Chapter 5 - The White Wolf

The ranger has an unexpected setback but has no choice but to forge ahead and traverse a country crawling with strange dangers in the night.

    The ranger and his horse circumnavigated the region of fragmented and hewn plateaus. Then they climbed a scarp strangled with boulders, which made for a arduous slog. Raiden imagined the rupturing battle cries of a Red Skull war party emerging over the rock-rim to bombard them with hefty rocks. If that happened while they were on this precarious ground, they’d be screwed.
       Once on firmer footing an appreciable vista was attained of the land ahead. Lower mountainous talus, resembling the back of a fallen dragon, rising and dipping unto the horizon where the blazing disc of the sun had begun to sink. He took the compass out. In his black gloved hand the violet neon liquid in the dark glass screen pulsated as the topography glowed into definition along with an array of measurements. Then, just as valuable data was being transferred, the imaging on the screen wavered, crackling sporadically.
       At the same time the compass was malfunctioning a wind moaned in the lowlands, summoning force until it hurtled up and eastward with the voice of a netherworld behemoth. Right before the drab dust cloud stormed his position and forced him to wheel with Night-Wind, the compass’s wavelengths went wildly hectic, breaking into incomprehensible disarray. Trailing the fore of the battering gust was a murmuring of vespers, then all was quiet.
       What? This didn’t make any sense! When Raiden inspected the compass again the readings were completely wiped. Only a sable glass screen sedately reflected his darkly warped face back at himself. F**k. This is no good man. It never failed him, not in any weather. He waited for it to kick back up. Nothing happened. To make it worse, in the final moments prior to its malfunction as the data was going haywire, he was pretty certain he'd espied a flashing beacon, but there’d been no time to verify it.
       He shook the compass, then rapped it against a rock, but try as he might, there was no fixing the confounded thing. Piece of s**t! His desperation spiraled. He’d never entirely trusted it to begin with. Damned machine things were liable to breakdown, just like the age of mechanization had busted and smoked. He shoved it back in his coat. Wonderful. Now he wasn’t going to be able to keep tabs on whoever was following him, and the chances of running into Warkhan had multiplied manifold. In one fell swoop of the wind he’d been made aware of how much he’d depended on the gadget. That was stupid. You should never come to rely on any one thing.
       The situation bode ill on another front. Something in that wind had disrupted, or perhaps permanently ruined the compass’s functionality. And that gust had come from the direction of his destination. Coincidence, or could it’s course have been born all the way back in the Valley of the Winds? Maybe the Akuma knew he was coming and had sent it? From under the brim of his dark hat Raiden gazed westward under the conflagrant cumulus. If the demon was capable of such a strange feat, what else could it do?
       With his chief mode of navigation defunct, he lingered on the high bank, pondering the best way to proceed. The sun was setting and the skies aflame over the sprawling mountaintops. He wondered what lay ahead, and if his diminished ability to see it coming would prove a fatal handicap. There was nothing to be done. The projected path couldn’t be altered at this point. There was but one option - keep hauling on.
       Heading down the steep backs of the promontory with nothing for company but his horse and his guns, Raiden felt awful lonely. What the f**k are you doing man? These desolations harbor evils aplenty. You don’t turn around and one of them is bound to hook and snag you. It’s the damned law of averages. They'll find you. The damned mountains have eyes.
       As if manifesting his fear, he thought he caught sight of an oscillation of movement between high spurs of rock. Setting his vision to it there was nothing. Maybe it’d been an animal, but could’ve been his imagination, could’ve been anything. The Red Skulls were sneaky curs.
       “Come on bud,” he patted Night-Wind more to reassure himself than the mustang, “This rifle will point out the way”
       As he walked the rises and falls of the dragon like talus under pink fired bellies of cloud, twilight crept in, purple fingers palpating the ravines, as if the night were seeping from the underworld, arms extending before it overtook the sky. The shadows of the desolations were closing in on the ranger and his horse like one big hungry maw full of teeth.

