Page 26 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

Marc Erdrich

thirty feet below and he was wondering, now that he was here,
how was he going to get down? He was already embarrassed
by the spectacle he was sure to make of himself in front of his
wife and Tissie as he inched his way to the ladder on hands
and knees. He considered the possibility that he might have
to crawl to the edge of the platform on his belly, and he had
no idea how he was going to get over the edge and onto the
ladder without anything to hold on to.
The more Harry thought about his predicament the dizzier
he felt. Fortunately, his thoughts were interrupted by the arriv-
al of his wife, who was last up the ladder. She seemed undaunt-
ed by the height. As she sat down next to Tissie the platform
swayed under their combined weight. Harry tightened his grip
on the branch and gasped quietly.

“Now if we’re very, very quiet, we might see some red deer,”
he heard Tissie saying, her voice far away. She pointed toward
a row of pine trees at the edge of a field, just beyond the high
seat. Harry lifted his gaze until he could see over the tops of
the trees, past the fields of bracken now a full three feet high,
beyond that to the meadows and the mosses with their blanket
of heather, and even further, until, in the distance, high atop a
hill, he could see the stone church he and his wife had visited
the day before in a driving rain. Today was the first real day of
sunshine since they arrived at Hay Bridge nearly a week earlier,
and the evening light cast a pink-gray-yellow aura over the
landscape that all but swept one’s breath away. For a moment,
even Harry got caught up in the beauty of it, forgetting he was
on the high seat.

His watch showed that it was 8:30, but the sun was still
well above the horizon, something Harry had trouble getting

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