The cowboy gave a brisk nod, which set the horse tail on his helmet bobbing.
"He's had a good deal to do with Mackenzies before, I know that," he said thoughtfully, eyes narrowing. "And he's got a fair passel of guests to home right now, all of 'em foreign."
Then he came to a decision, and called over his shoulder: "Cody! Hank! Tommy! Git over here! Rest of you, there's plenty to do. We got eight hundred head to move."
Cody looked enough like him to be his younger brother and probably was; Hank was even younger, but dark and thickset; Tommy was about sixteen, a slender redhead. They were armed and equipped like the first three; so was every man here and a fair number of the women.
"These folks are here to see the boss. Tommy, you get back to the homeplace and let him know. Cody, Hank, cut them out horses and take 'em on down to the house."
The three travelers stood and watched the ranch hands break camp. Most mounted up and moved out to get their herds moving north into the old national forest. The rest finished dousing their fires and policing up their gear, ready to resume their slow journey up to the sum mer pastures where they'd live until fall. One young girl came over shyly and gave them each a buttered biscuit with a piece of bacon in it. A few of the others looked dubious, and he caught a mutter of, "Witches."
Cody and Hank brought them saddled horses. They seemed to be watching as the three mounted, and half hoping they'd do so with a clumsy scramble. Rudi smiled, put a hand on the cantle and vaulted easily into the sad dle, feet finding the stirrups. They followed the old road, riding off the broken pavement to spare the hooves; the potholes had been filled in roughly to keep it passable to wagons, but dirt was easier on the horses' feet.
After an hour or two the two young cowboys were chattering merrily, and asking questions about the strangers' gear.
"Them longbows don't look too handy," Cody said dubiously.
"The dead pine," Rudi replied conversationally, nocked a shaft, drew and shot in one supple motion, before the cowpony he was riding had time to crab.
You could use a longbow from horseback, particularly when the target was directly to the left; it just wasn't easy. Snap, and then an instant later the shaft was quivering like an angry wasp in the trunk of the dead ponderosa pine a hundred and twenty yards away, while birds flung themselves skyward from it in alarm.
Cody gave him a look and cantered his horse across the slope to retrieve the shaft. He tried tugging it out, then gave up and dug at it with the point of his knife. When he came back he was shaking his head ruefully.
"OK, mister, you can shoot with that beanpole there," he said. "My daddy went west with the Rancher in the War of the Eye and he told me about Mackenzie longbows… still, I'd say a saddlebow is handier."
He raised his own weapon, copied from pre-Change recurve hunting bows, to illustrate what he meant; it was around four feet long, with flat-section laminated limbs that curled forward at the tips.
"It certainly is, when you're riding," Rudi acknowl edged. "The longbow holds up better in wet weather, though."
Ingolf shook his head. "Not if you're careful about varnish."
"And that doesn't matter as much out here, where it don't rain all the damn time like I hear it does over the mountains," Cody added.
They spent a pleasant hour talking bows, horses and hunting as they traveled. Then the men drew rein and looked southward as they came out of the last of the forest, where it trailed off into the occasional stunted juniper amid grass and sage and wildflowers.
Cody smiled, obviously expecting them to be impressed. "Quite somethin', ain't it?" he said proudly.
Ahead was open country, and they looked down onto a plain of sagebrush and bunchgrass green with spring and splashed by yellow bee plant. It was cut by a small river lined with cottonwoods, running westward towards a stretch of marsh. Water glinted in the diversion ditches that irrigated fields of dark alfalfa and a patchwork of other crops; cattle and horses and sheep and long-necked alpaca moved over the broad pastures beyond under the eye of mounted herders.
"That's the homeplace," the cowboy said, waving at a clutch of buildings, toy-sized in the middle distance. "There aren't many so fine."
A little village clustered there around the low-slung fieldstone ranch house, amid a wider setting of corrals, bunkhouse, paddocks and big barns of old-style sheet metal and newer ones of sawn boards; the square stone tower at one corner of the big house was probably new, too. John Brown's holding had been a good sized spread even before the Change, and afterwards he became one of the movers and shakers of CORA, the Central Oregon Ranchers' Association. He'd annexed several smaller ranches that didn't have good natural water, and as much of the old national forest as he wanted to claim and had the men to hold.
Couple of hundred people, more or less, Rudi thought. Pretty much what one of our farming duns has, or a Bear killer strategic hamlet, or a knight's-fee manor up in the Protectorate. Though there may be nearly as many out at the line camps this time of year.
That wasn't many for tens of thousands of acres, but the bones of the earth were closer to the skin here than they were in his lush homeland west of the mountains, and Brown had taken in as many townsfolk as he could feed after the Change. The cowboy clucked to his mount and they all moved forward again. Half a dozen more riders were on guard; two came up to escort them in, one of them with a light lance bearing the rancher's sigil on the pennant.
"They say Bend is a lot bigger," Cody went on. "But I say you'd travel plenty and find nothing better than this!"
Ingolf blinked, caught Rudi's eye, and lifted a brow.
Yeah, it's not much of a muchness, the Mackenzie acknowledged with a slight shrug. But sure, if they want to get excited over it, let's not be a wet blanket about it, eh? And it's probably a nice enough place to live. I don't like big cities myself.
There was no wall around the settlement, but all the houses were stone, with fireproof tile or sheet metal roofs; all the windows could be closed with steel shut ters that had narrow slits for shooting arrows, and angle iron posts set in concrete stood ready to carry tangles of barbed wire if need be. You could see how the ma sonry improved from the earlier houses to the later ones as hands gained skill, but they were all built thick and strong. The snout of a Corvallis-made catapult peeked over the top of the tower.
People were finishing breakfast or already at work, but they stopped to watch the strangers ride in. The smith was a brawny brick-thick man in a leather apron and sweat stained shirt beneath; he and his assistants paused while he plunged a white-hot knife blade into a quenching bath before they came out to wave. Many of the other folk came out also, from saddlers' shops and bowyers' and a big open-sided shed where carpenters were putting together something complex-probably a pivoting hay lift.
"Mackenzies! " the smith called, sounding happy to see them, a white grin splitting his sweat- and soot-streaked face. The man went on: "I trained in Dun Carson!"
Rudi reined aside and leaned over to shake his hand; it was hard as something carved out of cured leather, and strong even by the young clansman's standards.
"Cernunnos and Brigid bless you, then, friend," he said.
"Goibniu strengthen your hand," the smith replied; it sounded a little odd in the flat twanging range-country drawl.
Now that Rudi looked, there was a mask of the Lord of Iron over the hearth, together with the crossed spears and cow horns-not as conspicuous as the patron deity of smiths would have been in a Clan settlement, but there. He made a reverence to it before he rode on. Most of the people here were Christians-there was a small Protestant church, and an even smaller Catholic chapel. He hoped it didn't cause the smith any trouble, but it probably wouldn't. Even a generation after the Change, metalworker's skills were still rare enough to be very valuable, and the CORA charter allowed freedom of religion.