Mysterious Forces
The old ones of Lagunas County often say that one should be
very careful when out near the forests. The trees are almost as old as the
mountains, and there is a reason why they have lasted so long. They know how to
defend themselves, and they know enough to keep people out of the forest. If
one has good sense one knows it just by looking at them, seeing how they glower
if you stare too long at them, as if it would be wise to provoke them.
The great open plains of this great open land lie to the
east and north of this forest. There are rolling hills that are covered by grasses,
and it is said that where there are more hills, that is likely a sign that the
people have lived there the longest. A legend has it that most of these hills
were made to bury things, most likely the bodies of famous warriors and
hunters, along with their favorite weapons and other things they might need to
begin the next stage of their hunt. This was in the time when the people drew
comfort from the thought of keeping a reminder of the fallen ones, but those
times changed. The few remaining descendants of the people have conserved a few
stories about these hills, but no one can say for certain whether this is just a trick that they use to hold the attention of others, or the flickers of a wandering imagination.
The sleepy one, Old Temerario, insists that it is so, but he is just
as likely to growl with the next breath and tell any eager treasure seekers
that it is unwise to release any more ghosts than are already roaming on the
land. The way he tells it, it is as if the ghosts were standing right next to
him, invisible to all but him, and eager to stop up a person’s nose and slide
down his throat if he took more than a passing interest in a hill. People tend
not to be overly curious when the sleepy one is around.
In this land the clouds make it a habit of pouncing suddenly
out of the south. One minute the sky is an empty expanse of searing blue, and
the next, an aerial stamped is seen hurtling across overhead, as if the clouds
were wolves, hiding until the time came to burst out. The air turns heavy and
sullen, and then, the flash of light and the growl that accompanies it, as the
sky strikes its target with a piercing white spear. It is a sight to behold,
out in the open land, where the old people of yore were never completely safe,
and where the elements had a deadly edge. This doesn’t mean that the
descendants of the old people don’t look back wistfully at these times, and
wish they had taken heed of the signs that were there for everyone to see of a
new wave of migration by outsiders that changed their way of life and, many
say, made them poorer.
Now, the vast and open plains are still desolate, but not completely
so. There are modest towns and small ranches, but nothing like what is found
further down south. It is still a wide-open land, and while there may be some
fences, these seem almost like an afterthought from a more ambitious time, when
the settlers first arrived. The small towns have a forlorn look to them, being
old and underpopulated, with the young ones preferring to move to the south of
the state and settle in the big cities to find jobs and excitement. The small
settlements almost seemed destined for this fate, with names such as Dolores de
la Piedad, Acorralada and San Jerónimo Providencia. The inhabitants are a mix
of people, some coming from the old stock, and some, from the settlers who
marched up from the south two hundred and fifty years ago, and were expelled
after the original inhabitants rebelled, only to return in force a few decades
later and make a second go at it.
The plain ones, for so they have taken to calling
themselves, live lives of resolute stoicism. They have little enough to eat,
and decrepit housing, much of it having been abandoned by the settlers who,
after the last depression almost eighty years ago, seemed to have decided it
wasn’t worth it to have reconquered this land once again. It is a land of
grasses after the wet season, but most of the time, it is dry, and the land is
an open expanse of brown. It has also become much less exciting than it used to
be, because before, when the people needed to hunt in order to feed their
spirits, there used to be bison that would swarm across the land every year,
coming down from the north, and the people could have their fill. Now, the
bison has long been hunted to near extinction, and the livestock and horses
seem like an effrontery to the old ones who remember the stories that were told
by their old ones.
One thing that hasn’t changed, the forest remains as
forbidding as it ever has. People have never explored it fully, and in the
past, the old ones almost never ventured inside it. People respect boundaries,
and they recognize this as one that is best left untouched, for to do otherwise
was to invite the attention and anger of the wolves, and to bring with it a
plague of bad dreams and ill health. The settlers, having come from another
land, used to scoff at these “superstitions”, but from the beginning they
deemed it more prudent not to violate these taboos, if only not to risk riling
up the subdued native people who might once again see fit to resist them once
again. And with time, the settlers found no compelling reason to venture into
the forest, because as much as they could have used the materials for their
settlements, they found it easy enough to use what was otherwise available on
the plains. There were other stands of trees, mostly around the lake, and there
was no hint of onerous premonitions when the hatchet was taken to those stands.
Still, it was pretty evident to the settlers back then that
the land was haunted. There were secrets that were buried in those wide open
spaces, and not only in the hills or hiding in the trees. It was a feeling that
the land had been marked in some way, and that invisible energies were at play,
evident in the way that small metal objects, when they fell to the ground,
seemed to point to the forest, or in the way that people could walk over
stretched of land and suddenly hear a cry, as well as a sense of foreboding
that was like a heaviness that reached up out of the ground to claim them.
There were also stories of trees that talked, although only a few words were
intelligible, for the voices of trees are raspy and scratchy voices, and the trees
out in the plains are quite fickle. And, this was evident in the way that the
clocks and anything electronic would malfunction regularly, as if an invisible
hand had washed over them and reset or stopped them. Some of the newer people
who had moved in, enticed by the austere beauty of the land and by the wry
culture of the people, tended to be people of a more artistic sensibility, and
they were quick to pick up on these strange happenings, a sign of little mysteries
at hidden forces at play. One inhabitant, a retired schoolteacher from the
south, had actually written a book about the spirits of Lagunas county, after
having spent the preceding ten years gaining the trust of a few of the elders
of the region and having extracted numerous stories that were deemed colorful
but also haunting. The book, The Ghosts of the Land, had been a minor
sensation, and had done much to cement the reputation of this area as a place
of folkloric superstitions, but perhaps it would have gone otherwise unnoticed but
for the fact that the author died in a somewhat sensational fashion, having
drowned in the lake at night while trying to verify the presence of mysterious
lights deep below the waters. A sensationalized death apparently does wonders
for book sales.
But that had been over sixty years ago. Now, all the
original informants had long ago died, and the old ones of the present were
loath to trust any outsiders by sharing their lore. But the fact remained that
there was an unsettling air in this land, as if some unsettled conflict were
still at play. Among some of the oldtimers, they likened it to a curse, but if
they said so, they only spoke about this among themselves. Walking stone, a
little boy of eleven, only heard about it by accident, because he was bored and
because he had taken to listening to the conversations between his grandfather
and his friend, Jose Hard Rain. And the more he heard, the more he grew
intrigued.
(January 25, 2014)
OGRomero © 2014
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