Searching for Safe Passage

A small rock disengaged itself high above them on the other side of the road and skittered down what sounded like the face of a cliff, ricocheting sharply left and right as it fell like a little steel ball in a giant pachinko machine. Feeling slightly vertiginous and searching for visual context, for something solid and immovable in the midst of the disorienting, spectral grayness, the young man bent over and looked down at the misty, pock-marked surface of the ramshackle road, temporarily orienting himself and spotting a healthy coil of bleached white coyote scat filled with fur and small bones. He slowly stood upright and listening again to the creek gurgling hundreds of feet below them, gently grasped her elbow with his finger tips and guided her away from the invisible abyss towards what might have been the center of the road. He then slowly walked up to the impenetrable woven wall of alder branches, hands out in front, slightly stooped to see the road surface, and then followed the alders sideways towards where he’d heard the rock fall. There should be a narrow space, he reasoned, between the face of the cliff and the first alder trunks, a space that would allow them safe passage.

Copyright 2013 by Robert R. Mitchell

Read the book that started it all!
http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-Good-...