The Phantom

She touched me. Her wings caressing my cheek as she landed on my chest. It had been a long cold night.

Another tremor shook my body as I lay on the path. Roots and rocks digging into my back, my legs. My head resting on the cold wet earth.

Her gentle call vibrated into my flesh as blood continued to seep from my side. I did my best to hold the makeshift bandage on the wound, but my strength was giving way.

She felt the life force draining from my body.

The bullet, cold as ice, lodged in my spine, left my legs useless. My feeble cries for help had ceased long ago. When she arrived the moon had already traversed the sky, but her soft voice made me aware of her presence.

Now I felt her talons gently pressing through my flannel, I imagined her deep round eyes looking into me, through me, calming the fear that pulsed in my veins.

Death was upon me and here was its messenger.

The thunder of rifle shots echoed in my memory as I lay wheezing in the frozen mud.

I had been running a new trail, pounding the earth to free my mind and escape the end of a relationship that had tail spinned out of control.

For months we enjoyed the excitement of each other’s company and I floated through those days with a joy I had never felt before.

Then he lost his job. Before long he was drinking away the stress of the hunt for a new position. In most cases he wasn’t qualified, he didn’t add up, the story of his life he moaned, and I tried to comfort him.

But slowly he faded, and when I attempted to call him back to better days his anger flared, fueled by the fire of his addiction.

I told him it was over just a few hours ago, now, it was truly over and the hunters bullet quickened the day I hadn’t seen coming.

The shot rang out and I ducked, but the bullet sliced through my flesh, puncturing my lung before stopping between my vertebrae.

I gasped and stumbled, falling where I now lay. Then darkness overtook me, my body reeling from the shock. I awoke beneath the moon, a crescent hanging between the stars.

Shivering in the winter cold I lay like a doe, fallen between the trees, wondering, “What waits beyond?”

All the stories gathered from a life on the road, the beliefs about this life and the next, flowed like a stream through my mind.

Her presence made one possibility stand out above the rest, rising like a goddess from the flowing river of time, story and legend.

A presence animated her being that I had never encountered. The tales of tree spirits, mountain gods and animal allies had seemed like child’s play, until today.

As my body welcomed the decay all around me, the subtle energies of the forest came alive. I imagined insects crawling under fallen leaves. Deer resting in the trees not far away. Blue jays and cardinals nested for the night. Squirrels tucked inside their hollows, packed with nuts for the long winter.

All of these images flashed through my mind as if I was there with each one, for just a moment. Then Her wings came down around my face and she leaned her head in to touch my own.

For a moment the thrill of her touch overwhelmed me and then we rose, on white snowy wings.

The sun, now rising in the east, bright and brilliant, calling us home.