We hadn’t walked very far down the tunnel before we realized that something wasn’t right down here. Instead of getting darker as we went farther in, the light remained constant wherever we walked. We didn’t have any shadows, and the light seemed to be coming directly out of the rocks in the walls.
The tunnel was wide enough for us to walk side by side. The ground was quite flat, and it seemed to be a straight shot due west. Stumpy and I said nothing to each other. We just trekked on silently.
I couldn’t say exactly when the moth appeared. Maybe after a mile, or it could have been three. There were no landmarks to measure by. It was a safe bet that we were still headed west toward the mountains, that was all. The moth looked like a Miller moth. It was gray like everything else down here, and it fluttered in the direct center of the tunnel maybe twenty feet in front of us. The moth was traveling in the same direction and the same speed as us, so it just stayed there fluttering in our path as we walked. Its flight was hypnotic, and you could hear the sound of its wings quietly zipping on the air in front of us. The moth bounced and weaved in the random motions of an insect around a campfire. But with all of this he also traveled purposefully. He moved west leading us toward the mountains. And while he darted and flitted up, down, and in all directions, his forward progress was steady, just like ours.
By now I couldn’t take my eyes off of the moth. His existence underground seemed quite normal, and we calmly walked through the tunnel, which was straight as an arrow. Stumpy was next to me the whole time, but I never turned to him. I knew he was there, and I knew that he was alright. I didn’t even think to look away from the moth. And this is why it’s so strange that I didn’t notice how the moth had turned into a crow.
We were now following a crow through this dim, gray tunnel. The crow flapped and glided in a much more streamlined flight than the moth. And just like the moth, he always stayed about twenty feet in front of us. The buzz of the moth’s wings was replaced with the whooshing sound of wind in our ears. I wondered how a crow could fly so slow as to stay in front of us. I turned to Stumpy to ask him how a crow could fly so slowly. That’s when I saw that the tunnel walls were zooming past us. We were moving through this mine at the speed of the crow. He wasn’t flying slowly; we had sped up. There was no sensation of running or flying, and no rush of air against our faces, just the movement forward through the tunnel. And the crow would flap flap flap and glide smoothly, always twenty feet ahead. Always leading us west.
I wanted to ask Stumpy how this could be happening, but I couldn’t form the words. I turned back to face the crow and followed him through the gray tunnel.
I have no idea how much time passed at this point. Time didn’t matter. We were supposed to follow the crow, so we followed the crow. That was it.
I turned to look at Stumpy again, and saw that he was staring straight ahead, intently. Images began to appear on the walls zooming behind him. They weren’t painted on the walls. Instead, they moved with us as we traveled down the tunnel. It was as if a movie was being projected onto the walls as they zipped past.
I heard a train bell and the sound of a steam locomotive starting up from a station. The steam filled the tunnel as the image of a Pullman car appeared on the wall. I could feel the steam on the skin of my face as we moved through it. The train was replaced by Grandma’s gig pulled, as always, by Maisey. She was traveling down the Community Ditch trail. And Grandma was driving Maisey as fast as she could go. They climbed over a rise, and I could see the direction that they were headed. They were going west toward the mountains.
I saw a running coyote and then a bounding bear. The bear was replaced by a flock of ducks taking off from a pond. All of the animals seemed to be startled and running from something. In front of all of these images, Stumpy still stared straight ahead at the crow.
I looked forward, and the crow had become a Cooper’s hawk. The slow glide of the crow had been replaced with the sharp movements of a hawk on the hunt for prey. The sound was different, too. It was low and constant, like there was a giant hornet’s nest just out of sight.
I turned my head sideways toward Stumpy, and I could tell that we had sped up again. The walls were a complete blur. An image of Grandma appeared. She had her back to us. She had a chicken on the stump and a cleaver in her left hand. I saw her place the chicken’s head on the top of an upturned log and chop it off with one fell swoop. I’d seen Grandma do this a hundred times, and lately she’d been saying that she was going to hand this work off to me. To tell the truth, I wasn’t looking forward to it. Grandma picked the chicken up from the log and turned around to face us. It was Grandma’s dress and Grandma’s old cooking apron alright. But the head wasn’t Grandma’s at all. It was domed and hairy. And the face looked like an ape. This was the Broomsquatch we had told tales about all those times. But he wasn’t friendly. He was menacing, angry and snarling, and he held the headless chicken in his right hand and the still bloody cleaver in his left. And he was staring out of the cave walls directly at Stumpy and myself, as if he could actually see us trespassing in his world.
Suddenly, Stumpy reached over and grabbed me. “Look out!” he yelled, pointing straight ahead.
