Primal Estate: The Candidate Species Read Online Free PDF Page B

at a diagonal from where he’d been.

He pressed through more trees and was confronted with the ruins of a considerable settlement. He walked up the slope and around them. Before him was possibly a half acre of stone, all moved there for the purpose of creating buildings for some society that existed long ago. Rick had read about these people. They probably hunted and farmed. Then at some point the area grew too dry, the crops failed year after year, and people either starved or left. Then their buildings fell down.
Rick had heard stories from a local that, almost a hundred years ago before the 1950’s, boys would go out to the area at or near Hovenweep National Monument, now a preserved ruin site nearby, and have a little fun by knocking down the towers and walls of the ancient Indian dwellings with their trucks.

Rick wondered if these in front of him had been knocked down by vandals. The way the stone walls seemed to have flopped on their side and sunken deep in the earth, he doubted they’d been pushed over any time in the last couple hundred years. Maybe the vandals that destroyed these walls were the people that came to eat the people who lived here.
Rick had read that there was evidence of surface dwellers, like the ones who would have lived here. They eventually moved away to live in the cliffs, now also a national park at Mesa Verde, for protection as people resorted to cannibalism. “Food chain reorganizations can really motivate a people,” Rick muttered quietly.

He stood still for a moment and looked around. There were possibly a dozen very large pits in this one area. They were all full of and surrounded by the stone that had been the structures’ walls. Rick thought about how they must have never imagined, while their little village was humming along, that it would ever have reverted to this.
Rick thought how silly all cultures are. They conduct themselves as if they will always exist. Humans always seem to think things will get better. But that has never been a natural law, only a hope. The hope of improvement is the luxury of civilization that distracts us from the simple survival that confronts most animals on a daily basis.

From the clearing of the ruins, Rick could see he was very close to the trees he was trying to reach. This makes sense, he thought, as a settlement this large would have been established close to a good source of water. There must be water at those trees.
He continued downhill and came to a steep ravine on his left with a slight trickle of water. He continued down the drainage and came to a small, deep pool of crystal clear water, no larger than a few bathtubs, shrouded by the plant life it supported. What a gem in this barren place! He saw in his imagination Indian children getting in trouble for peeing upstream when their parents sent them to fill their jugs. He saw teenagers of the past who were in love sneaking a skinny dip and having a splash fight in an attempt to accidentally touch each other. And now there was nothing here but an almost silent trickle, overgrowth, and a lonely 50-year-old man looking for something to kill. This is a good place to remember, he told himself.

Rick moved on quickly. As long as his feet fell on stone or sand he could be almost completely silent. And he made sure he was. He reached the bottom of the canyon, traversed the dry creek bed that thick foliage hid, and worked his way up the west side of the drainage, back uphill toward a rocky, sparsely-treed slope full of ledges and small boulders.
Rick found a small ledge facing south east. Right in front of the ledge was a thick juniper tree, whose branches filled out all the way down to the ground with just enough room for him to wriggle his way in.

It was a great spot. He needed protection from the rear, which the ledge and the trunk and branches of the tree provided, and a good view to the front, which he had sitting with his back to the trunk. The branches filled out the space around him, but