Aude Sapere

You walk up a hill behind the town. You follow a road that switchbacks every three or four hundred yards, thins into a narrow pass, and eventually connects with faint marks of old trails that lead to the abandoned miles on which the town’s original inhabitants depended. Some have signs and high fences, prohibiting any exploration for the ostensibly curious or implicitly stupid. Others you peer into, or even enter if a horizontal entrance hole affords you the possibility. Spelunker you are not, but you do have a flashlight and why the hell else are you here if you’re not going to check it out.

Crumbling edifices are not particularly inviting; wood rots, soil shifts, and time does its thing to destabilize structural integrity. Still, what went on in there? If you have to kill the cat, it should be as interesting an exercise as possible. So you crouch and walk like a knuckle-dragging imbecile into the six feet of diffuse light that you wield. You find old tin cans and flayed rope, handles to displaced tools and pelvis bones of what could be a fox, cat, or dog, judging from the size. The space is permeated by dust and dank, underground smells, too. You pick up various rocks you find, as if you had the knowledge to discern between different types or could do something useful having applied that knowledge. You walk back outside, into the sunlight, as the sun doesn’t go down until 9:30 and there is more walking to be done and maybe you’ll strike gold at the next place, not literal gold but not fool’s gold either.