The Reward
There is that spot where the trail winds between yuccas; in years past, those yuccas were small, easy to ignore, if they were noticed at all. Those dagger leaves are so much bigger now. Threatening, dangerous, maybe even sinister. But for all that, they are obvious. It is the plain stuff you've got to watch for, the dried stalks of hemlock, mustard, grasses. The eyes, the mind, they do not register those with the same sense of concern, wariness. Forcing a way through that stuff, that is where the cuts and gashes come from when finally you emerge on the other side. Your reward - standing in the cut of the old road where it cut down through a ridge of rock, slicing off the finger tip, that brittle nail of rock crowned by a trio of spruce. There, the toyon have not all be picked clean by the winged, its berries wrapping a red wreath across the brow. There, standing on the edge where the mountainside falls away to a pool dark in alder shade. There, the eyes continue to wander further u...
