“What was that in aid of?” he asked.
“A speculation about your, ah, height,” Adrienne said, glancing at him out of the corners of her eyes. “The Ohlone weren’t shy, let’s say.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Do you really want to know? It had to do with comparing the dimensions of a baby’s head and those of—”
“No, not really,” Tom said hastily.
Am I blushing? he thought. Well, let’s be honest. I am horny. Very. It was hard not to be, next to a woman this good-looking, and one you’d made love with, one you liked as well as resented. Some of his mind was still angry; other parts of him had different imperatives.
“Need a horse, Adri?” Sandra Margolin said, setting aside a shovel. “Need an ox, Tom?” she went on with a good-natured smile, as she looked Tom over from head to toe.
“I’ll have Ahmed, Sandy. Tom’ll take… oh, Gustav, I think.”
“Oh, you do want an ox for him,” the part-Indian woman replied, then went on more seriously, “Good idea. We’ve been skipping things for the harvest, and they could both use some exercise.”
She leaned the shovel against a wall and whistled sharply for her assistants, then relayed the order. They led two horses up. He could guess which one was Gustav without much trouble; it was a gelding and stood a bit over seventeen hands, black and glossy and muscular.
He ran a hand down its neck and over the legs. “Sturdy,” he said. “I don’t recognize the breed.” Not that I’m an expert on horses. “Reminds me a little of some I saw in the ’Stans. A lot bigger, though.”
“Gustav’s a crossbreed,” Adrienne said. “Hanoverian warmblood on a Kabardin mare—you know, those north Caucasus mountain horses. Gustav here’s certainly plenty agile for his size, and he has extremely tough feet.”
Her mount was more lightly built, an Irish hunter, dapple-coated and two inches over fifteen hands. Sandra Margolin and a nahua stable hand came out with the blankets and saddles; they were a modified Western type, with several rings in the frame for ropes or gear, and machetes strapped to the left side beneath a coiled lariat; the horses champed a little with eagerness to get going. The young woman came back with the rifles, and they slid them into the molded-leather scabbards that rested at each rider’s right knee.
The lane ran through the stables, then out into a big grass paddock right at the foot of the hills, and then through a gate in a deer-high fence and into rougher country, grassland scattered with blue oak. Beyond, it turned into a track up alongside a rivulet that was probably small in spring and had shrunk back to about half that size now. The tinkling of the water over rock made a pleasant counterpoint to the clop of hooves, the occasional jingle of harness and creak of leather, the happy panting of the dogs as they cast back and forth and charged up the steep slopes to either hand, covering four or five times the ground the mounted humans did.
The track showed more deer and elk sign than horse hooves; the north-facing side of the V-shaped notch they were riding in was covered in big timber. Sparse-needled digger pine on the higher rocky slopes gave way to good-sized madrone and blue oak, goldcup oak, with Douglas fir and the odd redwood near the trickle of water—none of the king trees was a real giant like the ones up on the north coast, but they still towered over everything else, rising from forest shadow into the sunlight like great straight-shafted spears. The wildflowers were dying down as June wore on, but there were still clumps of ocean spray with drooping sprays of tiny creamy-white flowers, thickets of bitter cherry with silvery-bronze bark and sweet-smelling snowy clusters of blossom, thimbleberry and trailing blackberry beside the creek, blue chicory beside the trail. Silver-blue and long-tailed coppery butterflies started up from the horses’ hooves, though fortunately there weren’t many mosquitoes.
The air grew cooler as they angled up the ravine. After an hour or so he noticed something odd—a silence. The dogs stopped running through the underbrush and came back to stand by the horses; the mounts themselves tossed their heads a moment later. They both reined in and scanned the trees as their horses stamped and tossed and shifted their weight from foot to foot as a way of indicating they thought it was a bad idea to stop just then. One of the dogs gave a low growl and pointed, its nose locked on a big canyon oak about a hundred yards away. Tom peered closely, pushing back the brim of his hat with one big hand; dapples of sun and shade moved on the scaly gray bark of the trunk and thick limbs, but he thought that about thirty feet up…
“There,” Adrienne said, leaning close. He was pleasantly conscious of her breath on his ear and the contact of their knees. “That branch…”
“… there,” he said. “That isn’t a cougar, is it?”
“No,” she said softly. “Chui,” At his incomprehension, she went on: “We got that word from our when-wes. Leopard. A male, very large.”
There was something else jammed into the crutch of a branch higher on the tree: a mule-deer carcass, he thought. And the branch the big cat was lying on looked to be just perfect for dropping on anything that came by on the game trail beneath. He didn’t feel particularly alarmed; even big predators avoided people unless you cornered them or did something dumb like running away. Still, he didn’t intend to ride under that limb, either.
“Shall we turn back?” he said.
“Not unless you want to,” she replied. “There’s a very pretty little spot a bit farther on I was planning on showing you. Le Chui there’s probably been shot at before—they love the taste of dog, not to mention sheep. Pull your rifle out and see what he does.”
The cat’s head came around sharply as he slowly drew the weapon from the scabbard. It came to its feet as soon as he had the muzzle clear, and growled—a sound with more than a little of a rasping scream in it; then it whirled and went down the trunk of the oak like flowing water, disappearing into the bush so smoothly that scarcely a shrub quivered to the passage of three hundred pounds of carnivore.
“Well, he knows what a rifle looks like and what it’s for,” Tom said. “Doesn’t particularly like it, either.”
“Neither would I, if I could only bite back,” Adrienne said, clicking her white teeth together and laughing. “That was lucky. They tend to be scarce near settled country.”
The dogs relaxed, and the horses went forward without objections; he judged that meant the leopard had either gotten downwind or far away, or both. After a half hour of companionable silence they reached the spot she’d spoken of; it bore the first signs of humankind he’d seen amid the mountains.
“Here it is. Quite famous.”
“Well, you could call it pretty, I suppose,” Tom said.
They’d come out of pine-smelling forest onto a jutting triangle that emerged from the canyonside to make a flattish area about a quarter-acre broad, with pockets of growth amid the rocks. A spring bubbled up from the base of the overhanging sheer mountainside to the rear; it had been ringed with stones to collect the flow in a shallow gravel-floored pool, surrounded with a lush growth of star jasmine. That climbed the cliff higher than his head, grew thick around the water, and trailed along the sides of the trickling stream as it wound over the ledge and plunged off the rim. The water disappeared as mist among the trees below, turning to a constant drift of rain. The clustered white blossoms were thick among the vines, and the heady scent mixed with the forest smell and the chill dampness of the springwater. The ledge didn’t feel exposed, though; it was as if he’d walked into magic and become part of it, connected with everything he saw yet separate from it, safe and walled away.