Because Cloud’s fool rider, having gotten them into one human mess after the other, had now lost all his gear and everything he owned. Cloud depended on his rider to see ahead and think ahead, and understand the Wild, and his fool rider hadn’t even understood human beings. He wasn’t any help to anybody, and the best thing he could do was get them off the mountain alive and get Cloud fed and safe.
<Snow falling. Snow drifting down in the dark.>
<(Desire,)> came a thread of feeling. <(Bodies together, dark nighthorse bodies, feelings intense as the dark… )>
Danny caught a breath, roused out of sleep, suddenly beset by feelings he didn’t know where they’d come from—out of control, but he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t, he didn’t understand what was happening to him…
<(Wanting—wanting closeness, wanting—)>
<Snow> came down on him, cold and quiet, poured down until he was lost in a breathing, snowy night. That was Cloud. He knew it was.
<(… bodies merging, tearing, ripping apart—)>
<<… Watt, running through the dark, running and running— chest aching, breath coming edged with cold and terror, not enough air, branches breaking against arms and face, jabbing at eyes, branches crashing and breaking—> >
Stuart on the porch. “Stay with your horse.” Jump across time. Another moment. “Stay with your horse.” Danny and Cloud at the fireside. “Stay with your horse, whatever goes wrong, stay with your horse.”
<<Man running in the dark, something behind him, branches breaking—he won’t turn, he won’t turn and look, just running, sound coming closer with every stride—open ground, and steep rocks, and empty, dark air—> >
Danny gasped, jerked, caught at the ground, couldn’t get breath, couldn’t overcome the falling-feeling—
<<Snow. White everywhere. Heart slow, so slow his blood can’t move. So slow he can’t breathe—> >
Then could. Danny sucked in a breath, his ribs able to move.
He got another, and another, and his gloved hands knew the solid ground was under him, he hadn’t fallen. He wasn’t falling. That was somebody else—somebody was dying.
<Cold on his face, chilling cold against the sweat.> He sat there with his heart pounding, sure he’d been somewhere else—that he’d been somebodyelse. He was sure that something had been behind him, but when he looked he saw only the night-shadowed trees and the solid stone of the mountain.
A presence went past them then, fast, like a blink of starless dark—it swirled and it reeled dizzily, it wanted, it fell, it rose, it was a man and it wasn’t—it was lost and it was angry and it was looking for someone, it lusted after sex, after touch, after feeling, after something it had <(lost and couldn’t find)>—
He suffered a spasm of chill, then of arousal, but he held himself still, too wary to catch. He felt <drifting snow> on his face, and after a time of harsh, measured breathing the lust and the hurt and the wanting went away, sucked away into the dark farther and farther and farther, faster than any horse alive could run.
He thought at first it was another kind of falling, and clung to the rocks, shaking and afraid that the whole mountain would dissolve around him—straight outward into the air.
<(Hunger. Fright. Pouring through the woods—something chasing it. One and the same, predator and prey, feeding and fed upon. Pain and hunger embracing each other, tearing and biting—)>
<Blood on pale skin. Knives flashing. A man Harper loved—>
—and shot dead. <Face pale in the dark woods. Hole in the forehead. Staring at the sky. At Harper.>
<Cattle,> Cloud thought, telling him he was stupid. <Dung-piles.>
He felt his fists knotted up. Every musle was stiff. He was dreaming, he said to himself, remembering with eyes wide awake—he didn’t know for sure it was Harper. Things you heard in the ambient sometimes didn’t come to you full blown until later, sunken things rising to the surface ofyour mind with more and more detail. He kept seeing that dead face—
<Harper shooting—horse, at a fireside. Man and horse coming into firelight.
<Harper shooting: they had to die.
He was holding evergreen bits in his hands. He was on the ground, on his evergreen bed, testing whether he could breathe on his own, and whether the ground would stay still and the rocks not fly off into the night—his brain knew better than to trust what he’d just lived, but he couldn’t let go for a long while, couldn’t understand what had just happened, until he suffered a panicked fear and found Cloud nuzzling his cheek.
All right, he said to himself, all right, Danny Fisher, that was the rogue. You found it. That’s what you wanted. It’s up here. No gun. Nothing. Cloud’s got to get us out of here…
A rogue could send far, far across the mountain.
But if it wasn’t near them it couldn’t hear them, because sending that far, that was what itdid—but it couldn’t hear farther than theysent—and they weren’t nearly as strong or as loud. Except—
Except the creatures near them. It picked that up, the same as they could, only maybe—better than they did.
It had been near Watt. He’d heard—he’d beenWatt: the dark and the falling-feeling came back to him, the mind-taking pain of branches gouging an eye, tearing across his face—
Harper might still be alive. Quig might. He didn’t think Watt was. Somewhere on the mountain, Stuart might be alive. Theymight get the rogue. They might shoot it.
He had no gun. He sat and shook in the dark and fished a berry or two out of his pocket to take his mind off his fear.
Cloud came closer to him, hungry and <wanting the berries> Cloud could smell.
And suddenly he realized Cloud wasn’t stuck on the <snowy branches> image any longer. Whatever Cloud had been saving them from—was gone from the ambient.
So Cloud got the berries. All he had. They weren’t much for Cloud’s big body, but Cloud got them, and Cloud’s rider had only one last one. Cloud was due that much.
Cloud would find more berries tomorrow, and they’d take the chance they had and go down the mountain, please God. He’d been stupid. He’d run off from his parents and come up on the mountain where a stupid kid hadn’t any experience or any business being. God punished people like that. But maybe they had one more chance to get out of this.
Cloud snorted, mad. Cloud didn’t understand God. But if that was God that was out there in the dark, Cloud took exception to his thinking about God: Cloud came between him and the wind and licked vigorously at his face, making it wet in the cold air. He tried to shove Cloud off, but Cloud wouldn’t leave him, Cloud pressed in so he had to tuck up tighter in his nook or have his face scrubbed raw.
He was warm, though. He shivered, and whenever he thought— as he had to—that what he’d felt was real, and Watt had run through the woods, and Watt had fallen off the edge of some cliff—he disturbed Cloud, who didn’t want him to, and who thought about where they were and about <snow,> until he gave up trying to think of anything else.
<Snow sifting down on them.> He thought it was Cloud’s imaging. But he opened his eyes and felt it on his face when he looked up. It whitened the evergreen that made their blanket. It stuck to Cloud’s back.
The terror didn’t come back. Maybe the rogue was asleep.
Maybe it had found what it was hunting. But he hadn’t felt it satisfied. It had just—flown away, not finished with what it was doing.
<Harper firing—on a man and a horse, firing until the gun was empty.>
—until the man was dead.
He squeezed his eyes tight, not wanting to think about that. So he thought, like Cloud, about <snow and branches > and bore down on that thought very hard.