Carrying The Fire

Aron carries a backpack through the forest. He turns and looks at the empty hillside behind him. He can’t see anyone, but he can hear his pursuers, rattling through the brush sounding like dice in a cup. It’s a continual rattle-rattle-rattle, and that’s because there are a lot of them moving through the dense scrub pines that dot the hilly landscape he has spent all day crossing. He hears the baying of a dog, then as the pursuers draw closer, he can hear more dogs baying. And where that rattle-rattle once echoed randomly through the woods and made its way to his ears circuitously, now it is direct and loud and pounding against him.

‘I’m running out of time’, he thinks. He has been on the move since dawn, the longest day of his life.

A couple hours ago he spent fifteen minutes walking north in water up to his shins through the large stream he found several miles back, to confuse any dogs that might have been tracking him. But they apparently still had his scent. Now it is late afternoon crossing the line into evening, and the red sun is slowly setting. It rests about three fingers above the horizon. From the angle he faces it the rays hit him directly in the eyes, which is bad because it hampers his vision and causes him to trip occasionally, but good because it is his guide. 

He leads his pursuers by perhaps a mile or less, though his head start this morning had been close to five miles. The chase began outside an apple orchard then through a small town, and then rapidly into an uncharted pine forest. There are no roads and few trails, and a never-ending variety of tall pine, scrub trees and bushes, fallen and decaying trunks. He has gotten scratched by brambles and more than once fallen, tripped by a random root or limb or hole in the ground, but gotten up every time, urged by what he had been told.

“Go west”, the woman had told him this morning. “Go west as hard and fast as you can. Don’t stop for anything. You should make it by nightfall.” So, he has been going as due west as he can and as hard as he can all day. 

The straps of the pack he is carrying on his back are rubbing into the front of his shoulders, sweat seeping through his shirt and stinging his raw skin. The sweat runs down his forehead into his eyes. When his neckerchief got soaked, he started grabbing a handful of his shirt to dry his face but now his shirt is soaking wet too, so it does no good. The sweat drips down his hairline and into his ears and occasionally dislodges the earpiece from his ear. When that happens, he has to stop and try to wipe his ear dry, then shove it back in again.

He climbs to the crest of a hill and runs down the slope to the bottom, hurdling small logs and stumps and random twigs, his ankles absorbing the shock of the uneven terrain. He’s been running down hills since mid-morning. His only hope of staying ahead of his pursuers is to pick up time on the downhill; on the uphill track it is just him and just like a solo rider in a bike race, the group behind him has more muscle and can share the load together. The group can keep a more even pace and get more spread out than just one runner fleeing in front of them. He has no doubt that, just like in a fox hunt, the men and dogs will pursue until they run him down. And then the end will come just as quickly and violently as it does for a fox alone against a hunter and a pack of excited dogs.

He makes a sudden turn south and runs hard at least a hundred yards, dashing through a couple small streams. On an impulse he pulls the useless sweat-soaked neckerchief off from around his neck and shoves it into a hollow log then doubles back through the streams again back to the point he turned, hoping that the scent in the log will slow the dogs down for a couple minutes. Then he turns to the west and starts up the next hill.

The slope is steep, and he is badly out of breath by the time he crests it. The sun is red in the sky in front of him. It rests two fingers above the horizon. He has been told that when he reaches the demilitarized zone he will see a fence across the border and a guard tower near the crossing point. He doesn’t know which side of the border the tower is on, nor does he know which way the sentries are looking.

The rest of her instructions had been terse and hurried. “Don’t drop the pack no matter what”, she had said. “It has to get across the border. Don’t put anything else in it. Don’t open it. Remember, the guards at the border can’t help you until you cross.” She handed him a small red capsule with a grim nod. She expected him to recognize what it was for, and of course he did. “Last resort”, she said shortly. He wrapped it in a tissue and shoved it into his pocket. 

“If I take that”, he commented, “They will get the pack for sure.”

“Then it’s all but over for us too”, she had replied blankly, as he stared at the floor.

“Maybe we will see each other again”, she had continued, then opened the door. He had stepped outside and started running. After a few miles, the rattling behind him started and Aron had stopped to put his communications receiver earpiece in, just on the off chance he might hear something from the pursuers behind him. After flipping through the channels for a few seconds he found a staticky channel with what sounded like multiple people talking. It was a confused hubbub of voices for a second, then complete silence, then a single voice giving instructions.

“He’s headed due west”, the voice said calmly. “Straight for the border.” Aron made sure his microphone was muted and listened as they talked to one another. He listened to them for the first two hours of their pursuit, mostly to men panting with a backdrop of cursing and dogs barking. At the top of one hill, he was wiping his face with his kerchief, which was still mostly dry at that point, and turned his microphone on without being aware of it. He must have muttered something under his breath because someone recognized him on the circuit. Then they were all over him.

“You may as well stop now”, one voice taunted. “You’re not going to make it to the DMZ.”

“We’ll be easy on you”, another voice jumped in.

“You shouldn’t have left”, a third man interjected. “We’re the winning team.”

Since then, he has endured taunts and curses and several minutes-long rants trying to convince him to switch sides. Since the accident he has kept his microphone off. He has debated just taking the headset out of his ear, but in the end concluded that the potential for useful information outweighs the insults and damage to his morale that make up most of the content.

