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“Father?” she said.
“Yes?”
“What is my name?”
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The Third Twin 14
The five of us sat as a group for the first time at an outdoor table at Berchtesgaden’s Café Strasbourg. The views from the terrace were grand, Herr Ritter having obviously selected the location that would speak most eloquently for the element in which his party would be spending the next two weeks. The restaurant was situated on the side of a hill, and from where I sat, Dianna to my left, Ritter to my right, I had a dead-on look at Germany’s third highest mountain, Mount Watzmann. Against the backdrop of an isolated cloud cluster in an otherwise clear sky, its twin snow-capped peaks looked like the hooks of a nasty vise that was as likely to shear its victim in two as to clamp it in place. Conspicuously out of the view was Mount Kehlstein, on a spur of which rested Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, a visit not for another day as I’d have thought, but one which, unbeknownst to us, had been written into our itinerary. When I heard this, I’d been instantly suspi
The Third Twin FOUR - THE WINDS OF EVOLUÇÃO 15
On the fifth day out we saw a wolf. The five of us, weary, hungry, and sweat-chilled, had just broken out of a patch of short alpine trees that hard weather had left in a perpetual balletic bow, and there it stood not twenty meters away, silhouetted along a blade of rock, watchful eyes shining coppery in the moonlight.As we froze, Higgins as usual was the first to comment, his frosted whisper like glass shattering in the cold May night. “It’s beautiful.”“Hush!” hissed Maya, an even sharper aftershock.The wolf seemed more curious than alarmed—in custom for its kind from my limited experience. Granted, in Southeast
The Third Twin 16
To our relief, the snow showers quit around noon, though the sky remained threatening, in moving shades of gray. A wind had risen, channeling along the opposite slope and lifting the fallen snow up in swirls, but the road before us nonetheless looked traversable. We didn’t relish the thought of trudging across treacherous terrain in the face of a cold stiff wind, but we didn’t doubt that our Teutonic Knight, Champion of the Cause of Human Endurance, would drive us on, probably double time, to our next site. He had been eyeing the weather with impatience ever since he’d finished sewing Higgins up, likely having been anxious to flee the uncomfortable silence that had descended. It nearly knocked us backward when he entered the shelter saying he thought we should wait until morning to set out again, that even if we managed to avoid more snow, we were going to find the next shelter, a lean-to he had constructed himself out of tree limbs, less comfortabl
The Third Twin 17
When I opened my eyes on the morning of the seventh day, faces lingered in the snow shower that greeted me, warping, swirling, dissolving among the driven flakes, among their own echoes. The snow came hard, and on an unfriendly and capricious wind, and the bed was now at least six inches deep. But Ritter wasn’t going to let us off this time. He’d had us get our packs ready and do what body cleaning we were going to—the usual boiled water and alcohol-based wipes—before we went to sleep. He gave us just enough time to shovel down our Pop-tarts and brush our teeth before we were on our way.The going was tedious from the outset, and the blow only intensified as we went. We tried to keep our path as shielded from the brunt of it as possible, but there was only so much navigable ground, and Ritter’s memorized route to keep. The exposed stretch
The Third Twin 18
It was so out of place, character, context as the trees and their denizens fell away behind us, that Dianna and I could only stare in wonderment. The pavilion-like structure, which served as a covered porch to an adjoining cinderblock building, painted a mirage-like tableau. Two sides were open, while the one that stood opposite us abutting the building was a leeward wall fashioned of slim, rough logs lashed and nailed together. The roof, resting on six knotty supports, was just as crude, but the structure was clearly sturdy, withstanding the storm in creaking though staunch motionlessness. Yet it was the shelter’s interior that sang—with its fire pit, the stack of logs in the corner, the picnic table and bench, camping chairs. The scene was surreal, Daliesque, an unapologetic imposition upon rigidity and uniformity, upon the past itself. The shelter was Ritter’s lean-to, disassembled and put back together here, where in its alienness it somehow bel
The Third Twin 19
“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to sit next to God?” Maya said, eyes still moist as they reflected the fire’s whispery flames. “For me, that is not a simple question to answer because I have sat next to one who sits next to God. He dispenses his keys, breaks his genetic codes without regard for bystanders, or even those he dispenses his keys to, those whose codes he breaks. It is entirely possible he has cracked the genetic code to God Himself, but does he consider the possibility of offense? No, because there are no possibilities with him. There is only the thing he intends to achieve and the straightest route to that achievement. For him, God is a bystander. He’ll acknowledge Him if He gets in the way. Otherwise . . . ” She shrugged.Dianna and I sat on the opposite side of the fire. Outside the shelter, the snow came hard
The Third Twin 20
I woke to a world so brilliant, I thought I was still in the clutches of the elaborate nightmare that seemed to have spanned years of mine and others’ lives; and that this must be the culmination of its chaotic conclusion, a blinding photograph to attach to mankind’s record, the moment in time when human evolution pinnacled not in glory, but in irony, for crimes against the very engine that had driven it.When my pupils adjusted to the brightness, I found that I lay beneath a clear blue sky in a world encased in, utterly suppressed by snow. Not a sound or flutter occurred. The story told in the dream had ended, and there was no epilogue. The point-of-view character had landed not in heaven or hell, but in oblivion, and this was what it looked like, a realm of white and blue. And yet there were memories, were there not? In his muscles and
The Third Twin ONE - EGGS AND ELEPHANTS 1
ONEEGGS AND ELEPHANTS1The winter issue of Backtrails magazine appeared in my mailbox in February. Though I’d never heard of the magazine, much less subscribed to it, the following May I was on a plane for Munich answering one of its ads. It wasn’t unusual for me to respond to the call of a distant place or activity. An avid outdoorsman, I’d hiked, biked, climbed, snowboarded, skydived, even canyoned at various locations throughout the States and Eur
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