My foes, who see me as a corrupting influence on their daily routines, should be in light of the fact that this guy - in his isolated abandon - was out by 04:45, breathing in the scent of pine, and introducing to nature - alongside the morning raucous of merry avian voices - the shuffle of his feet across the soggy slopes and the hard tarmac. Only witness, perhaps, to his resolute run - yes, it wasn't a coincidental affair that he randomly started out on a run just coz he "felt like it" - were the transient truck drivers stationed along the road for the night.
Cutting across the sleepy village and its sleepy mongrels, he made it to the 'bend' even before ambient morning light could flood the valleys. At this time, a crushing lull predates the surge of activity that is to follow - the air hangs heavy, the plants droop in their nightly hangover, field and glade mournfully stare back, and the virginal backwoods have the appearance of a hag tossing restlessly in the bed scratching her ass. But for this guy, eagerly awake through the night, the surge was preemptive, before anybody else could seize his moment, or before he would be overcome with lethargy himself. The sylvan woods were there, and being an insider, he needed no invitation, he would just barge in.
Circling the hill at the bend, along the kutcha disused motor-track that was only frequented by the boozehounds on their social evenings, he savoured the largely-unspoilt jungle panorama, greedily narrowing his gaze on the occasional grassy clearing in the woods or a good rocky outcrop, where he wanted to find a trail to, but calculated them unreachable of his present time-space-risk constraints. A shuffle among the Lantana bushes directly below him caught his attention. Something went crashing down the bushes in haste, about 40ft from him; likely a rabbit, or a mountain goat. He tiptoed ahead - utilizing the grassy patches on the road and avoiding the stones that crunch under the feet - to a better vantage point, but the excitement down there had subsided by now.
He proceeded ahead, studying the hill he was circumnavigating. Much of the features of the hill above this kutcha track lay bare, owing to a forest fire that had wiped out all undergrowth, especially the opaque blanket of Lantana bush (the notorious infestation upon the Himalayan landscape). On these ashen slopes, he could now see possibilities of ascent along several of the faces. Until now, he'd been apprehensive of climbing to the summit any other way but the usual one that had been a well defined trail branching off from the road, used by the same boozehounds mentioned earlier. But the brutal drops he'd imagined across rest of the hill weren't so brutal, after all.
Not being one to return content with a mere observation, he decided to try out climbing to the summit, along the very face that lay adjacent to him. Leaving the kutcha track, he climbed a narrow ledge on the hill, one which he judged would make for a great location for a 'mehfil' with friends, or for a libidinous encounter with a buxom pahari maiden. He expected running into an animal or two in these thickets, but all wildlife had seemingly relocated to more abundant slopes where fires hadn't razed down their cover and feed. Regardless, he began his ascent - one grip on the jutting root, one on the infant pine with roasted bark... and hoist. So it went: balancing and grabbing each time the loose soil yielded under his feet, groping and brushing against charred trunks, fighting entanglement in thorny skeletons of dead bushes, clawing his way vertically up where no leverage existed, crouching low in narrow passageways.
After 10-15 minutes of toil, he found himself entering the clearing at the summit. His head instinctively tuned into mumbling the words of Pink Floyd's Animals "if you didn't care, what happened to me, and I didn't care, for you..."... Turning to his right, he saw a questioning pair of eyes staring back, one of a Barking Deer (aka Kakar aka Muntjac). And then it - the deer - turned the other direction and, sans ambivalence, bounded away for its life.
My ascent felt rewarded.
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