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I don’t think anyone could honestly say how long the man had lived there. He just was. He was there long before anyone else arrived, and he was still there once they had moved on.
He was quiet- kept to himself- just enjoying the view of the far off lands from the comfort of an old wooden rocking chair outside his shack on the hill. Quiet, but kind.
If a stranger found his home, and there were many who did over the years, he would go to great lengths to bid them welcome. His home, his possessions—anything to please his guests. But if the visitor declined or sought to move on, it bothered him none. He just wasn’t the quarrelsome type.
His perch upon the hill overlooked the entirety of the world beyond: not one place the sun touched escaped his appraising eye. But none of the far off lands intrigued him so terribly. His was the shack, and the field that surrounded it.
He saw a lot of pilgrims in his day, making the trek from the Westward Desert over the mountains to the East. They had heard of this man who so willingly would give berth to weary travelers, and many sought him out especially. Like it happened, so many times before, when the coals burned low and the dishes were cleared, the talk would turn to travel. It was always the pilgrim who brought it up; and the man, never one to argue, would kindly change the subject. Not once would he entertain the notion that he might want to leave with them, to breach the forests surrounding the vast field that was his and his alone. If talk kept on in this manner, the man would retreat to his chair to watch the stars. “I am where I am happy.”
And that was that.
The next day, his guests would say farewell and, if the light was right, note a tinge of regret pass behind the man’s eyes: a profound sorrow here, for a moment, then lost again. If pressed on the issue, he insisted that such a notion was “absurd! I can see the whole of the world from here. I am where I am happy,” and waved goodbye to his departing friends.
As more and more travelers passed through the field, heading north to where the cities started springing up, still he was content. “Such a pretty sight.”
Then, when those travelers returned, this time headed for the East, to see the worlds beyond the mountains that the boy from the valley had spoken of, “why bother with new lands, when there is so much to see in this one?”
Even when the pilgrims grew few and the last of us found our ways to the fields, relating tales of untold hope.
“No.”
And so it was that the cities fell to ruin and the wilderness swallowed up what it could claim as its own. The forests, once green and living, withered away; and the whole of the world’s people who still lived passed beyond the Eastern Mountains.
It was in those days that I decided to trek back to the field, back to that hilltop shack, back to that place which somehow seemed so important to me; back to pay my old friend one last visit that he might finally accept the oft-extended invitation.
But his shack was empty. His possessions were rusted, moth-eaten, and rotting away.
His body; I found it lying near the forest’s edge, picked over and devoured by the low beasts of the field, rotting in the now dying sun. His withered hand, it seemed, reached Eastward, towards the mountains.