Just a Stone's Throw

The mountain lake where we used to swim was just wide enough to where a strong boy on a good day could throw a stone and have it reach the opposite shore. Of course, the stone had to be a proper stone, fitted to the purpose, not too heavy and not too light, and the shape would matter, too, for if the stone were flat, it might catch the breeze and veer off a straight course. If it were knobby or rough, it might catch the fingertip and tumble forth with less velocity. 



You didn't reach the opposite shore every time. You needed the right rock, the right day, the right effort. And you needed to be approximately 12 years of age. For a younger boy, the goal would have been hopeless; for an older one, pointless. 


The rock that reached the other side was never seen again, it may as well have passed altogether out of existence, for we boys never once went to that side of the lake. The woods were thick and the mosquitoes were thick and there was simply no practical use for that far shore other than as a recipient of stones. Nor did it occur to us that these expended stones, having once been found capable, ought to be retrieved for use in future efforts. That would have seemed unfair, somehow. No, they simply disappeared. After a moment of glory, they disappeared, and it was only the journey of the next stone that mattered.



One thing more may be said about that far shore. One or two things more. It was generally suspected, for instance--or no, not suspected, but more or less known--that any and all snakes that had ever been seen in the lake had slithered originally from the depths of those dark and untrodden woods that crept straight on to the edge of the water, bearded chin lying in a sinister looking tangle in the shallows. Little in the way of inventiveness was needed for imaging teeth, green with moss, quite ready to devour, and a black tongue just behind the teeth, thick and moist, slug-like, with its root residing in the heart of the impenetrable wilderness.



Also, it was said, there were wolves. If you went there at night, to our swimming spot, and if you listened very, very carefully, you could hear the sound of their howling afar off in the hills. If you went there on a moonless night, you could see their yellow eyes winking for a split second between the invisible trees. Nor indeed was it an altogether certain thing that these were common variety wolves, of the Canis lupus sort. They might very well be humans who had turned to wolves, having in some forgotten time fallen victim to the error of setting foot on that dark, forsaken and stone-spattered shore, doomed forthwith to wander, helplessly lost in the endless wild, subject to fantastic forces beyond the ken of mankind.



Who knows?



Every boy, at the age of 12 or so, is primed and fueled by a precisely balanced mixture of heroics and horrors, and a competency to both achieve and believe.