The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

Author:Theodore Sturgeon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781583947548
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

At noon he was picking his way up a creek, crossing and recrossing and letting one of Conlin’s surefooted mountain ponies find the route. The Green Spring, he had been told, was the source of this particular stream. He had been told this by the Pueblo, who answered his question in Spanish. He had pretended not to understand her; he didn’t want anyone to add his knowledge of Spanish to Al Coe’s guess—if it was a guess—about Taos. So she had answered in English and he was now on his way. To what he didn’t know, but he had shaved first.

He had to leave the creek at an alder thicket and cut out to open ground. He was well up into the hills now, and could see the rolling country for miles. Ahead of him, a steep slope was capped by a rocky cliff, mostly sheer, in some places overhanging. “That spring better be under the cliff,” he muttered. “Sure won’t get over it without wings.”

He moved back to the stream when he could, and found it boiling along, large as ever. Well, maybe it ran along the base of the cliff …

But it didn’t. He swore helplessly when he saw how it gushed right out of the rock face and came brawling down the broken slope, with no sign of a spring at all, let alone a green one.

Who was playing games? Loretta? The squaw?

Jokers like to watch their victims. He looked around carefully, angrily. As far as the eye could determine, he had this cliff and this creek to himself, and the whole world to boot.

He looked again at the cliff. Forty, fifty, some places sixty feet. Sharp, almost solid rock, with a few scrubs of jack pine clinging to cracks here and there, a spruce and hemlock at the foot. Up at the top, like as not, it would be flat earth soft as delta country—a giant terrace up to the mountain beyond.

Suddenly he saw an answer—the only possible way that the squaw could be right and Loretta not playing games. Not practical jokes, anyway.

He cast up and back along the face of the cliff until he located a possible break near the top—a long brown scar of spilled earth and the clinging evergreen thick around it. He rode to the foot of it, found shade for the pony, and started to climb a spruce which grew hard by the sheer wall. Near the treetop was a tangle of limbs, part from his tree, part from growth on the cliff. He thrashed his way across and began to crawl upward.

In twenty minutes he was winded and furious. He had been a fly, a mountain goat, a leapfrog, an inchworm. His fingernails were broken and there was dirt in his mouth and grit under his right eyelid. But the last fifteen feet or so were suddenly easy, with a dry wash he had not been able to see before, angling gently up to the right, and he got up it on his hands and knees, and at last reached level ground.

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