Eagerly Ratha led them all to Thakur’s spring, and she saw that the watering place would serve as well as she had hoped. Even with three-horns and dapplebacks milling and trampling, the flow stayed clear, and the animals drank until they were sated. Then the herders let them scatter to browse, and the rest of the Named sought dens or sleeping places nearby.
At last, when the confusion died down, she sought out Fessran. The Firekeeper was sitting on a rock ledge near the pool, grooming her belly and purring softly to herself. As Ratha approached, she caught something unusual in Fessran’s smell, something sweet and almost milky. But the powerful seamare odor in her own coat interfered with her nose, and she couldn’t tell if the odd scent was just her imagination. She consoled herself by thinking that Fessran would soon be wearing the odoriferous stuff and would smell as bad as she did now.
As she approached, Fessran stopped grooming and lay down. The elusive scent teasing Ratha’s nose vanished as if it had never been. Fessran yawned, looking weary but happy. The strained look on her face seemed to have gone.
“Well, I did it.” She grinned at Ratha. “I helped Cherfan whip that lazy bunch into shape and get them here.”
“No one gave you trouble?”
Fessran licked some new scratches on her muzzle. “Oh, there were a few malcontents—there always are. I had to use a little persuasion, but not much. The sight of the dry streambeds helped change their minds.” She shifted, grimacing and sneezing. “Would you mind sitting a bit farther away, clan leader? I mean no disrespect, but until I get used to that smell... ”
Ratha moved herself, sitting a little apart, while Fessran told her how they had made the journey without losing a single fawn or foal. It suddenly struck her that the Firekeeper was preoccupied by something that had nothing to do with herdbeasts. She could tell by the absent tone in Fessran’s voice and the way she groomed herself.
“Are you still thinking about your treeling?” she asked suddenly.
“What? Oh, Fessree? No. I’m sure she’s surviving without me. No point in fretting, and I have other things to think about.”
A little later Ratha paced away, swinging her tail. When she returned later to ask the Firekeeper something, she found Fessran gone.
She did not have much time to wonder where her friend had disappeared. No sooner had she turned away from the pool below the falls than she saw Thakur trotting up to her. She could tell by the way his whiskers bristled that this wasn’t just a friendly call.
He jogged to a stop, Aree rocking on his back. Ratha lifted her chin, raised her whiskers.
“Ratha, I thought you told the herders not to take any wave-wallowers from the southern beach.”
“I did,” she said mildly.
“Well, they aren’t obeying you,” Thakur said. “I saw several young herders bringing an animal over the rocks that separate our beach from the one Newt stalks.”
Ratha’s tail twitched with irritation. She did not like her instructions to be flouted, even though she had given them to appease Thakur. Privately, she didn’t think that the Un-Named female Thakur called Newt would really miss a few wave-wallowers.
By the time the two backtracked to where Thakur had seen the stolen seamare and then made their way to the corral, the herding students were driving the beast past the brush wall. The herders, all yearlings, looked inordinately proud of themselves. Ratha thought sourly that the creature they had pirated was small and not really worth all the effort. She lost sight of the seamare as it lumbered past the thornbrush wall and mingled with the honking, hooting mass of its fellows.
She was about to tongue-lash the overenthusiastic youngsters when Thakur interrupted, asking if she had tracked the seamare through the brush gate and knew which one it was.
“No,” she admitted, staring across the thornbrush at slick, mud-smeared flanks and swinging tusks. “I lost sight of the creature as soon as it got in.”
Thakur sighed. “Newt isn’t going to like this. I should have stopped those yearlings and returned the beast myself. I also don’t know which others they may have taken.”
“Does it really matter?” Ratha asked. “There are more on her beach than on ours. Surely she won’t miss a few.”
Thakur’s ears twitched back. “Don’t tell me you agree with what the herders did, Ratha!”
“I don’t, and I was going to let them know that when you stuck your whiskers in,” she snapped. “Why is your nape all up about this anyway? Your lame friend has got more of the wave-wallowers than she needs.”
“She knows them all, and she’ll know if one is missing. She has favorites among them.”
At this Ratha grimaced disdainfully. “You may think it’s silly, but she does,” Thakur insisted. “She may tolerate us stealing a few, especially if she thinks they have wandered over from her beach, but if we take the wrong animal, we will have trouble. And I’m afraid we may have already done that.”
“All right,” Ratha said, seeing that he really was worried. “I’ll tell everyone they’d better keep to our territory, or they’ll have more than an Un-Named cripple to worry about.”
She saw Thakur grimace at that and knew she should have chosen her words less recklessly. “I’m sorry, Thakur. She deserves more respect than that. I’ll be sure the herders leave her alone.”
She didn’t like it when Thakur held her gaze with his own, his copper-furred face serious. “Don’t underestimate Newt, Ratha.”
Her tail did an irritated flip. Why was he getting so touchy about Newt, or whoever she was? Abruptly she decided to change the subject and asked him if he’d seen Fessran.
“I caught a glimpse of her going somewhere with Khushi,” Thakur answered.
Ratha padded away. It seemed odd that Fessran was spending so much time with her son. None of the other Named females bothered much with their cubs once they were grown. She often had to scratch in her mind to remember who had birthed whom, on the rare occasions when it mattered. She shook herself and went on her way.
The following day, when she saw that the herdbeasts and the Named had settled after the journey, she gathered up those herders and Firekeepers who could be spared. After teaching them and their treelings how to work sticks and brush together to form a section of wall, she put them to work building the seamare pen.
Although Fessran still lacked a treeling, she made up for it by diligently bringing pieces of driftwood up from the beach and piling them near the wall.
Ratha had the pole-setters place additional sticks alongside the ones she and Thakur had laid. Once more poles were in place she worked alongside them with Ratharee on her back. The treeling held crossmembers where Ratha wanted them and helped to lash these in place. It was wearing work, hard on both Named jaws and treeling hands.
“Don’t you think it’s strong enough?” Fessran asked Ratha. “Watching you grunt and tussle in that miserable river is making me squirm.”
From the shallow water where she was standing, Ratha eyed the wall and the seamares inside. “It needs more brush on top. I want to be sure those duck-footed bellydraggers can’t escape.”
“If you put more on top, it will fall over,” Fessran argued, but Ratha wasn’t in a mood to listen. She slogged her way out to midriver, where the construction crew and their treelings were reinforcing the barrier by shoving sticks and thornbrush into the crude latticework. Not satisfied with how the others were building the wall, she took a tangle of brush in her own mouth and clambered atop the construction.
“Here’s where it should go,” she said, and shoved the mass in the fork of a driftwood branch. As she stretched down to take more thornbrush that was being passed up to her, she felt the whole wall shift alarmingly under her weight. With squalls of dismay, the workers scattered as a section of the barrier toppled over, carrying Ratha and her treeling with it.