It was the day after Samuel brought the deer in on a sled. We got our usual time in the sun before coming to what looked like a very dark forest with very tall trees. It is the kind of thing that gets goosebumps popping out all over. It was that dark, and without so much as a 'howdy do,' we were up to our eye teeth in the darkness.

It is so dark, that I can only see Horse's hindquarters directly in front of Dobbin. I can't see Running Horse, just the rump of his horse. We are in it now. Even if we tried to turn around, we might lose each other in the dark. I can only hope we aren't lost in this place for long. I keep waiting for something to grab me. Maybe a witch or a warlock. If there were such things, this is where they would be found. It was darker than dark ever was.

The only sound is what the horses make as they plod along. I wonder if they can see anything. I thought of the blindfold Joe put on Moses. He never had an objection to where Joe was taking him. He willingly went along, taking it on blind faith, Joe knew what he was doing.

It wasn't noon yet, but it got dark quick. I could see Horse's rump in front of me. I couldn't see Running horse. It was that kind of dark. I wasn't afraid of the dark, but I was afraid of what might be in it. I imagined rattlesnakes all around me, hanging from limbs, dropping on us from above.

We continued to move. I didn't let Horse get too far ahead of me.

We wove in and out of the trees. If Running Horse could see where he was going, he was doing better than me, and I kept moving, because he hadn't run into a tree yet. I wasn't stopping until we got to the other side, or until Horse stopped, or something stopped us. I didn't look back for fear of losing sight of Horse. My eyes stayed on his hindquarters as we kept on moving.

Then, something got my attention. My eyes were right on Horse's rump, when I saw a flicker of light. When I took my eyes off of Horse, I saw light high above us in the distance. We were finally coming out of the darkness. I had never been happier to see the flickering daylight ahead.

I breathed a sigh of relief as Running Horse came into view, but my relief was short lived. I went from letting my guard down to absolute terror in a second and a half. Horse stopped, backed up, he reared on his hind legs. Dobbin turned to avoid Running Horse falling back on my horse's head. A sound, like a scream but louder and more penetrating, came from something in the tree as he was coming out of the tree.

Had the cat come straight down, he would have taken running Running Horse off of Horse, if Horse hadn't taken evasive action. If his horse's front hooves had not come off the ground, and the cat hadn't changed direction while he was in midair, Running Horse would have been badly mauled or worse.

The sound the cat made was enough to send a major chill through me. After the scream, I was looking in the direction it came from. The big cat was already in the air, but when Horse's hooves came up, it changed direction, not wanting anything to do with a horse's hooves.

By that time Dobbin was turning away, and the only good look at the cat I got was when he dashed off between the trees, and I saw his hindquarters disappearing.

With daylight ahead of us, Dobbin was quickly heading for open spaces, and Horse was doing the same in front of us. We were all out of the forest a few seconds later, and the cat was long gone before anyone took a shot at him. We were all okay, and that was the important thing.

"You see the size of the thing?" Young Antelope said, with his horse up next to mine as we were heading for daylight and wasted no time leaving the forest behind us.

We all dismounted and Running Horse was once again pampering Horse.

"Good Horse. Good Horse," Running Horse said, stroking Horse's neck.

I was immediately beside him.

"You okay?" I asked.

"I'm fine. A bit shaken. I didn't get much of a look, but I heard enough to give me white hair. What was it that came out of that tree? Horse kept it from reaching me, but he thought he wanted to take me on."

"I didn't get a clear look at the cat, because when it screamed, I had my hands full with Dobbin. I got a good look at his hindquarters as he ran off into the trees.

"We didn't have time to react before the horses reacted, and they were startled by the high pitched sound. The closeness of the trees kept them from dashing away from the noise. It was easier to let them head for daylight, and once there, they calmed down," Big Bear said.

"What the hell was that thing?"

"Cougar," Joe interjected, sliding off of Moses with his bow and an arrow in hand. "Seen a few up north of Kansas Territory way back when. My impression is that cougar was the size of two cougars. I never seen a cat that big, or one move that fast. He would have taken Running Horse if Horse hadn't interrupted him. The cat decided to get gone fast. Horse saved your bacon, Chief."

