The Nine Pound Hammer Read Free Page B

Ray cupped his hands in the cold water and drank, hoping it would stop the complaints growing in his stomach. He would be out before dark, he assured himself. Maybe he’d find a farm with a warm meal and comfortable bed. Even sleeping in the straw of a stable would be fine.
    Emboldened to get out of the woods, Ray stood and checked the lodestone. It was still pulling in the same direction, so he continued. But as night fell and he was still in the vast forest, Ray curled up at the roots of a big black locust tree, hungry, footsore, and more than a little frightened. Eventually he slept.
    Things went no better the following day. He was alone, in a place both alien and potentially dangerous. Late in the afternoon, Ray found some berries and, painfully hungry, he ate them. Fifteen minutes later, he got sick. No more berries, he decided.
    He slept that night in an abandoned logging camp. The walls of the lean-to shelters were riddled with bullet holes.He hoped as he searched the jumble of buildings that he wouldn’t find a dead body. He didn’t. But he did find a couple of water skins and a moth-eaten blanket. All the food had long since rotted into black puddles in boxes.
    He filled the water skins the following morning in a stream. He had never been this hungry in his life—even at the worst moments when he and Sally were living on the streets.
    After about half an hour of walking, a buzzing of bees brought his attention to a hollow log partway up a rise in the forest. Bees, he thought. That meant honey! Faint with hunger, Ray decided a few bee stings might be worth it. After shooing away the hovering bees with his cap, Ray crouched on his blanket to dig out the honeycomb.
    Reaching up to his shoulder into the log, he touched something soft, instead of a sticky honeycomb. Working it close enough to grab, he pulled out a yellow hat. The color was striking against the dark greens and grays of the forest, but what surprised Ray most was not the color itself but the reason for it: the hat was formed completely of dandelions, as fresh and bright as if they were growing on a spring lawn.
    Ray turned the hat over in his hands, thinking how strange it was to find a hat in a log—especially a hat made of flowers. Ray wondered if fatigue and hunger were driving him to hallucinations. Then he heard a faint voice over the rise.
    Ducking behind the log, Ray’s first thought was of menwith guns who had shot up the logging camp. What if they were bandits and he had stumbled onto their camp? Was it too much to hope that they would feed him?
    Ray crept to the top of the hill and found himself on a rim overlooking a wide depression in the ground that was encircled by close-growing trees. At the bottom, a small man was sitting alone at the roots of a single massive oak.
    The man had a jagged explosion of golden-yellow hair and was whining and whispering to himself piteously. The man’s clothes were tattered and patched in a hundred places with a different square of fabric for every hole. On his ankle he wore a leather fetter with an iron lock, the chain curling around to the oak at his back.
    As Ray leaned forward to get a better look, the root under his hands gave way with a crack, sending him splayed forward on his belly partway down the slope. The wild man looked up with surprise. Ray snatched the dandelion hat from where it had fallen and scrambled back up to hide again behind the tree.
    “Is that my hat?” the wild man called in a peculiar high-pitched voice.
    Ray’s heart thumped in his throat as he tried to decide whether to speak to the man or simply run away.
    “Where did you find it?” the man called again, waiting a few silent moments for an answer. “What you hiding for? En’t going to hurt you.” Ray heard him rattle the chain. “Here I’m tied to the tree and can’t get away. Can you help me?”
    Ray called from around the tree. “Have you got any food?”
    “No, en’t got nothing for you to eat. Sorry. Can you