“The Trail to Eagle Rock” by Ed Wilson

Coming September 2014

To the Reader,

All of the events and characters in The Trail to Eagle Rock are fictional, but the locations are real. The Rampart School looked exactly as described as did the trail to Ruby Creek. The bench where Jake made his camp is there and if you looked you could probably still find the rotting tent platform where he slept. Correct names are given to all geographic features and, if you wished, one day you too could climb Eagle Rock.

---

Jacob shivered against the dropping temperature as he opened his eyes peering around the single room. Dark except for the flickering reddish light that leaked through the cracks and around the door and damper of the old oil drum that served as a stove in one corner. Late at night, the fire dying, the cabin to cooled while his three sisters burrowed closer together in their bunk, his parents and baby brother in theirs. In a chair by the door his Uncle Moses snored loudly, sleeping off the effects of last night’s, most nights’, bottle of whiskey.

Jake moved slowly, feeling the cold drafts of air that came in around the cabin’s single window and door, other stray drafts leaking through the chinking between the wall’s logs.Raising his head, he could see out the window to the wood yard where a light snow fell through the sub-arctic night. Up the hill a single light burned in the teacher’s office and Jake could hear, and feel, the thumping of the school’s diesel generator that provided the only electricity in the village.