"Yes, Horse is a good horse. We've been together a long time. Don't want no cat changing that," he said in a solemn voice, still offering Horse his gratitude with light touches and pats.

We were extra gentle with our horses, walking them away from the forest and moving toward the creek a few hundred yards ahead. It was a good time for a break before riding on. The horses were okay, and now it was time for the rest of us to calm down.

No one had anything to say as we walked to the creek to drink. Our horses drank beside us. I was still a bit shaken from seeing how close that cat came to taking Running Horse off of Horse's back.

The water was cool and refreshing, the mountains were still dead ahead, and we were still moving west. This time, we moved west while thanking our lucky stars. There were mountain lions and other wild cats on the Great Plains, but they are about as elusive a creature as you could find, but they were out there, maybe not as big as the one we encountered. Big enough to take down a man. If you were on their turf, you were fair game.

With the dark forest well behind us, off to the right, or north the way I figured, there were groves of trees in more grassland. Off to the south it was pastureland as far as I could see. The mountains loomed ahead of us, that hadn't changed.

I couldn't take my eyes off the mountains. They seemed larger than they had before. They stood so high and the rocky surface looked so bleak, nothing was going beyond them. Whatever was on the far side of those mountains, we were never going to see if there was anything on the far side. Maybe Underworld ended there.

If it was possible to go any slower, I don't see how, but we didn't ask much of our horses once we came out of that spooky forest. We saw another creek in the distance and Running Horse dismounted long before we got to it, and we all walked our horses to where they could drink if they liked.

Running Horse stood looking at the mountains as I stood looking at him. It had to be where we were going. There was nothing else out there and they stood above Underworld.

I dipped my hand in the creek, and I drank two, three, maybe four handfuls. As I drank I watched Turtle, becoming amused by what he was doing. A few dozen feet to my right, Turtle was stepping in and out of the creek. In and then out of the creek.

I stood, looking to see why he was stepping in and then out of the creek. He kept doing it, and I walked his way to see what he was up to.

As I approached, he spoke to me about what he was doing.

"Look, is this a footprint, or what? Look at the size of it."

My eyes opened wide when I saw what got his attention. By that time, everyone but Joe came to see. I saw Joe on Moses, walking him to the north along the creek bed, but I lost sight of Joe when I saw the footprint. I lost sight of everything, but a single footprint pressed into one side of the creek bed.

Turtle picked up a stick and pointed into the impression with it.

"Big toe here. Next toe here. Middle toe here, smaller toe and little toe here. Don't you see. It's a footprint. The little toe is removed some from the other toes, but it looks almost like my foot."

"Don't ruin it," Running Horse said. "First sign of something that could be a man."

"Can't hurt it. The small rocks that hold the print are hard as rock. That print has been here a while."

"Take your moccasin off, Turtle," Barking Dog said.

Turtle yanked off his right moccasin and stepped into the impression.

"Just about four times the size of your foot," Running Horse said.

Big Bear looked up and down the creek bed, as if he was expecting the guy who made the print to be near.

Joe came back, he jumped down off Moses to see what we had surrounded on the far edge of the creek.

"A footprint?" Joe said, as Turtles foot was lost inside of the impression.

"Take off your moccasin, Joe. You've got the biggest feet here. I want to see how much larger than your foot," Running Horse said.

Joe pulled off his right moccasin and put his foot in the impression. He moved his toes up among the five toes, and the impression extended back a foot further than where Joe's heel reached. Joe moved his heal back to where the heel in the impression was, and his foot was lost within it.

"How big would this man be, Joe?" Running Horse asked as Joe bent to feel how solid the impression was.

"It's been here a while. Years maybe. Maybe next to forever," Joe said. "Hard to tell, but the footprint is part of the creek bed."

"How big," I asked, never thinking of his size before Running Horse thought of it.

"Big. Big enough for his footprint to be left in the creek bed forever," Joe said. "Fifteen, eighteen feet. Two or three times as big as any of us. Maybe bigger. Maybe not."

We all had our eyes on the footprint. Something on the order of a human being had left that footprint. Whatever he was, he was big. I looked up and down the creek bed. Who lived down here? It was a land of big animals, but not animals that different from what we knew. If there were people down here that size, we might want to think twice before moving the village down here.

The footprint had been there for a long time. I didn't want to meet up with the man that left it.

