Slip, who’d have chased a young male out of his territory without hesitation in the Wild, was just, seniorlike in the band, increasingly out of patience with a noisy youngster. That might be all it was, and all that was out there might just be a late-season arrival with nothing really frightening about it—because they had two spooky minds to contend with, Jennie as well as the skittish colt. Jennie was worried about <Callie in the passages, dark villageside passages, > which Jennie didn’t like, <echoey, thumping-boards, spooky dark passages. Dark, quiet dark.>
“Everything villageside is quiet,” Ridley reminded her—because she was trying to listen into that dark where Callie had gone, and Jennie wasn’t used to that side of the walclass="underline" Jennie had had the noise of horses and human minds around her since before she was born. The relative silence of villageside was scary to her.
“They’re deaf over there,” Jennie remembered. “But they hear us. Do they hear that horse out there?”
“Probably,” he said. “But if they don’t, you can bet your mama’s going to wake them up. Your mama’ll wake the marshal up, first.” He felt Jennie shiver. “Cold?”
“A little.”
He had her sit on the grain-bin and tuck up her legs in the blanket. Rain came and licked Jennie’s face and hair. He couldn’t feel the noise from outside so keenly now, maybe because Rain was distracted from it.
Or maybe not. It came and it went, maybe with the attention of a horse out there.
It wasn’t a safe feeling. That was one thing he knew.
Chapter 5
With the storm-light all around them, and with the snow coming down on a steady wind, the woods took on an illusory sense of peace, a wind-swept, chill peace that bid fair to swallow down the weary— the mountain proving too vast, the snowy night and the wind trying to fold them in—fatally so. What had been traction was getting to be a knee-high barrier to horse and human.
“We’ve missed the shelter,” Carlo said.
“We’ll get there.”
“I think it’s behind us.”
“What do you want? Go back and run into that horse?”
“You said it wouldn’t follow us!”
“Yeah, well, best guess.”
“It can’t be this far!”
“So hire another rider!”
“Don’t give me an answer like that! What are we going to do?”
“If we’ve missed it,” Danny said, struggling for calm, “—if we have missed it, there’s another shelter.”
“There’s another! God, it’s hours on! It’s getting late! The sun’s gone! We could miss the shelter ahead of us, too, Danny! What are we doing?”
“We don’t know we’ve missed the first one!”
“There’s logging trails that spur off this road. We could be off on one of them!”
“I know. I know about them. There’s three. We never bear right into the trees. That’s what Tara said. All I can say. Keep walking.”
“Dammit,” Carlo said. “Dammit.”
“Yeah,” he said. He ran out of breath for talking. The shadow that was Cloud was pulling ahead of them again, nothing but a grayness in the ambient and a grayness in the softly felling snow.
They’d pull and breathe, now, pull and breathe, Randy on the travois, half-aware, neither of them who were pulling having breath to talk. But that ominous <blood on snow> sending came to them now and again and drove them to greater effort. Danny was sick at his stomach, he’d had a nosebleed, which he only realized because the blood showed up dark on his glove and <dark on the snow,> which confounded itself with the dreadful image chasing them.
We’re in trouble, was all Danny could say to himself. It had assumed a rhythm along with the pulling: We’re in—real bad—trouble.
“We’d better look for a spot to tuck down,” he said to Carlo. “Dig in and stay. We’re out of options.”
It meant Brionne was going to die for certain. But they were down to Randy’s life. And down to their own. There were trees. He had a hatchet.
<Snow. Blood. Gunshot.>
“Damn that thing!” Carlo cried, stumbling to a stop. “I’ll shoot it!”
<Stormclouds and pain. Bite and kick.> That was Cloud answering the challenge. Cloud had swung about, also stopped in his tracks, head up, ears flat, nostrils catching the night wind, and Danny dropped the travois and grabbed Cloud by the mane, imaging <Cloud with Danny. Thin and hungry Danny. Danny lying in the snow.> He was scared Cloud was going to take out chasing that sending, and Cloud did drag him a distance through the snow, until weariness had its effect and Cloud came to his senses.
Cloud stood shivering after that. But Cloud knew his rider was beside him at that point, snorted loudly, and listened when Danny imaged <walking uphill.>
Cloud agreed, also wanting <Danny walking,> and Danny let go all but a single handful of his mane and walked past Carlo without a word, because Cloud’s state of mind was as precarious as it could possibly be right now.
“Hey!” Carlo’s ragged voice came from behind him. It was a moment before Carlo could overtake him, pulling the travois alone to the point where he stopped—Carlo was <mad> and <scared.>
“What are you doing?” Carlo cried. Carlo ran out of strength in that last effort and dropped to his knees.
He didn’t know what he was doing. He had Cloud headed in the right direction. That was where his thoughts were. But he took one pole, Carlo hauled at the other, and they pulled in Cloud’s track.
From Randy there was nothing but the image of <biscuits. Steaming biscuits piled on a plate.>
Trees were consistently on either side of them, arguing they had somehow missed the shelter and, almost indistinguishable from drifts, there were banks of snow-covered undergrowth that argued whatever this track was, it was used enough to keep the brush down. Trucks in this country dragged chain from their undercarriage to maintain the roads clear of brush and keep the ruts from making high centers; this was surely a road of some kind—if it wasn’t theirs, if they had gotten diverted onto a logging trail, it might lead to a camp, deserted in this season as the miners headed for villages for the winter, or even dug-in miners, fools so crazy for digging they wouldn’t leave for the winters.
But there’d be a shack strong enough to sleep in, if they could find it in the blowing snow. If they could just get a place to tuck in, even a deep place in the rocks, then they could wait it out—and hold off the horse that was stalking them.
Only if they could get Cloud into it. Only if they could keep him from challenging that horse. He might win.
He might not.
<Blood on white. Blood and a man’s still shape. Gunshot echoing off the mountain. Far, far riders up the road.>
They perceived something else near them, too, something angry and curious that wasn’t a horse. Wildlife was disturbed by the intrusion. Wild things were waking from storm-slumber.
Deep, deep trouble, Danny began to say to himself, and in that inattention put his foot in a hole. He went down, and made Carlo fall. For a moment they both lay there, neither with the strength to move.
Then Cloud broke the force of the wind, coming up to shove with his nose at his back, and slowly, shaking at Carlo to move him, Danny began to get up. He’d gotten snow into his cuffs. He tried to get rid of it, got his feet under him somehow.
“Need to rest,” Carlo gasped.
“You got a kid freezing faster than you are. His body’s thinner. Get up. Now!”