There Was A Walking Man

 

          He had been following the stream in the canyon bottom for many days. He stayed in whichever side was shady, crossing the water as he needed to. The heat was insistent, constant, like a voice. No wind blew through the canyon. But there was water there, and it was better than travel up on the top in all ways.
          Of course, he didn’t know the word canyon. He must have used some other utterance. That whole matter is open to conjecture only.
          He was a very precise stone thrower, using a skin sling. His method of hunting was to gather a few projectiles, then become still.  So still, that he ceased to exist for cautious animals of appropriate size. Even his mind became still, lest they perceive his thoughts.
          When a rabbit or some bird came within the reach of his stones he would send one flying. He succeeded more than he failed. He didn’t require cooked meat.
          He stepped out into the shallow breadth of the stream and lay down letting the cool water adjust his body temperature. After a few minutes he stood and found a spot with some shade to wait out the noonday light and heat. His head went back against the stone that he had selected, and he dozed off and on.  Nothing disturbed his rest. Mankind still had his ancestral cachet with all other life.
          Disintegration had been almost total. An obscenity had run amok among all life. The ironic thing about the obscenity was that it had timed out when the host died. The remnant was very small indeed. The leaven of human life numbered in the thousands of souls on all of the earth.
          One seldom met another. Hence the walking man.
          Peace and safety.  It had been like a religion. No heresy was to be endured. Mankind had been mostly faithful unto death.
          Oh, various Savonarolas had sung a different song, a number so near to zero heard it, that they might as well have not existed. Perhaps those listeners, wiser than the faithful, were among the remnant. If so, theirs was the tribe that would increase.
          But the walker was almost entirely innocent of the knowledge of the latest age of mankind.   Well, he has seen some signs, but he was born in a remote area and had never seen the rotting infrastructure of the last age, like some planetary inner city.
          Nor did he know anything of the grotesque unmind that presided over earth’s destruction without thought or awareness.
          Why did he walk? Well, man has always been a walker, a swimmer, or a floater or later a rider, but his mind seems to operate on a “straight away from wherever I am” trajectory.  He walked because he was a man. He was able to move camp instantly because he had no tribe, no tents, no flocks, or followers.  He was alone, with only a skin robe for comfort, a blade, his sling, and a long stick for general use and walking.
          Also, he had seen a few women, but none of them were available to him. He was not a thief nor a murderer. Therefore, he walked. Perhaps he sought his future, his fortune, or family.
          Presently, as they say in the old stories, he awoke from his noontime sleep and arose, observing that the shadows had moved, and that day was getting on.
          He resumed walking beside the water as it flowed ever onward.  He followed it downhill. The walls of the canyon widened out, becoming shallower, and the climate changed gradually, until he began to see rolling hills covered in prairie grasses as the stream ran ever on a gentle downward course. Beside the stream there began to be leafy trees, perhaps they were oaks. Good for shade, in any case.
          As he came out of the canyon the sky was beginning to darken.  He began to wonder where he should sleep that night. And he wondered what he could eat in this grassland.
          He noticed a light up ahead just over the top of a gentle rise in the prairie.  It was neither the sun setting nor the moon rising. This was something else. Pulling his skin robe closer, he walked on.
          As he cleared the top of the rise, he came upon a startling, and frankly, terrifying sight. He had never seen or even heard of such a thing.
          A bushy small tree burned but did not fall to ash. A sphere of golden and blue fire, with a white halo encased the whole tree, emitting no heat but only brilliant light.  He began to feel a great wave of fear in his heart, and he shuddered with it.
          Then a Voice spoke to him. The Voice spoke from nowhere and everywhere and it healed all of his fears, and it named him, and gave him a journey and a cause. 
          With the living fire lighting his way for some distance, he set off again, walking through the tall grass until morning came, and the next beginning of the world.