Craig Davidson - Cataract City

The forest thickened. The land sloped upwards and narrowed to a natural bridge of sorts, thirty yards wide. The trees below were thin and bone-white, the tusks of enormous buried mammoths. We charted the incline and came upon a massive deadfall: a fallen oak with the smaller tusklike trees piled over and around it. The oak had fallen directly across the path; the rock drew steeply down on either side into a forest of those bony trees; if we fell, chances were we’d impale ourselves on them.

Small saplings grew out of the oak. It was a nurse tree: as it rotted, it provided nourishment for smaller trees. But it was a poor nurse: the tusks grew up from the dead oak only to topple over, dead. Their limbs lay at splintered angles, making the deadfall all but impassable.

Duncan said, “Turn back?”

I chided him. “You of all people.”

Duncan clambered onto the oak. The bark collapsed under his boot and his leg punched into the rotted tree. He clutched his chest. I wondered if the impact had jarred the needle loose. He pulled his leg out, brushed petrified wood off his thigh and peered into the hole. “Huh. Could be easier to just go through .”

A solid few kicks broke a hole. The insides were hollow, wood pulp glittery with frost. I pushed my shoulders inside the tree, inhaling a fusty sawmill smell. Chains of fibrous wood hung down, clung with insect chrysalises that looked like translucent seeds; it felt like being inside a pumpkin. My skull brushed those fibrous chains; a few snapped and fell down my neck, cold as icicles. I reminded myself it’d be far worse in the summer, the tree alive with squirming insects. I pushed at the far side of the dead tree. My palm broke through with ease. I cracked the bark away in jigsaw sections, opening a hole big enough to crawl through.

Dunk spied an overhang to our left, carved into the base of a steep cliff that spilled into an alluvial floodplain. There was room under the rocky shelf for both of us.

We gathered wood from the deadfall and kindled a fire with the last drops of gasoline, sitting on the stony wash as night rolled in. Dunk’s face had a loose, distant quality born of physical exhaustion and mental fatigue. I’m sure my face looked much the same.

“A village once sat at the high side of the Falls,” I said, beginning the story I’d been thinking about all day. “Did you know that?”

Duncan smiled wanly. “I did not.”

“Centuries ago, okay? An unknown plague struck the village. At night, the graveyard was dug up and the bodies devoured — no, not devoured but sucked dry. The villagefolk—”

“Villagefolk,” Duncan said dreamily, rolling the word around in his mouth like hard candy. “I like that.”

“Yeah, so they believed something evil must live in the caves under the Falls. It must creep up the cliffs while they slept to feed on the dead. So they loaded up a canoe with succulent fruits and sailed it over the Falls. But the next night the graves were cracked open again, bones strewn across the ground. The village elders decided to send a virgin over the Falls.”

“Those elders always figure a virgin will do the trick, don’t they?”

“So they grab this poor girl and plunk her in a canoe. But once she’s sailed over the Falls the elders get a bit of buyer’s remorse. They go to the best warrior in the village and say, ‘Hey man, will you go down and get her?’ And he gives them a long look and says, ‘Nah, fuck it.’”

“Really?” Duncan said. “Nah, fuck it ?”

“I’m paraphrasing, but yeah, that’s the gist. But the youngest warrior, he’s always had a crush on the sacrificial maiden. He volunteers to go. The elders shrug and say, ‘Fill your boots, kid.’ So he clambers down the cliffs and finds a seam in the rock leading behind the Falls. It’s dark in there. He hears the trickle of water on rock. And just underneath that trickle is another sound, soft — a whimper.

“The young warrior creeps into a honeycombed cave under the Falls and he sees … it . His heart quivers. It’s huge. It’s revolting. It’s … a spider. The virgin is cradled in its eight furry legs, each as big as a fence post. Its fangs are dark elephant tusks. Its eyes are black boiled eggs, hundreds of them crammed into the nightmare of its face.”

“Oh, jeez. That’s so gross .”

“What could the young warrior do? A buffalo he could handle. A bear, even a moose. But this? He has to out-think it. So he backtracks out of the cave. He sees the spider’s tracks going up the Falls — strands of gossamer as thick around as ropes swung from the rock face. He notices the spider’s path scrupulously avoided the water. Is it scared of water?”

“Then why’s it living under the Falls?”

“Maybe,” I said, fixing Duncan with a sidelong look, “the spider was born there. Maybe it doesn’t know any better. Or maybe it was rent-controlled and he was a penny-pinching, miser spider. Fact is, this particular spider didn’t care for water.”

“Ah.”

“The warrior gathers strands of sticky gossamer and lashes them to an outcropping above the spider’s exit hole, high enough that he’d have to jump to reach them. The rocks around the exit he coats with bear grease to make them slippery … except he leaves a few patches dry. Then he creeps back into the cave and yells, ‘Hey, bug!’”

“Is that so?”

“It is so. Spiders hate being called bugs seeing as, technically, they are not. The spider flings the maiden aside and pursues the warrior. They scramble up the cave, the warrior a mere half-step ahead. Venom drips from the spider’s fangs. A drop strikes the warrior’s skin and burns painfully.

“He races out of the cave, steps nimbly on the ungreased rocks and leaps, grabbing a gossamer rope. The spider races out over the cliff, slips and falls. It hits the bottom of the Falls with a splash. The young warrior returns to the cave and finds the maiden. They marry — such was the custom at the time — and have many children.”

“What happened to the spider? Did it drown or what?”

“Probably. Let’s assume so.”

“What do you mean, probably?”

“You’re never satisfied, are you? Every ‘i’ needs to be dotted.”

“That’s right.”

“Fine … know what? The spider was fine. It floated down the river and found another village and sucked everybody dry as a bone. Then it laid eggs in their mummified skulls, which hatched into a brood of huge pissed-off super-spiders who laid siege to the land. Many, many innocents were senselessly slaughtered. An epic bloodbath.”

“Jesus, Owe!”

“Next time don’t ask.”

“How smooth is the language of the whites,” a new voice said, “when they can make right look like wrong and wrong like right.”

We reached for our weapons.

A guttural, mocking laugh creased the air. “I could’ve shot you both if that had been my aim.”

A sickle of light bloomed on the far side of the deadfall. Drinkwater’s face hovered in a flashlight’s beam. Stubble glittered in the sunken pockets of his cheeks and dark matter was caked around his mouth. His eyes were deep holes in his face.

I said, “Why follow us?”

“Why not? You’ve been following me. Turnabout is fair play.”

“You tried to kill us.”

“When?” Drinkwater said, confused.

“The trap.”

“The what?”

“The fox trap. Remember?”

Drinkwater waved his hand. “ Kill? You were hunting me like a dog. Dogs bite when they’re pursued, don’t they? Nothing evil to that.”

Duncan came around the fire until he was facing Drinkwater.

“You have a gun?”

Drinkwater nodded. “You, too?”

Duncan nodded. “Are you cold?”