The Tale of the Hunters

Baba Gene began:

I was still pretty young when I fell out of love with the world. Until that point everything had seemed to me full of wonder and promise. Life surely had so much to offer a young man such as I. But once I saw through the cracks in the mask of this world and understood that its beauty was a facade, then I could never go back to chasing its illusions like a donkey after a rotten carrot.

The affair ended one evening with the sinking of the sun and in the moment of its departure behind banks of grey cloud, everything about me lost its gleam. The sparkle vanished from the sky and the evening hung heavy as a damp cloth. I stood up and looked at those around me; the faces of pretty girls now pulsed with but a borrowed beauty that would soon and leave a legacy of wrinkles and lines of regret. The vitality behind the eyes of my friends no longer roared like invincible fires but instead flickered doubtful as thin candles, ready to be snuffed by the night.

But it seemed as though I was alone in my unease, in this sudden and tragic reappraisal of the world. Everybody continued to chat amiably as if nothing had changed. But to me it seemed that they were driven by a fear of the emptiness of the night and sought to fill it with their talk and laughter.

As for me, I could go no further. In each direction that I looked my hopes and dreams lay scattered around in invisible IOU’s signed out to my name. I was the victim of a con trick and the deceitful, trickster world had fled leaving me bereft and naked, its lies still curling around my ears.

One of my older friends caught the baleful look in my eye and called me over.

“You know, Gene,” She said, “This life never keeps its promises.”

“Yeah, I just found out.” I replied. “What can I do?”

She then told me of a place in the forests of North California where I could go. There lived some people who felt just like me and they welcomed anyone into their midst who was ready to leave their past behind.

I took the directions and set off the next day at dawn. I hitchhiked to the nearest town to the forest and then began to walk towards the trees. The heat grew with every mile and the insatiable appetite of the flies for my sweat put me in a foul mood. By the time I reached the shade of the oaks and birches, I’d discarded most of my luggage and walked now with only a small knapsack about my shoulders.

I picked my way though the trees and quickly lost any sense of direction as I struggled to pick a path through the thick vegetation. I walked all day without finding anyone. By twilight it seemed as though I was to be today’s sacrificial lost idiot for the mosquitoes. I was beginning to wonder at the desperate madness that had brought me here when the scent of burning wood touched the hairs of my nostrils.

I followed the smoke through some unfriendly bushes whose thorns and brambles ripped open my skin as I passed. So it was that I emerged bleeding and soaked in sweat upon the edge of a gathering stranger than anything I’d seen before. Men and women of all ages dressed in loin cloths gathered around small, smoky fires that obscured the air so that it was hard to see how many they numbered.

They wore so little that I felt overdressed. I let slip what was left of my clothes and squatted down at one of the nearest fires where I was received with a quiet nod. No one seemed inclined to talk much and as heads came to rest on pillows of leaves, I did the same.

The fumes of the fire doped me into playbacks of the melodramas of my past, mingled with memories of when I had seemed to be most at peace. The sequence of my life seemed so random and meaningless. But before I could consider these scenes more deeply, the day arrived. I was shaken from my drowsiness by the rise of the sun and an accompanying howl went up from my euphoric comrades. Their heads were tilted back and their throats shook with the force of their cry.

The Hunt was on.

I discovered that someone had left me a bow and a quiver of arrows by my head. I snatched them up and jumped to my feet to pursue the last pair of heels I could see charging off into the early morning mist. The hunters continued to whoop and yell as they ran and, though I was barely awake, I found myself joining in.

We ran barefoot through the shadows cast by tall, slender trees, splashing through streams and the sunlight made the sweat on our backs to glisten. Then, as we surmounted a rise to approach a clearing that overlooked a lake, our pack halted and the shooting began.

To my astonishment, arrows were whipped out from their quivers and the flint tips wetted with blood from their lower lips. They were released in every conceivable direction - straight up at the sky, into the ground, among the trees and splashing into the lake.

The extent of this madness caught up with me and I suddenly wondered what on earth I was doing there. Yet I was certain that no one was going to explain anything to me. Instead I decided to just follow their example and hope that things became clear by themselves. The sting as I cut open my lip with the arrow head reminded me of that awful sunset the day before. A desperate passion shook me and before I knew it I had already fired my arrow into the tree one yard to my right.

With each shot that I fired my fever grew. Behind everything I began to see the underlying love that made the sun shine, the plants grow and the insects fly. Yet when I trained my arrow in its direction then it at once eluded my aim, leaving behind an insipid, lifeless target. I yearned to possess this elusive Force that was clearly the source of everything. But by the time my last arrow was spent, I was still no closer.

Breathing heavily, I looked around and saw that each of the other hunters was equally unsuccessful. Miserable and exhausted, we ambled back through the forest to our camp fires in defeat.

And so it continued. Every day for the next few weeks we set out hunting every day, hot on the trail of the Source that moves all things, but ending each day in failure. We never spoke to one another for there in truth there was nothing to say. Sometimes we hunted together and other days we struck out alone. I lost count of the number of arrows that I fired.

Then, on one of the days that we set out as a pack, one of us hit her target. All of us had released our shots without success and we were about to turn back when we saw that one of the youngest of us still had one last arrow in her trembling hand. We sensed something was about to happen and one and all paused to watch. Very slowly she raised the arrow head to her full, red lip and cut in deep. Blood poured out like a stream down her neck and chest but she didn’t flinch in the least.

Her tender, young face writhed on the unbearable brink of revelation. With tightly closed eyes she pulled back the length of the string and fired her last arrow. It disappeared with a twang into the sky at an angle of 45 degrees - And then it seemed to spin several times across the path of the sun. We watched hypnotised as the arrow returned along the same trajectory as it had left, flying with no doubt as to its target. It pierced the girl’s breast in a moment and imbedded itself deep into her heart.

She gasped and clutched the shaft with both hands before releasing the ecstatic moan of discovering pure freedom. A pink mist now sprayed out from her wound and enveloped her in a rosy vapour.

‘You were here all the time.’ She cried aloud. I always guessed it but the lock you placed on my heart was too strong for me to open. How else could I find you but by hunting for you in vain everywhere else?’

We learnt the meaning of the hunt that day. No matter how close our target might be we would never hit by a good aim alone.

From that day on I could never go back to my old life and so I hit the road with a quiver of arrows about my neck. I ate what came to me and slept wherever, waking up each day to walk further East into the dawn. Since then I cut my lip each morning and continue the hunt, however futile the search may be. But while I have the strength I’ll keep firing my arrows until one of them finally comes back.”

Chapter 18