The winter had been an especially long and brutal one, lengthier and harsher than any he could recall. So, the much-anticipated arrival of spring was just the tonic Ezra Whitehall had been needing. However, had he known what was to unfold in the young new season, Ezra likely would have begged for an endless continuation of the bitter winter.
It started with an eclipsing of the sun, a rare and wondrous event that only lasted mere moments, but a man who makes his life and way through the mountains daily as Ezra does should have seen the miraculous happening as a portent of troubles to come. Signs and wonders, his mother used to say. He should have recognized a mountainous one when he found himself standing in the middle of it. But how could he have possibly known that the trust and respect that he so rarely gave would be carelessly thrown away like a bone with the meat gnawed from it, by one he thought so highly of? How could he have known that the days were ticking away toward him being changed forever in so many ways? How could he have known that after offering a gesture of friendship he would never again be the same?
The joining of forces, the pairing of experience and wisdom, the zeal of youth combined with the patience earned through age, was to have made a glorious victory that would be talked of and remembered by the firesides for many winters to come, but that wasn’t what came to pass. Instead, those things that Ezra held so dear and guarded were counted as worthless. The regard, the admiration, and the affection that he gave to so very few was dissolved in the blink of an eye, and in their place was a decision to be made. To take a life in order to save one.
In that terrible Teton Mountain spring, in the year of the eclipse, Ezra Whitehall would learn of himself that which he would not, and could not, ever forget. He would learn that in his own life, there can be No Prize Above Truth.
Genre: Western
It started with an eclipsing of the sun, a rare and wondrous event that only lasted mere moments, but a man who makes his life and way through the mountains daily as Ezra does should have seen the miraculous happening as a portent of troubles to come. Signs and wonders, his mother used to say. He should have recognized a mountainous one when he found himself standing in the middle of it. But how could he have possibly known that the trust and respect that he so rarely gave would be carelessly thrown away like a bone with the meat gnawed from it, by one he thought so highly of? How could he have known that the days were ticking away toward him being changed forever in so many ways? How could he have known that after offering a gesture of friendship he would never again be the same?
The joining of forces, the pairing of experience and wisdom, the zeal of youth combined with the patience earned through age, was to have made a glorious victory that would be talked of and remembered by the firesides for many winters to come, but that wasn’t what came to pass. Instead, those things that Ezra held so dear and guarded were counted as worthless. The regard, the admiration, and the affection that he gave to so very few was dissolved in the blink of an eye, and in their place was a decision to be made. To take a life in order to save one.
In that terrible Teton Mountain spring, in the year of the eclipse, Ezra Whitehall would learn of himself that which he would not, and could not, ever forget. He would learn that in his own life, there can be No Prize Above Truth.
Genre: Western
Used availability for Jeff Crawford's No Prize Above Truth