The men of the settlement had been tracking the three for days; across fields and valleys, through forest and marshland. Fernando knew that now they were close. All of the signs pointed to it. In his mind he could already hear the crack of their necks as they reached the rope’s end
Nando was not a vengeful man. Slights did not cut him deeply. He was not the kind to come out with a knife in the face of some insult. But his children had been stolen; his and the children of the other men. They were all so blind with hate, sorrow, and fear that they could not have seen the angels now even if they were to appear again and sing their song of love and salvation once more.

The others followed him as if he were the leader of a pack of wolves on the hunt. They moved swiftly and quietly, rarely stopping. They were all body hard from years of herding, used to moving through tough country in search of lost sheep, practiced in the ways of stealth, in avoiding the patrols of the men with badges. They followed Nando because he was the one who always hunted down and killed the wolves who invaded the settlement’s lands to devour the lambs.

They had begun to run out of food. Before, they would have found poor laborers like themselves and made a trade or accepted charity, or they would have gone to the gabachos and chopped some wood or hauled some water for a few coins or a bag of corn. But they could afford neither the delay nor the chance that someone would turn them in. So these honest men began to steal.

They kept a cold camp that night as they had every night to remain hidden from the locals and those they hunted. And as he did every night after the others were asleep, Nando slipped out of camp with Luis.

"You have the pistol?" he asked.

"Yes."

They moved through a forest of sharp, twisting trees, each twig sharp as a thorn, the way passable only by a maze of goat trails that cut through it. As he moved through the pitch he could hear Luis behind him: soft crunch of boot sole on the frozen ground, a quiet curse as a thorn hooked flesh. Nando only hoped his friend had stuffed the pistol in his pants rather than holding it in his hand where Luis might stumble and shoot him.

The maze cut crazily through the thornwood forest, twisting and turning like a dying serpent. Paths crossed and crisscrossed at random, doubled back, and shrunk away. Luis knew that he would have been hopelessly lost out here in the dark but for his guide. As it was, he just kept a tight grip on the pistol that he held out before him and followed, trying not to stumble over the vines that snaked across the paths and the rocks that pocked its surface.

Nando stopped. He reached back and placed a hand on Luis’s arm.

"Smell." he ordered quietly.

Luis drew in the winter cold air.

"Smoke." he said in a whisper.

In the thick murk he could just make out Nando’s quiet nod. The tracker pointed ahead and moved on. Luis gripped the pistol more tightly in his fist and followed.

As they moved ahead, the trees and the darkness thickened. They were in a place now where even on the brightest day no sun would reach the ground. Good, thought Luis. It will be easier to kill the three if I can’t see the sky.

Then, up ahead they saw light.

It flickered through the crooked branches and around the gnarled trunks of the trees. The smell of smoke came stronger, a sulfurous smoke as if the fire were eating the flesh of hell trees. Luis could see Nando more clearly now and as his friend glanced back there was a look of murder on Nando’s face. If Nando had peered into Luis’s face he would have seen wide eyed horror.

A rim of rocks circled the camp. The two men crawled to the cover. Nando looked at Luis, his eyes still wide with murder. He reached for the gun and slowly pried it from Luis’s white knuckled hand.

"No, Luis!" Luis whispered low.

"Go get the others."

Luis shook his head.

"I can’t find my way out of this. What if I get lost in the dark?"

"Then I will kill them myself."
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Ishmael was no tracker and Walt seemed to possess no skills at all other than the composition of bizarre songs to chronicle their journey. But on the second day Ishmael learned how to discover the path to take. It happened quite by accident. One of the telephone poles that followed the tracks had fallen and the corroded wire ran for a ways along the ground before it rose back into the air and rode the poles onward. As he and Walt covered this ground he happened to touch the wire and he knew.

From that time on, whenever they reached a junction, Ishmael would climb the nearest pole, lay his hand on the wire, and choose the way.

Walt never questioned his decisions.

They had set out with nothing, but had found food as they went. The first night it had been a hobo camp. A man with a wicked scar had shared his pot of beans. The second night it was loaves of bread along the tracks where they had spilled from a train. The third was spent digging potatoes from an abandoned field that had a crooked sign that read "Auction for Back Taxes". And so it went.

"Surprising how we can eat so well." said Walt. "We reap not, neither do we sow."

The next day he found a wool coat hanging from a tree limb.
As he put it on he asked Ishmael why he had taken it upon himself to stop the men from killing the three.

"As soon as I set foot on Shepherd’s Knoll I knew it was something that I had to do. It’s not so much that I am trying to save them. Its more like I’m trying to save myself."

"From what?"

