She returned. And returned again. The animal became the focus of her life, yet she still was almost unaware of the fact, as she was unaware of so much about her still developing personality.
But her excursions into the wilderness now usually ended here, in this meadow astride this horse.
The feeling as she rode him was electric. The communion between their bodies was a real, tangible sensation.
It was…
But there were no words in her vocabulary to describe precisely what it was. She knew only that when they rode, she soared, she flew, she transcended herself.
She petted him softly, talking a kind of baby talk to him. He was gentle. That something so huge and powerful could be so gentle always left her stunned.
And then, dropping the clothing that she had carried from the stream, she mounted him, naked, alive, tense and trembling. They would ride. She would soar. And again, she would feel the strength of his body pass into her own, feel the energy of his gait transformed into power in her own body, energy, sensation…
Sensation like nothing she could possibly experience from anyone else or anything else.
Her legs spread down either side of his large frame. The bumps along the ridge of his spinal column passed directly beneath her, right along the opened wet slit of her pussy. She felt his body against hers, felt herself growing wet as she gave the first tentative squeeze of her knees into his sides.
He began to move. The vibrations started like a slow cadence, building with each step. She felt him. She felt herself. She felt alive!
Faster now, faster, racing with the wind… They reached the other side of the meadow, and he instinctively slowed down as they approached the fence. She paused, trying to decide what to do. Then, she turned him back around the way they had just come, kicked him into a full gallop and held him to it, even as the fence loomed closer and closer…
With one mighty spring he flew over it.
They were out!
She felt suddenly a freedom she'd never before known.
She didn't even think about where she was going. It didn't matter.
She wanted to ride, to fly, to escape. She wanted to take her steed and vanish, never to return again!
CHAPTER THREE
"Holy shit! Would you look at that."
"How the fuck can I look, I can't even hold on!"
Rod looked back at Johnny, who was balanced precariously on a small ledge.
"What the hell are we doing climbing up this damn thing anyway for? I thought you wanted to make Kingman's Dome by dark!"
"All right, all right, we'll head back. I just wanted to see what there was to see."
"Well, if you'd move out of the damn way and let me up there, I might get an idea for myself."
"Well, be careful you stupid klutz. There's not a whole lot of room up here."
They had decided to detour and climb a chimney rock. It had taken the better part of an hour and now, perched atop what seemed to Johnny to be the highest place in the world, the view was without a doubt breathtaking. But scary. The top was no more than five or six feet square except that it wasn't square at all but rather sloped. At a fairly steep angle.
"Oh Lord, I think I'm gonna be sick," moaned Johnny as soon as he scrambled up next to Rod.
"Well make damn sure you're down wind from me if you do."
"No fucking sympathy, that's your problem. You know I'm scared of heights."
"Then what the hell are you doing up here?"
"Well now you see the confusion that's been going on in my brain for the past hour."
Rod just looked at his friend with bemused exasperation. Then he looked back at the sight that had first caught his attention.
"Look over there."
He pointed about halfway down the mountain slope that they'd slept on the previous night.
A faint stream of smoke could be seen drifting through the trees, and the dim outlines of a house.
"Someone lives over there. That surprises me. This is supposed to be absolute wilderness."
"That's not those people the ranger was telling us about, is it?"
"Nah, those were some people from the DuPont family. Come up here for the summer. But they're way the fuck back over that way," he said, pointing in the opposite direction. He looked back at the smoke.
"Now who the hell do you think could be living up here, and be so secluded that no one would know about it?"
Johnny looked at him like he was crazy.
"Hell, anyone. Look around you. Do you see any roads? Do you see any phone wires? Do you see anything but mountains and trees for miles and miles. No one would find you up here."
"Yeah," Rod replied, thoughtfully. "And I'll bet that if you did stumble onto someone up here, and no one else did know about them… well maybe they might have a reason for wanting to stay out of sight."
"Rod old buddy, this is the vacation, remember? You were supposed to have left your job behind, remember. You're just a backwoods country boy come home, remember? You aren't a newsman, you don't have a camera crew with you, you don't have any deadlines to meet for the six o'clock report, and if something does happen, someone else is going to get the scoop. That's the price you pay for getting away from it all. Except it's not supposed to be a price. You follow?"
He wasn't sure that he did.
He thought about it a moment.
And then he answered.
"All right, all right. I'm just curious, that's all. That ranger seemed to know the area pretty good… if he didn't know about someone who was up here, it just seemed like maybe there was a reason."
"Maybe he was getting paid to forget," said Johnny, rapidly losing interest in the conversation. He'd just realized that they were going to have to climb back down the same impossible rocks they'd just climbed up.
"There, see what I mean? Even you're doing it."
"Doing what."
"Trying to figure out a reason why someone would be up here in such seclusion."
"What reason? Be sensible, will you? What's wrong with wanting privacy? It's people like you that give news reporters a bad name. You don't look for stories, you try to force people into stories."
"All right, we've had this argument before."
"Yeah, I know. But if you're going to deal with fiction, you ought to be like me and just deal with fiction."
Rod gave him a sour look.
"Besides, you'd make more money."
"Yeah, but at least I'm performing a public service. What about you? Hell, you don't even sign your real name to your stuff."
"Don't need to. The checks have the right name on them."
Rod gave him another sour look.
"Besides, Bart McAdams sounds like a cowboy writer."
"Yeah… who were you for your spy series?"
"Brent Holbrook. Good establishment CIA type of name."
"Um hmmm. Well, I'll tell you what. Whatever your fucking name is, you're going to have to climb back down this thing, and we might as well get started."
Johnny groaned, looked down and groaned again.
"I told you, asshole, don't ever look down!"
Lucus Simpson sipped coffee on the back porch, sighed, wished for a moment that his career enabled him to get out into the open more often. The weather up here was so beautiful. Down in his laboratory it made no difference whether or not there was a tornado or a hurricane or sunshine. He saw none of it.
Every so often though, he liked to just sit out here, put the work aside, relax, forget.
Sherry came to the door.
"Do you want your breakfast now Dad?"
"Yes, I'll have some eggs, I think."
Dear Sherry. She took such good care of him, tending to all his needs.