BEYOND THE FEARFUL FOREST
By Geoff St. Reynard
No hunter had ever dared to follow the great Knifetooth
Bear into his Fearful Forest. For beyond it lay
a greater peril—the land of The Nameless....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
April 1951
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The bones lie light in the fertile soil of Sunset Fields. You can prod them out with a few thrusts of your bare toes. The roots of the big luxurious tree ferns carry skulls and skins and back-bones up to the frond-filtered shining of day, and even the delicately questing purple tendrils of the burrowflower may drag an occasional finger or toe bone from its uneasy rest, so light they lie.
The bones do not decay. Nobody knows why. Animal bones decay. The skeletons of our own revered dead fall away to powder in a generation or two. But the bones of Sunset Fields are like the unchanging granite of the jagged cliffs, and of them we make our arrow points and lance heads, our hammers and our needles. It is more difficult to work the bones, to chip and flake them into form, than it is to shape our tools of metal; for we have ways of heating and molding these, subtle methods handed down from the far olden times of our fathers' fathers. There is no way to heat and mold a bone.
Our singers tell a legend that—oh, many years ago!—a man went by stealth and slew another man with his lance. Not many of us believed the legend even when we were children. To kill a man! Our singers say that he possessed a beautiful woman whom the slayer desired. Who would desire the woman of another man? Such a thing seems incredible and childish, even to a child. There are women for all men, men for all women, and do we not each love all others equally, reserving a special love only for our own mate? But the legend is sung that after this bloody deed was done, many men fought because of it, and their curst bones lie in the earth of Sunset Fields forever, a memorial to their fantastic stupidity.