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Fourteen

 

A spur of sandstone, four hundred feet tall, stood out from the cliff, the rock of its narrow crest jointed and loose. Above it loomed five hundred feet of cliff, stepped back halfway to the top with a broad, slanting ledge. Millennia earlier, a mass of rock had broken from farther up, some of it embedding in the soil of the ledge. Since then, summer thunderstorms had washed away enough of the soil that several of the boulders were ready to move, needing only some small impulse to send them hurtling onto the spur below.

The base of the spur was in a shale slope, steep and narrow, where more old boulders from higher up lay precariously among spiny shrubs. The lip of the slope was weathered limestone that had not had a major fall for ten thousand years, and was ready.

On the plateau above the canyon and the spur, on the side inaccessible to the Navajo herds and hard against the National Park, a band of twenty-three antelope grazed. One of them, the herd leader, raised her head and looked around, confused for a moment. Others, catching the movement, looked up to watch, the movement spreading. The big doe took a tentative step, paused, then started to trot toward a point on the canyon rim two hundred yards away. Sheeplike, the others followed.

* * *

In a pickup truck four miles away, Jerry and Carol lay sleeping. In their sleep came something like a dream—one they would not remember when they awoke. Each of them faced a small band of antelope running toward the rim of a canyon. They threw fear bolts at the animals, trying to turn them back.

* * *

Sharon Van Wyk had been writing a letter when she was struck by a need to rest her head on her arms and close her eyes for a moment. She didn't argue with it, and fell asleep at once.

* * *

Bill Van Wyk had just finished discussing an equation with his students in Math 207. He looked at his watch; five minutes remained before the bell. Nonetheless, he dismissed the class and began absently to erase the blackboard. He would erase for three long minutes before he realized that the board was clean.

* * *

Frowning, Tory Merlin stood in her kitchen with oven mitts on her hands. In her mind she watched a small band of antelope running confusedly back and forth above a canyon. In the minds of the animals collectively, she placed the image of a great bear clambering up over the rim, onto the plateau top—an image complete with stench. It was a bear such as hadn't been seen in the district for nearly a century, a huge lumbering grizzly.

An antelope's fear of grizzlies does not require experience or training: It simply knows that a grizzly means death. Confusion was replaced by terror. The antelopes turned and sped away from the rim. Tory watched them go, then opened the oven door and removed the bread.

 

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Framed