He pauses at the top of the next hill, his lungs burning. The red sun has dropped closer to the horizon. Judging from the sounds behind him, his pursuers have made up significant ground. What has been a steady barking of dogs suddenly becomes frantic. Most likely, they have found the neckerchief he left in the log at the base of the last hill. They are no more than ten minutes behind him now.

Despite the need to move, Aron pauses for a moment at the top of the hill, drinking in the clear mountain air. It reminded him of long mountain hikes, picnics in meadows at the base of a snowcapped peak, his son and daughter laughing together as they chased a butterfly, their wonder at discovering the berry bushes ripe with fruit that has never been picked by a human, the strong hand of his wife gripping his as they meandered up a circuitous path to a hilltop like the one he stood on now.

Those are days long past, he thinks. As he pauses to descend into the next valley his eyes notice a shape on the next hill that does not look like a tree. Then he sees a strip of denuded landscape in front of it going as far as he can see to the north and south, a twenty-yard strip of land that has been sprayed with chemical agents to kill all the brush so now the ground is brown and barren and denotes a dividing line between his past and his future. The shape he did not recognize comes into focus; it is the guard tower. 

His breath quickens and he begins to move, and suddenly realizes that there is a pack of dogs much closer than ten minutes away; while a group of his pursuers had followed his trail and let his wandering across streams divert them, another smaller yet much more dangerous group skipped the detour and has relied on dead reckoning to put themselves on a vector to intercept him before he got to that tower, and judging from the sounds behind him they are close, very close.

He curses to himself and runs down the hill as fast as he can, tripping on a root and sending himself sprawling. He gets up panting and starts running again.

“Aron”. A voice breathes in his ear. “Aron, I know you can hear me.”

He can hear her but continues to run down the hill. 

“Aron”, she says. “I miss you. We miss you. Please come home.”

He closes his eyes for a second while running and does not see the branches from a smaller tree that smack him right in the face, scratching his skin and half blinding him for a second. He does not stop running as he descends into the valley, his eyes tearing from the collision with the branches and from hearing her voice. He looks over his shoulder and can see a handler with two dogs just starting down the hill he had stood at the top of a few minutes before. Bloodhounds, baying and pulling on the leash, but he knows behind them are handlers with other dogs that when they are close enough, they will release and those dogs will chase him down and pull him to the ground and if he survives them, he will not survive the men that will come behind, and their guns. Almost against his own volition he reaches into his pocket for the capsule.

“Aron”, she says. “Aron. Stop and talk to me.” He stops for a moment, hypnotized by the sound of her voice. But logic outweighs emotion at least for now, and he drowns his hesitancy and starts to run again.

Now at the bottom of the hill, he takes his downward momentum and runs up the slope of the next hill, at the top of which is the guardhouse and his rescuers. He is using the last vestiges of his energy. The pack seems to have gotten heavier. It is pulling his shoulders down and bouncing with every step he takes. He glances over his shoulder; the baying bloodhounds have been pulled back. He can hear a deep, heavy, angry bark and glancing back, sees the black and brown Rottweilers dragging their handlers forward. Soon they will release them and….

“Aron”, she says in her sternest tone. “This is your last chance. Stop now.”

He wonders how they got her onto the channel. Or is it a recording? He pauses, wishing for the meadow again, his hands to the straps of the pack. If he throws it aside, will he see her again? A spout of earth appears to his left, followed closely by the whipcrack of a gun, and he understands the game they have been playing. He turns and runs harder than before. He is halfway up the slope, arms pumping, and he hears the whistle of a round past his head and the snap as it embeds itself in a tree trunk just in front of him, followed by another crack.   Aron can hear the deep bark of the Rottweilers, hear them running behind him, hear his pursuers shouting as they close the distance to less than twenty yards, the dogs closing the distance fast as he approaches the top of the hill. Another spout of dirt, this one on his right and a bit closer. Matter of time before they find the range. He starts to zigzag back and forth, hoping to throw their aim off.

“Aron”, she says. “I miss you. We miss you. Please come home.” An identical message to the plaintive one he heard just a few minutes before, and he thinks he can hear the deception, but either way it is too late for them to sell their lie and for him to buy it. He will either cross the border or fall into their hands in the next few seconds. He pulls the capsule out of his pocket and holds it in his hand just in case he fails.

He reaches the top of the hill.  Just a sliver of the red sun remains, glowing bright like a coal in a fire that has been preserved every day for a hundred years, a single coal saved and used to start a fire which, when it burns down, produces another coal. And in that way the heat and light has been carried from place to place for generations, a sign of hope and future and tomorrow, even now as the red sliver slides below the horizon. There is twenty yards of brown wasteland between him and the gate. Guardians on the other side are armed and poised to open the gate and let him through when he reaches it. Lights from the watchtower are shining on him and he is a hero in a ten second story, a dirty limping man wearing a backpack, one hand clutching something wrapped in a tissue, the other hand stripping away a headset and dropping it on the ground as he runs unevenly toward the gate. The dogs have eliminated nearly all the distance and the snarling, growling, one-hundred-pound beasts are poising themselves to jump as soon as they close the last few yards.

When the red sun sets on the longest day of his life Aron is in mid-stride three steps from safety, the gate sliding open, guards beckoning him through. Behind him leaps a black and brown streak of sleek fur, muscles rippling, jaws agape showing white teeth bearing down on his exposed left calf, a second dog behind, positioned to deliver the death blow if he falls. 

Aron carries a backpack to the end of the forest. It contains the fire.