"From the world as I have come to know it."

He walked on to the sound of Walt’s quiet singing. From time to time the old man glanced at him as if he expected more.

"I felt another world." Ishmael finally continued, as Walt knew he would. "It’s a world better than the one I lived in before."

"And what world was that?"

"Strangely, I can’t remember. I mean, I recall its essence, the tone of the place and my life in it. But I can’t grasp hold of any particular memory. Its like I’m trapped between the old world that I can’t recall and a new world that I can’t imagine. In order to finally make a choice and join one or the other I have to do this thing."

"You have no memories at all?"

" The last thing I remember is the dead man between the two thieves."

"How do you plan to stop the men from killing the strangers?"

"All I can do is tell them that they have the same decision to make as I do: to carry Shepherd’s Knoll in their hearts or to return to their old world."

"They are good men." said Walt. "But they are liable to cut your gullet. I am beginning to suspect that they will have to do it by candle light and use an icy knife to open your silky throat."

They camped one night among twisted, thorny trees whose flesh smelled of sulphur when tossed into the fire. Despite the season, they had found what seemed to be dried apples hanging from one of the trees.

Ishmael had led them away from the tracks the day before after climbing down from one of the poles. Walt did not ask why. He simply followed. He knew that he had no idea which way to go to find the men, one way would be as good as another, so he’d might as well follow Ishmael. As the thorny woods had grown thicker and the myriad paths they followed more convoluted, he had begun to feel doubts. But all he had to do was look into Ishmael’s face to know that this was the way to go.

Now, as they lay by the fire eating the dried apples, Ishmael looked at Walt and said "Tell me about the child."

"The others thought he was the most beautiful child they had ever seen. To me he looked the same as any other I have seen born from those people. He cried, he sucked, he slept. But it was not the child that was truly the promise."

"Then what was?"

"What the child can become."

"And what is that?"

"Us. That child will become all of us."

"I don’t understand."

"Nor I. It’s just something that I feel. It’s in my heart, not in my brain."

"Did the others feel the same way?"

"No. I think they expected that crying, bawling, helpless little thing to wave his hand like a wizard and cure all of their ills. They should have known better."

"The three were there?"

"Yes."

"Tell me about them. What were their names?”

Walt screwed up his face and looked into the fire.

"It’s hard to recall. I remember that one was called Frank. Another...I don’t know, I think I only heard his last name. Goldman...Goldstein... something like that."

"And the third?"

"Merle. That, I remember. Reminded me of Merle Haggard."

"How had they ended up at the settlement?"

"Well, I never was quite clear about that. Seems they’d been on the road for quite a while. Came from someplace East of here. I expect that’s where they are going now, unless the men catch up to them and stretch their necks. Anyway, they had picked up the story of the baby. Maybe they saw the angels, maybe not. They didn’t say."

"Why do the men think they informed on the settlement."

"Well, they admitted that they’d been to Sheriff Rodman. "

"Why?"

"Looking for the settlement. I don’t believe that they meant any harm. They had no way of knowing that about half of the families have no legal right to be there. They also had no way of knowing that Sheriff H. E. Rodman has sworn both to God Almighty and the Devil himself to wipe the village of Rachel off the map."

"Are they squatters?"

"In a manner of speaking. Some were born in the settlement. Others are from the south side of the river. Crossed over right under Rodman’s nose. People born in Rachel married the one’s that crossed over, like Maria married Joe. Years ago nobody saw it as a big thing. Now they’re putting patrol boats on the river to keep folks out."

"Is that what the raid was about?"

"Yep. But they seemed particularly interested in Maria’s baby. They hit the trailer first. When they found that they were too late Rodman’s men went berserk. Took every last kid in Rachel and beat the hell out of anybody who tried to get in the way."

Ishmael shook his head and stared into the sulfurous fire.

"I just don’t understand this world." he said.

"Nothing too understand. To look for a plan or a smattering of sense in this world is like looking for a pearl in a plate of mountain oysters."

With those words the old man rolled over, wrapped in the warm woolen coat that he had found hanging on the branch, and went to sleep. The younger man stayed awake for some time longer, pondering upon what had happened to him over past few days and the strange amnesia that seemed to have gripped him. For a long while he fed the fire with the sulfurous limbs that littered the forest, and stared into the flames that seemed to dance before him like Danteic ghosts

Hours later, his patience at an end, Nando peered over the rocks at the figures that lay bundled on the ground. He pointed the pistol at one of the figures, and slowly squeezed the trigger.

Note to reader: Walt's comment about slitting Ishmael's throat with an icy knife was inspired by a line from the beat poet Kandel.