She threw a splash of water at him as her stomach rumbled and saliva spurted into her mouth. There were plenty of feral swine in the Cascades, crossed with European wild boar introduced by hunters; they'd been regarded as pests before the Change. A lot of them hung around this section, because the hardwoods her great-uncle planted left mast for them to eat, and there was camas-root in the mountain meadows. The problem was that they were fierce and wary, and hard for mostly inexperienced hunters to take without guns. Which prompted a thought:
"Wait a minute! You got it, Dennie? As in, actually shot it yourself?"
"I found a much better method than sneaking around in the woods. I just waited up late by the gardens." He smiled smugly. "If you grow it, they will come."
A groan went around the tub.
"There aren't all that many veggies, I'm afraid, but eat, eat-it's a special occasion, after all! Oh, and Di is sacrificing some of her flour to make buns to go with the pork-and-sage sausages: "
The two younger members of the traveling party excused themselves with exquisite good manners, grabbed towels and bolted:
Or perhaps they've just got enough energy to pester the cooks, she thought. She felt her friend's description right in her stomach, but the hot water was soothing away her aches so pleasantly that she could wait. Particularly with each piece of garden truck a sweet explosion of pleasure in her mouth.
Or maybe the youngsters are off to their girlfriends. Certainly Chuck and Judy are devouring each other with their eyes, and perhaps playing touch-toes.
The brief meeting with Mike Havel already seemed like a dream; an ache went through her:
Ah, Rudy, Rudy, I miss you! You'd bless me from the Summerlands if I found a man, but who could take your place?
"So," Chuck Barstow said, tearing his gaze away from his wife's eyes, and other parts of her. "Obviously you did have luck. I couldn't believe you got Jack and the others back!"
"We had help, and until then it was a very sticky situation indeed : " Juniper began, and gave a quick rundown.
A murmur of blessed be ran through the coveners.
"Who says the Lord and Lady don't look after Their folk?" Chuck said.
He was always keen, but we're all turning more to the Goddess and the God, Juniper thought. Perhaps because there's so little else to hold on to.
When she mentioned that Luther Finney had survived, Dennis swore in delight, and Eilir clapped her hands.
"Who says you don't have the Goddess looking out for you, special?" Dennis grinned. "Little stuff and big? There were those yew logs seasoning at the bottom of your woodpile that you never got around to burning, just waiting to be made into bows: "
"That would be the God looking out for me, as Cernunnos Lord of the Forest, Dennie. But I make allowances for the ignorance of a mere cowan."
He splashed water back at her; "cowan" was Wiccaspeak for a non-Witch, and not entirely polite.
"Hey, you're playing confuse-the-unbeliever again. I have never been able to get a straight answer on whether you guys have two deities or dozens, taken from any pantheon you feel like mugging in a theological dark alley. Which is it? Number one or number two?"
"Yes," Juniper said, with all the other coven members joining in to make a ragged chorus; Eilir concurred in Sign.
Dennis groaned, and there was a minute of chaotic water-fighting. Juniper rescued the bowl and held it over her head to keep it from sinking until things quieted down again. That exposed more of her, but if everybody felt like throwing hot water at her aching, overworked, underfed body, she wasn't going to object.
"Or maybe it's just that somebody had to be lucky," he went on. "Anthropic principle-anyone still around to talk about it nowadays has to have had a string of lucky coincidences helping them, and more so every day that passes. If someone's breathing, they're a lottery winner. You, Juney, you're the Powerball grand-prizer."
Juniper's chuckle was a bit harsh; after her trip through the valley that bit a little closer to the bone than she liked. But when gallows humor was the only kind available: well, that was when you needed to laugh more than ever.
"Scoffer," she said, and continued: "Anyway, I spent time with the Committee running things in what's left of Cor-vallis; mostly the aggie and engineering faculties and some other folk-Luther's on it himself. They're talking about a meeting of the honest communities sometime this autumn or early winter to discuss mutual aid-especially about the bandit problem."
"Well, blessed be Moo U," Chuck said. "That could be really useful."
Juniper nodded. "Good people, though a bit suspicious. They can offer a lot of varieties of seeds and grafts, and stud services from their rams and bulls and stallions, and farming and building help in general. They've got real experts there; I've got forty pages of notes, advice they gave me on our problems. The difficulty is that what they want most besides bowstaves is livestock; heifers and mares and ewes particularly, to breed upgrade herds from their pedigree stock."
Chuck Barstow breathed on his nails and polished them on an imaginary lapel; Dennis grinned like a happy bear.
"Those Herefords?" Juniper asked.
"Yup. We got a small party through there about five days after you left. They got back day before yesterday, driving their flocks before them-twenty-five head of cattle, twenty sheep, six horses. Mostly breeding females."
Juniper made a delighted tip-of-the-hat gesture to the two grinning men. That solved their unused-pasture problem, with a vengeance! They could get a good crop of calves, lambs and foals too. And they could slaughter a steer every couple of weeks:
Or if we can trade for more, maybe we can spare some for Corvallis . have to arrange escorts across the valley, though: if only Highway 20 were open:
It wasn't; by all they could tell, it was a gauntlet of horrors, everything from plain old-style robbers to Eaters. Aloud she went on: "What's it like over there in the Bend country?"
Chuck went on: "The Change hit them about like us, just not so much. Bend and Madras and the other bigger towns have pretty well collapsed, but a lot of their people got out to the farms and ranches, since there weren't millions of them to start with; if anything, they're short of working hands."
That sounded familiar. It just took so much effort to get anything done without machinery, particularly since nobody really knew how to do a lot of the necessary things by hand. There were descriptions in books, but they always turned out to be maddeningly incomplete and/or no substitute for the knowledge experience built into your muscles and nerves.
"And they've got local governments functioning in a shadowy sort of way-they're calling it the Central Oregon Ranchers' Association. They've got more livestock than they can feed, too, without the irrigated pastures. this year, at least; next year's going to be tighter for them too. We traded them bows and shafts and jacks for the stock, and for jerky and rawhides. They've got bandits of their own and the ranchers who're running things over there want weapons bad. They really miss their rifles."
"Congratulations," Juniper said sincerely.
The night when she'd nearly had a fit over hitting a man in the head seemed a long way away, except when the bad dreams came. She wasn't happy about becoming case-hardened, but it was part of the price of personal sanity and collective survival.
"Congratulations!" she said again. "It sounds like the eastern slope is a lot better off, at least for now."
"What was it like out there in the valley?" Dennis said. "I still say it was a crazy risk, you going out."
"Worth it," Juniper said. "Rumor isn't reliable and we have to know what to expect. The way the world's closed down to walking distance, you don't know until you go there and see or it comes to you. I'm not absolutely indispensable, either."
"The hell you aren't," Dennis and Chuck said together.
"I may be the High Priestess, but I'm not the Lady come in human form, you know, except symbolically and in the Circle."