When I looked down the tunnel the Cooper’s hawk was gone. The Broomsquatch was standing still directly in the center of the tunnel in front of us. The Broomsquatch had his left hand raised to say “Stop!” And we were hurtling directly toward him, unable to stop or even slow down.
I could hear both Stumpy and myself scream in anticipation of the unavoidable impact. But at the moment of collision, everything disappeared -- the Broomsquatch, the images on the walls, and even the tunnel walls themselves were gone. Instead of hurtling westward, we were now free falling in total darkness and complete silence.
Sometimes Stumpy’s screams mixed with mine and cut through the silence, then it would go completely quiet again. There was no feeling of wind at all. I could see our arms and legs flailing as we fell, completely helpless. And when we screamed loud enough at the same time, we could break through the blanket that dulled our senses.
We splashed down into a pool of water, impacting hard and pushing down deep. I spread my arms and legs to slow my dive under the water, but I could feel Stumpy slide past me, swimming deeper into the pool.
The water was icy cold like a mountain stream. The shock of hitting the cold water at speed shook me from the dream world of the mine tunnel, and I literally returned to my senses. I heard a great splash of water as we hit the surface. I felt the smack of the surface on my face and skin. And I felt the cold water instantly penetrate my clothes as our momentum pushed us way down under the surface of the water. Still deep underwater, I was able to open my eyes to see Stumpy waving for me to follow him deeper still.
The water was crystal clear, and I could see quite well under the water. There was a light at the bottom of the pool, only about twenty feet from where we were suspended. The momentum of the fall had stopped, and my natural buoyancy was pulling me up, away from Stumpy and the light. So I had to swim with all my strength to follow him.
The light was coming from a cave entrance -- really just a hole in the rocks in the bottom of the pool. I could see beer bottle caps spread around carelessly on the bottom, and they were concentrated toward the cave opening. Inside the opening, a brilliant, gold light, as bright as a sunrise, streamed out. I could feel the warmth of the light on my face and arms.
Stumpy was halfway there, and I swam harder through the cold water, unsure if I had enough breath left to make it before I passed out. Stumpy reached the entrance and grabbed onto a solid rock with his right hand. He stretched his left arm back to me to shorten my distance to the opening. I swam for his hand with all my might, fighting my body’s natural need to inhale.
The light began to fade and go purple when Stumpy made a stab at my hand, grabbed it, and yanked us both through the cave opening.
We broke through the surface of the water just as we traveled through the cave opening. We both inhaled deeply, coughing and steadying our breathing. After several deep breaths, I was able to take stock of our surroundings.
We were outside in a deep ravine somewhere in the mountains. The ravine walls were too steep to see any high mountain peaks, so I couldn’t get any bearings. We were floating in a calm eddy next to a mountain stream. Once we caught our breath, Stumpy and I instinctively looked down to find the cave opening that he’d just pulled me through. We both knew it wouldn’t be there, but we looked anyway. Stumpy dove straight down, his wet shoes broke the surface for a second as he dove.
Stumpy popped up a few seconds later. “Nothing,” he said. “But I did find these.” And he opened his palm to show me two Coors Banquet Beer bottle caps, rusted just like the ones that Grandma had given us. “I reckon we might need them,” Stumpy said.
We pulled ourselves out of the eddy and into a small clearing at the side of the stream. I could see a well-worn path that followed the stream through the mountains. We did everything we could to dry off. We shook like dogs. We took our shirts off and wrung them out. And we poured the remaining water out of our shoes.
“Here.” Stumpy said, handing me a bottle cap. “Better keep this with the ones your Grandma gave us. I reached into my pocket to find the three bottle caps from Grandma, and they were gone. Stumpy had the same realization at the same time. Again, we didn’t talk about it much. It just seemed like exactly the sort of thing that should have happened.
“I guess we’ll need these last two bottle caps to get home,” Stumpy said. “Let’s build a fire and dry off.”
“Thanks for saving my life down there,” I told Stumpy. “If you hadn’t grabbed onto my hand, I think I was a goner.”
“Do you really think we could have died in there?” Stumpy asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. I think we got lucky, Stump.”
Stumpy didn’t say anything to that. He just looked at the rusted Coors Banquet Beer bottle cap in his hand. Then he shoved it deep into his pants pocket.
“We’ll build a fire, first,” Stumpy said. “Our first priority is to get dry so we don’t catch pneumonia.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Then we’ll find out why we’re here, I suppose,” Stumpy replied. And we both set out along the path looking for dry kindling to start a fire.
To be continued...