smaller branches ran horizontally like ladders up the sides of the shelter, and this was where the thatch was secured. We took handfuls of the grass and twisted them around these small branches, tying them off with cordage. We spent a couple of hours doing this until the shelter was completely repaired.

Now we took out our lunch and ate it on a large flat rock in the meadow. I was tired and sweaty from our labor, but I felt a real sense of accomplishment at the completion of our task. Without any tools, we had rebuilt this shelter. I imagine that it is not much different from the shelters that the people who inhabited these hills thousands of years ago lived in . Even the porridge we had for lunch tasted good to me. After we finished, Brother Tom took me to the other side of the meadow and showed me where there were some wild strawberries growing. They were quite small, and I was sure that they would be relatively tasteless as other wild strawberries I had tasted had been. I tasted one, and it was like an explosion of sweetness in my mouth. I can not ever remember eating a sweeter strawberry anywhere. We picked as many as we could carry and brought them back to the rock, where we feasted on them with gusto. We lay back on the rock enjoying the afternoon sun. "Man, this would be a great place to camp out." I remarked. "Would you like to stay here tonight?" Brother Tom asked. "Of course I would, but aren't we supposed to get back to the compound?" "Well," He said, "I wasn't sure how extensive the damage to the shelter would be, so I told Brother Henry that we might have to stay here the night." He replied. "What will we eat for supper?" Brother Tom smiled and opened the leather bag that hung from his shoulder. He pulled out a piece of leather that was folded up and tied with a thong. He untied the thong, and he opened the leather up. There he revealed some fishing line wrapped around a flat piece of wood and several fishhooks. He went into the brush and cut himself a pole from a dead sapling. He tied the line to the pole, and then he pulled a smaller piece of leather out of his pack and opened it, revealing several small fishing flies made out of feathers and hooks. He attached one of the flies to the fishing line, and we headed off to the river. I sat on the ground as Brother Tom waded out into the water. He stood near the middle of the stream and began to flick the line back and forth until he lay the fly about twenty feet ahead of him. He gave the fly a couple of jerks and then he pulled the line in hand over hand, holding it loosely in his left hand in a large coil. He repeated this several times until he got a bite. He jerked the line and set the hook. Brother Tom began to back up toward the shore, and he walked that fish right out of that river. I scooped it up and removed the fly from his lip. Brother Tom repeated this trick seven more times, and he cleaned those fish next to the river. We walked back to the shelter and we collected a large pile of firewood.

Brother Tom pulled some items out of his bag. There was a small bow strung with some cordage. There was also a dowel about six inches in length and a flat piece of wood with a depression in the middle and a notch out of the side. He emptied the contents of a small leather pouch onto the ground. The mixture that tumbled out was a variety of natural fiber and materials. He placed the dowel in the depression on the piece of wood and wrapped the cord on the bow around the dowel. He sprinkled some of the mixture around the bottom of the dowel and he began to saw the bow back and forth, causing the dowel to spin quickly back and forth on the wood. He applied pressure to the top of the dowel with another flat piece of wood from his bag. After a few minutes of this, a wisp of smoke rose from the bottom of the dowel. At Brother Tom's request, I sprinkled more of the mixture into the depression and he began to bow faster. Soon a little column of smoke appeared and he stopped bowing and dropped some more of the mixture onto the smoking coal. He blew on that, and we had a flame. He built a little teepee over the flame using tiny sticks. As the flame grew, he lay larger and larger sticks over the teepee, and before we knew it, we had a fire.

We each stuck a fish on a stout stick and lay them over the fire, turning often. We feasted on trout and a couple of apples that Brother Tom had saved from the lunch we brought. We talked for a while until darkness fell. Brother Tom told me a little about himself. He was a dentist before he joined the Brethren. He said that this was the last thing he had envisioned for himself. Now, he said, he couldn't envision any other life for himself.

Soon we crawled into the shelter and to sleep on some grass and pine bows that Brother Tom had collected earlier. I filled my leather bag with grass and leaves and lay down. As sleep began to claim me, the last thing I remember was the high, plaintive cry of a coyote from somewhere up on the ridge.

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Day 5
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Day 7