It was quiet once we rode on. The footprint dampened all our spirits, because we probably weren't the equal of the men the size of the one that left the footprint. If there were a tribe of them, we wouldn't stand a chance.

The first impression being that of being combatants was normal for people marked for death. What if, because of their immensity, they didn't need to fight anyone? Who would want to fight anyone that size? What if they were friendly and were fascinated by such a puny race of people, and what if they weren't friendly? What if they weren't people as we knew people to be. They could have a people like foot but have some other kind of body.

We had a lot to think about, and my mind was going full speed. We had seen plenty of Underworld. What if it was a safe place to live? What if I worried too much?

Our food pouches were full of venison from Samuel's deer kill from a few days before. We could keep riding, and I'm sure Running Horse was carrying a fine venison roast for the evening meal, and we kept riding, but we were riding into darkening clouds, and it was then I noticed, the mountains had disappeared. Just as we seemed to be nearly on top of them, a blackness covered the landscape ahead of us.

One hell of a storm was on the way. The horses walk turned into a crawl before they stopped moving. The clouds had become the wall the mountains had been up until now. We were in the wide open. There wasn't so much as a tree to give us shelter.

Where had it come from? The day had been clear and cool, and we were going about our business, and then, there it was. I never saw more than a few dark clouds near the mountain.

What if the storms were as big as the animals were, when compared to our experiences on the surface. We all stopped riding at the same time. We just watched that black cloud come closer and closer to us. Lightning deep inside the storm gave it a mysterious look, and we could feel the thunder even when we didn't hear it.

It was like someone pulled a black curtain down on everything out in front of us. We could see for miles while riding on the open grassland, up until now.

"There's another creek ahead. We'll ride there so the horses have water. I'll start a firepit, but by the looks of what is coming, I might not be able to light a fire. We aren't riding into that, and we'll need to wait it out. It's going to be a long night."

We followed Running Horse to the creek, and we led the horses to the water, but the horses didn't drink. They stared at the black cloud that couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty feet away from us. The wind started blowing a bit more substantially and mostly we all stood watching it coming for us.

I worried about what might be down in Underworld, but the weather had been the one thing that seemed almost too good to be true. What if the storms were killers?

I had been in plenty of storms, but like everything else in Underworld, I never saw the likes of this. We were definitely in serious trouble if the storm kept coming, and I never saw a storm suddenly stop moving. They came and went in their own time. Man couldn't control and had limited awareness of the weather.

As close as we were to being in it, the storm stopped moving toward us. I stood staring at it, the lightning, and distant thunder wasn't close enough to be the kind of warning thunder was. It seemed distant to me as I looked at the blackness that covered everything from the ground into the sky.

Why doesn't it hit and get it over with?

Everyone but Samuel turned their back to the storm. Running Horse started working on the firepit, stopped, and since the storm came no closer in the last ten minutes, he went to work on the firepit again with the help of Big Bear and Joe. I stood watching the blackness in front of me.

Samuel walked toward it. I wanted to yell, "Don't walk into that cloud," but I wasn't his mother and my fear of things that were a mystery to me wasn't the same as Sammy Boy's fear. He walked up to it, stopped in front of it, and after a minute, he lifted his arm to let it reach into the cloud. He pulled it back out and looked at it.

He turned and came back to where the rest of us stood around or squatted on the ground. No one else seemed all that curious about what it was, and how it was coming directly at us and stopped directly in front of us. There was nothing we could do about it. The storm seemed to have a mind of its own. It was quiet. The breeze that kicked up stayed a breeze. The harshness we were expecting kept us waiting.

Running Horse got the firepit the way he wanted it. He lit the fire and he started to prepare the venison roast I saw him putting with his gear the night before. The aroma from the deer meat was wonderful.

While eating, I almost forgot about what was a few feet away. The venison was enjoyable, and it hit the spot. As the dark from the storm joined with the coming night, we got ready to bed down. It wasn't any cooler than normal, but it was good sleeping weather, and once it was dark, everything was dark, and I couldn't have seen the storm if I wanted to. I knew where it was. I expected we would get a loud wet awakening later on.

On to Chapter Twenty-Three
"Stormy Weather?"
Back to Chapter Twenty-One
"Predators"
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