The creatures and the dark

The creatures and the dark
by Raven
16-Mar-2010
 

The rain cruelly lashed the rolling hills of Martinez, Northern California, swift and grey, rivulets of muddy water draining down between the trees, carrying dead leaves down to the gullies where bullfrogs croaked, cries lost amid the dull maelstrom of the black night, the wind dementedly whipping the leaves. Flashes of jagged lightning illuminated the windswept landscape fleetingly, the shallow lakes lined with lilies, like doomed ships riding the squall, while below the surface the tadpoles watched their sky rise and fall in the tumult, huddled together solemn as judges, their tiny throats pregnant with fearful croaks, trapped in bubbles escaping to the surface to be lost in the teeming, howling wind.

Gophers snuggled together in hollows as the thunder followed the light, the pups cradled in the warm, writhing crush of the pack, burrowing deeper between their cousins and sisters as the heaven's fury blistered the night, the light from the sky penetrating the burrows to find the old blind mole, dull eyes, dark as coal, huddling in fear, a subterranean gargoyle, dreading the coils of the ground snake which shakes and trembles not ten paces to the left, wrapped around the body of the mouse, swift and deft, rigid with rigor mortis, the taste of death.

The thunder rolls like church bells, filling the narrow valleys with its dull boom as the rain rattles like the god's own loom at work, weaving our world with threads of rain, no rhyme or reason, knitting the angry sky to the soggy brown earth as the creatures cower and tremble, huddling below ground as the tremulous thunder sounds, waiting til the safety of the morning comes around.

Balatarin
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Multiple Personality Disorder

Your piece of writing reminds me of Jack London’s White Fang

by Multiple Personality Disorder on Thu Mar 18, 2010 03:43 AM PDT

.

Here is a passage where She Wolf finds a lair by a small stream that flowed into the Mackenzie River:
 
“She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully. Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base of the wall to where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape.  Returning to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth.  For a short three feet she was compelled to crouch, then the walls widened and rose higher in a little round chamber nearly six feet in diameter. The roof barely cleared her head. It was dry and cosey. She inspected it with painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in the entrance and patiently watched her. She dropped her head, with her nose to the ground and directed toward a point near to her closely bunched feet, and around this point she circled several times; then, with a tired sigh that was almost a grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her legs, and dropped down, her head toward the entrance.
 
And here is a passage when One Eye discovers the litter of puppies for the first time:
 
“When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair, he again sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds. There was a new note in his mate's warning snarl. It was a jealous note, and he was very careful in keeping a respectful distance. Never the less, he made out, sheltering between her legs against the length of her body, five strange little bundles of life, very feeble, very helpless, making tiny whimpering noises, with eyes that did not open to the light.”
 
You are an excellent writer.  Keep on writing.


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