Flash Friday 6-6-14 Bones III in Flash Friday

The hunting party crouched by the fire. The chief had built this fire among the rocks where the wind would not tempt it and where the prey could not see it. His two sons and one other man sat around the fire and spoke. It was what hungry men did. “Those are the campfires of great warriors, giants, the first men,” the other man told the chiefs two sons. “Gods,” said the older boy, “They chose to guide us or guide the prey, they judge whether we are worthy.”

The chief would not pass on his flint to this son. He knew this even before his second son was born. Sometimes he imagined the older boy being gored by a horned beast during a hunt. He knew this was not a dream, he knew that it was not prescience; he just didn’t like the boy.

“I don’t respect the judgment of any who hasn’t the sense to hide his fire,” the younger boy said.

“I have seen them,” the other man said. The chief had found this man during the time when his second boy had started to grow teeth and his girl child was a moon away from coming into the world. The man was weak and broken and hungry. The chief had taken him under protection to make his tribe stronger, and the man had learned to hunt well, but, he often used his strangeness as leverage. His sons could not have claimed to have seen something the chief had not seen, but this man had lived years out of the chief’s sight.

The three were nodding at one another, their faces slipping from light to shadow. The chief turned away from the plain he had been watching and approached the fire.

“Yes, Gods, but not campfires,” he spoke to the three but only looked at his younger boy, “They are the bones of the gods, foolish creatures who built their fires in the open,” he paused and looked at his older boy “where the beasts could see them from the dark, and gore them in the sky,” the chief turned his look to the other man “I have seen them now too.”