He thought that Carlo might be heading to Mornay on his own: Carlo might never have traveled in his life, but he was well familiar with the fact of the shelters. When in his first days with Cloud, and inexperienced as he was of the Wild, he’d taken out to the open, he’d had far better weather and no such shelters in reach.
<Shelter and warm mash,> he thought, <Danny and Cloud in the rider-shelter.>
Cloud shook his dark abundance of wooly mane and whipped his tail about.
<Fierce nighthorse male,> Cloud sent into the ambient, and Danny tried to think of <Danny and Carlo.> That didn’t make him or Cloud more comfortable. But he didn’t want to challenge the whole ambient the way Cloud was minded to do, and he wanted <riding.> When Cloud let him up he wanted <going faster,> just because it seemed to him—
He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t put a name or a label to it—and nighthorses weren’t the only large hunters on the mountain. He’d long since put curves of the mountain face between him and Evergreen—a lot of them. And now, just since the last sharp curve, the nape of his neck prickled as they rode, which sometimes meant something watching—and sometimes didn’t. Sometimes it was just a human’s own imagination padding along behind him, never there when the rider looked back, and never close enough to leave tracks in the rider’s sight.
Which was ridiculous. If anything had been behind them, Cloud’s vision would have spotted it, Cloud’s horse-sense would have located it, Cloud’s knowledge of the Wild would have identified it with far more surety than a human could.
He just decided, in all that silence, not to call out to Carlo aloud as he’d sometimes done, and not to send so loudly as he’d been urging Cloud to do. He rode along through a shadow that deepened as they passed into woods. But past a little wooded spot and around a little curve, he found open road ahead.
And there—he was ever so glad to see—just past those last trees, a wall of logs. The Evergreen-to-Mornay shelter was ahead. He’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t have to tell Ridley he’d missed this one in a snowstorm, and, thank God, despite the snow-fall, he hadn’t.
The road went past it. But the trail he was following didn’t go there. It veered off down a broad gap in the trees that led past the shelter, and just kept going.
Damn, he thought. A logging track, and Carlo had taken it, shying off from the cabin. He stopped Cloud, and stood looking down it. Snow-fall was thick enough the trail disappeared into white haze, along with the farther trees.
It might be stupid to follow. But he had gear and a gun, and Carlo didn’t. He could stay on his horse, and he wouldn’t bet on Carlo’s chances if that trail led down to rough ground.
It was a question how hard to push Carlo, how hard to make him run. He didn’t want to create a disaster. It might be smarter to hole up for the night, use the supplies in the cabin to make a good hot supper and hope Carlo could smell it on the wind.
But when he rode up to the shelter, in which the ambient gave him no feeling of occupancy—just a wooden structure half-buried in snow—he kept thinking that with the snow coming down the way it was and a half-crazed horse under him—
God, what chance did <Carlo> have but him?
Cloud turned without his willing it, with the notion of <Carlo,> too, and a <bad> feeling about the precinct that came on a gust of wind. <Lorrie-lie> was Cloud’s thinking at the moment; and <high in treetops.> Or it was something very like. Cloud blew steam in an explosive clearing of his nostrils and shook his mane in disgust at what he was smelling. Cloud had a notion of <bad> and <movement on the mountain,> and <gap in the world> that boiled up to the top of the ambient in a scary way he’d never before felt from Cloud.
“All right,” he said, patting Cloud on the shoulder, agreeing on the trail in front of them.
The overcast had gone very gray and dim above them. They might be fools to be going away from shelter.
But he hadn’t gone too far at all before they crossed another such clearcut, and came on a bowl-shaped little nook where a big forested crag thrust out from the mountain, rock veiled in snow, bristling with evergreens. It was one of those unexpected vistas the mountain could give you, just unfolding from around a turn. A broad patch was clear of trees and brush, and the immaculate flatness of ice showed where the wind blew the snow clear.
A mountain pool, frozen over. Tall evergreens stood about its banks.
He knew where he was: the pond Mornay and Evergreen shared for excursions.
The pond where the doctor’s daughter had drowned.
Unlucky place, he thought, scanning that scene from Cloud’s moving back like a painting on a wall—loggers hadn’t taken the trees here, only cut a trail through, about wide enough for the ox-teams that dragged the logs up to the roads: a pile of cut logs where a trail went off across the mountain awaited the teams that wouldn’t come next spring. Surprised by early winter, he thought, as Cloud pace-pace-paced along the track that a single horse had left along the side of the pond.
Cloud felt skittish, looking left and right and moving faster than his rider thought prudent. A <smell> was in the ambient, something Cloud couldn’t identify, and Danny was acquiring the same nervousness.
Another glance toward the pond showed a lump in a snow-hazed treetop.
<Lorrie-lie,> he thought. His knowledge of the predators of the Wild was all secondhand, but it could account for Cloud’s faster pace.
Didn’t pick up anything, though. Old nest, he thought. Old and abandoned. If—
Cloud shot forward so suddenly in <startlement> he almost went off. In the same moment he caught <Carlo and Spook below them> as the ambient did an uncanny ripple of <there> and <not-there> and nothing was the same as he’d seen it a moment ago.
Trick, he thought in a wash of panic. <Goblin-cat> could do that. He’d never heard lorrie-lies did.
Suddenly it didn’t feel lonely out here. It felt—dangerous. It felt—occupied. Alive. And scary of a sudden. Very scary. <Carlo> might be an illusion some hunter got from his mind.
<Goblin-cat> had that talent, too.
He didn’t quarrel with Cloud’s sudden rush. Not now.
The way ahead was a white gash through the dark of trees, a path dropping lower on the mountain, steep and almost all an inexperienced rider could do to stay on—a logging cut, Carlo thought it was. He didn’t know why the horse had shied from the cabin and taken him in this direction, but he was scared beyond clear thinking by the situation as well as the route they were taking. He kept feeling oppressive danger in the place, not on either hand, but above them—and that worried him more than it would have if Spook’s fear had been of all the trees.
This had direction. And it didn’t have to do with <rider following them,>not now. Spook remembered <Danny with gun,> but he didn’t carry that image continually—and wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t stop, though by now Spook was breathing hard and his jogging pace was jarring his rider’s teeth loose as he wove back and forth down the centerline of a depression in that white gash the sides of which Carlo feared might conceal stumps or brush. The center might be a road—he didn’t know. He had no sense of what Spook was doing or how Spook avoided obstacles under the snow—just—sometimes—Spook didn’t avoid them until the last second, and threw him violently off balance.
Carlo didn’t want to fall off and find himself on the ground with that feeling of <danger high in the trees> that was continually riding the edges of Spook’s awareness. He knew very well he didn’t have a rider’s skills or a rider’s knowledge of the dangers out here even on an ordinary day; and he didn’t have a rider’s sense of how to help his horse—he’d seen Danny take precautions and perform certain things with Cloud that he figured he ought to do for Spook if there was a problem.