...continuing...

A useless thought meandered through his mind.
What must he look like, standing there?
The focus of his imaginative vision zoomed out suddenly, and he saw himself standing on the shoulder of a mountain, determined to make something mysteriously significant of a forsaken graveyard.
Who was he, really? What was he doing here? What was he doing anywhere?
It was that sensation so seldom felt, but so unsettling, as when you are talking, out loud, and suddenly begin to listen to the sound of your own voice. The tone is unfamiliar, and the words strange and pointless. And so you trail off, discomforted.
He beheld his own thoughts, and found them deliberate. Not the reacting thoughts of an astute observer, but the predisposed pondering of a man bent on . . . . . .what?
He saw what he wished to see. His sight was tinted by his own worldview.
His thoughts, his writing, his long hikes in the woods, his cabin, his world; they all had the same murky theme, obscure even to him.
The question lay before him to be considered; why? Why did he live the way he lived, sequestered and harboring a smoldering resentment for mankind in general? To what end were his writing, his entire existence?
He stood completely motionless, scuttled in uncertainty. He was unsure of what to do next, and even more unsure of why he felt he should be doing something.
Turning from this troubling direction his thoughts had taken, he moved suddenly, turning his back on the graves and stepping off the rimrock to continue on up the mountain.
Ebenezer was yet to be found.
He reached the top thirty minutes later, breathing hard.
He was cheated out of the exhiliration of a sweeping view of the surrounding mountains and found instead a long, sloping grove of small pines shuddering slightly as the high wind whispered loudly through their branches.
The sun, after chilling his mercurial temperament with its mid-morning blaze, had deserted the early afternoon sky, hiding behind one rolling cloud after another, making its way across the sky altogether unseen.
The wind had grown steadily as he climbed higher and now stung his eyes and swept sheets of powder across the crust of the snow. He scanned the woods again for movement, looking for the familiar flash of smoky white flitting through the trees. Siberian huskies were more wolf than dog, and resltessness always lurked behind Ebenezer's ice bue eyes, but he had seldom left his master alone for this long.

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