*                     *                     *

       That night, though there were stars in the sky aplenty, was one of the coldest and darkest Raiden experienced in a long time. Temperatures dropped dismally. On either side of the hogbacks he plodded were ink welled canyons. He was forced to pass through more than one of the frigid abysses, feeling nearly blind as he did so. Here he heard strange sounds surface and echo. The day slept, but the Broken Horns were waking up, yawning and stretching before setting to its evils. The nocturnal residents stirred with cautious trills and warbles, hisses, hoots, and occasional growls. The compass continued to prove itself worthless. Worse than a knockout it, the wind had punched it dead. Fortunately, he didn’t sense the presence of any dark energy, and was able to conclude that all that was out roaming the night were animals, howbeit with at least a few very strange things making their presence known among the tenebrous brew of hail and holler.
       The worse sound of all came a few hours into the night trek. It was a deep woofing followed by a guttural baying like that of a wolf, but one which was incontestably many times larger than any canine, and of a more morbid nature than any natural creation could possess. In comparison, the soft hoots of an owl overhead were a welcome note, like being reminded of a grandfather’s wisdom. He came to a number of halts to listen in better. Warkhan could communicate to each other from afar by mode of a secret code of animalistic intonations. During one of these cautious interims, Raiden took notice of a more obscure strain of sound. A steady stream of weaseling peeps, chitters, and intermittent screeches, surely belonging to a rodent or marmot genus, which unseen, hurried furtively down narrow fissures and in and out of deep dens, ever chary of the larger things that liked to dine on them.
       Turning a bluff Raiden nearly fell over when from a diorite rock face, as if loosened from a vertical landmine, burst forth a surging river of screeching and flapping. Before Raiden could get a handle on him, Night-Wind reared up and whinnied, and Raiden was acutely aware that the woofing baying thing had probably heard his horse. They waited as the black flying things issued from a grotto which he hadn’t been able to see until at its threshold. They were like bats, but bigger and more horrid. Raiden cowered. If the bat-things had wanted they could’ve overwhelmed him, but they were too hysterical to take notice, suddenly free from the prison daylight had inflicted upon them, they raced up and up, towards the dark side of the moon it seemed, so many of them that their numbers blotted out a large number of the stars.
       After the membranous swarm passed, the ranger continued on. It must have been nigh midnight when the baying and woofing returned, at one point much closer. Night-Wind grew agitated, ears pressing back. Raiden’s vigilance intensified and he stood still with his hand on the rifle, that way he could hear it before it heard them again. There was a long silence, perhaps a full hour, which only ended with an eruption of frantic and terrified screams. Ripping growls ploughed. The woofing thing had found a meal. The tirade of screams were difficult to listen to, almost human in the way they were being stabbed out of it, as if the prey were trying to writhe up the brink of life it was slipping over. There were a series of crunches, then it was as quiet as a cemetery. When the other sounds started again, they were warier, more hushed. No one wanted to be next on the woofing thing’s menu.
       A couple hours passed and they made it several miles further along and they didn’t hear the big bad thing make anymore noise. Raiden felt calmer, hoping it meant whatever it was was satisfied with this evening's eats. A predicament of a different kind presented itself however. Grudgingly, Raiden accepted that without the compass he might be lost. What with so many damned folds and furrows, it was nearly impossible to tell. He tried using the map of stars to guide him. He still knew what direction he was headed, but the route that had been drawn out had left him stranded. That’s what happens when you rely on something until it becomes a walking stick. Get so used to it, when it's taken away, your stumbling like a mossback.
       Time to take a sit. Get a little rest as well as gather his bearings. By a crescent of boulders on a lofty headland, he sat down in tribal fashion, and closed his eyes, searching the storerooms of his mind for the map that had become nebulous in the night.
       A smatter of minutes into this meditative state he calmly opened his eyes, unsure as to what had interrupted him. The air was motionless. The stars small but piercing, as pieces of diamond thrown carelessly. There was a new power present however, he could feel it. That was when he looked west and saw the white wolf.
       There was a silence that man and beast shared. Night-Wind tensed, but not much. It was a big wolf, but the ranger and his horse knew right away that it was the antithesis of the monstrous thing they’d heard earlier. This was a creature of beauty and dignity. The wolf gazed at the ranger, eyes shining with the calm of the sky. Raiden felt he was looking into the face of a spirit of the wild that had made itself manifest, a regal lord among living things, serene, white fur almost glowing in the faint moonlight. They regarded each other as one who contemplates their reflection in the waters of a lake. The reflection reached back in time to a primordial source that often became clouded in one’s everyday toils and struggling.
       “It is an honor to be in your presence” said Raiden, and meaning it.      
       But it was without words that they truly spoke, saying things Raiden didn’t understand, but which he sensed to be sacred. The wolf hid nothing. No veils or mists between them. Raiden realized it had come to find him.
       The wolf held its gaze, and lowered its head amicably. A little later it turned to the east, ears perking as if it had heard something. An urgency quivered through its well honed muscles, and it walked up and down the nearest moraine, pausing now and then to turn its senses eastward anew. It looked back to Raiden, as if to see what he had to say about the matter.
       “What is it you see wolf?”
       Knowing better than to bark in this place, the wolf emitted a low whining. Then, growing impatient, it slunk westward down the promontory by which it’d come. Raiden stood up and saw that it hadn’t gone far. It would move off a few paces and then turn around and look at him expectantly. What’s it trying to tell me? But it wasn’t going to wait forever for him to find out, and so it slowly and reluctantly continued in the direction whence it’d come.
       Not knowing what else to do, Raiden followed it.

Author's Note

The story is not strictly horror. More western, fantasy, Native American mythological, etc. But there are some chapters that lean a little more towards horror than others. Any feedback will make me do mental back flips

Reviews

[Georgie]

Love it! Mental backflips ahoy

[Kuandio]

I'm a little worried about this chapter. Isn't it too much description? Or is that ok?