Earth Abides

There was still another incident of that morning’s march which came to him clearly out of the dimness of the fog pressing in around him. Again they had halted, but this time they were not sitting. The young man called Jack was carrying him at this moment, and as Ish looked out over Jack’s left shoulder, he saw the one with the spear right in front of them; one on each side, stood the two other young men, each with his bow half-drawn and an arrow nocked ready on the string. The two dogs crouched at heel, and they were growling deeply. Then, looking farther on, Ish saw a huge mountain-lion in the path.

The lion crouched, threatening, on one side. And on the other side, the men and dogs stood their ground. Thus they remained for perhaps a dozen breaths.

Then the one with the spear said, “He is not going to spring.” He spoke quietly and in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Shall I shoot?” said one of the others.

“Don’t be a fool!” said the one with the spear, calmly.

They all went back a little way, and made a detour off to the right, making the dogs keep close at heel, so that they would not rush off and alarm or disturb the lion. In this way they went around the lion, leaving him possession of the direct way, but avoiding trouble. Ish wondered greatly about all this. As far as he could see the men were not afraid of the beast but were merely avoiding trouble, and on the other hand the beast did not seem to be afraid of the men. Perhaps it was because there were no more rifles being used, or perhaps it was because there were so few men that a lion rarely saw one and could not realize how dangerous these not very dangerous-looking creatures could be. Or perhaps, if the young men had not been encumbered with a helpless old one, they might have attacked.

Yet certainly he could not help thinking that the men had lost that old dominance and the arrogance with which they had once viewed the animals, and were now acting more or less as equals with them. He felt that this was too bad, and yet the young men were going along just as unconcerned as ever, cracking their little jokes and not feeling that they had been at all humiliated by having to detour the lion, any more than if they had had to detour around a fallen tree-trunk or a ruined building.

When he next began to pay attention, they were approaching the bridge. Ish became interested, and again he wished that he could tell the young men something of the Old Times, of what the bridge used to be like when traffic was pouring across it in both directions and all six lanes were so full of whizzing cars that you could not have run from one side to the other and remained alive.

Now, however, as they slowly walked up the long approach and came to the first span on the East Bay side, Ish could see that the bridge as a whole, though rust-covered, was still intact. The pavement, however, was badly gone to pieces, and whole sections of the highway sagged a little, and some of the towers were noticeably out of line.

At one place they had to walk for a few feet across a single girder which offered the only passageway. Looking down from the young man’s back, Ish could see clear down to where the waves were slushing back and forth, and he noticed that the metal of the bridge, where salt water had splashed on it for all these years, was deeply corroded, and sagging and breaking.

This is the road that no man finishes traveling. This is the river so long that no voyager finds the sea. This is the path winding among the hills, and still winding. This is the bridge that no man crosses wholly—lucky is he who through the mists and rain clouds sees, or even believes he dimly sees, the farther shore.

After that, Ish was not sure of anything again until at last he realized that he was sitting on something hard and leaning against something hard, and that his feet were very cold. Next he knew that somebody was chafing his hands, and then slowly he came into consciousness.

He found that he was sitting on the pavement at the edge of the bridge, propped against the railing. The first thing that he really noticed was his hammer on the pavement in front of him, the handle pointing stiffly in the air. On each side of him, a young man was chafing one of his hands, as if trying to get some blood back into them. The other two young men were near also, and they all seemed greatly disturbed.