Well, you were forty then and forty-eight now, he told himself. Not a lad anymore; old flesh doesn't heal like young. Learn to like it; when you're hurting, you're not dead. Aloud he went on, pointing south towards the road:
"That's where they've gone. Over the lane, over the water, and up."
"You think it's people?" Larry Smith asked.
"Stands to reason, doesn't it? There's blood, lots of it, but no bits of wool or skin like an animal would have left. Someone cut that wether's throat, let it bleed out, and then ran off with it. They'll not go straight down the road westward, because that leads into open country-my oath, that's probably the direction they came from. And Dun Juniper's up on the slope to the north. So they'll go south, up the hill, before they work back towards the lowlands. That's if they've any bloody idea where they are at all."
He looked around. Even the men close to him were simply darker patches in the misty night. Once over the river and among the trees, it would be like standing inside a closet-except that in a closet you didn't have to chance a branch taking your eye out, and you generally weren't in the company of men carrying razor-edged blades on the ends of awkward poles.
"Everyone, be careful with the stickers, all right?"
He was glad he'd told everyone to kit up. The brig-andines were twenty-five pounds of inconvenience each, but they didn't make any noise and they'd be extremely helpful if someone did accidentally run his spearhead into a neighbor. Plus they'd be very helpful if it came to a tussle. Any mixup would be at arm's length; even Sam Ayl-ward couldn't shoot well in pitch-dark.
"Spread out so you're just in touch, and please, don't any bloody fool get lost, right? And keep it quiet."
"Aye, sor," someone said, in an excruciating Mummerset growl. "As ye wish."
Aylward snorted quietly to himself as he wiped his hand on a clean patch of grass and dried it on his kilt. One thing the post-Change, Oregon-version Clan Mackenzie had in spades was bad put-on British accents, most of them sounding like they were out of old pirate movies by way of Monty Python, and the closer you got to Dun Juniper the more of them you heard.
Although I'll grant that Lady Juniper herself can do a perfectly authentic County Mayo brogue when she wants to. And of course I'm an 'ampshire 'og of the purest breed-seven hundred years of Crooksbury farmers.
The imitators, though: He supposed the others had caught it from the reenactors and Renaissance Faire types who'd made up much of her original circle. What they'd all end up sounding like a few generations down the road when the soup had had some chance to simmer didn't bear thinking about:
He turned to the dogs, whistling softly. "Garm! Grip! Take the scent. Seek, boys. Seek!"
The dogs were mere dark shapes weaving in and out of the mist, but he could hear their interested snuffles. Then they stopped, muzzles to the ground; he moved up between them, watching their black nostrils quiver over the grasses that bent down under the beads of moisture that condensed on them. Gram growled low in his broad chest, and they began to move purposefully to the south.
"Slow, boys. Slow!"
He'd hunted the dogs long enough and trained them well enough that they knew not to leave the humans behind. The boards of the fence loomed up out of the dark, and there was a clatter and someone's mild curse as they climbed it, cut off by a sharp shush! A little more light glimmered on the graveled road; the white dust and rock seemed to glow, and the drifts of fog moved with a breeze from the west. The group halted at his sssst! -they weren't SAS troopers by any manner of means, but he'd been training the clan in general and this lot in particular for nine years now, and the most of them hunted for the pot on their own quite frequently. The dogs cast about again, zigzagging across the road with concentrated attention, then moving off eastward; after a moment they doubled back and halted where a trail took off from the road and plunged through the creekside trees.
Now isn't that interesting? he thought. Whoever it was missed the trail down to the water, then turned back and got it. Right: straight down to the river, eh, boys?
They all moved down through the brush, breath and feet loud in his ears. "Larry, let's have the light again for a second-the rest of you keep your sodding boots back, will you?"
There were tracks this time, amid the mud and trampled ferns of the creekside. Aylward grounded his spear and crouched, his hand pointing to direct the light.
"Well, cor' stone the crows," the Englishman said mildly. "It's a tribal migration, it is."
He turned to the others. "They stopped here."
"More than one?"
"Six at least, mate," Aylward said, indicating tracks with the point of his spear. "Eight, more likely. What's more, a couple of them were youngsters-see the bare footprint there? Six-year-old or thereabouts. There's four different sets of shoes, only one without holes in 'em."
There was a murmur from the others. A thought struck him. Aylward cast his mind back; yes, there was just enough time, given that Lady Juniper and party had stopped overnight at several duns and for a whole day in Sutter-down despite Ostara being so close. Herself had stayed with the local Baptist minister, Reverend Jennings, at that. Pointedly driving home a point about toleration of the suddenly minority faith.
Separation of Covenstead and State, was the way she'd put it.
Coming cross-country from the spot east of Salem, there was just enough time:
"I think I may know who this is," he said slowly. "But I could be wrong. On the one hand, they have kids with them. On t' other, they could be bandits or even Eaters. So let's be careful, shall we?"
The water was nearly to the waist and snarling-cold as they crossed the ford, snowmelt from the high mountains to the east, enough to numb his thighs and feet and set at least one set of teeth chattering. There was nothing to be done about that; the dogs didn't seem to mind at least, porpoising up on the other bank and shaking themselves vigorously in the murk. One advantage of kilts was that you could hold them up out of the wet, and the merely damp wool cloth felt good when he let it go again on the other side and it swung down to his knees.
"That settles it," he said, when the dogs picked up the scent again. "If they were regulars at sheeplifting, they'd have waded upstream to break their trail. They just went across and scarpered."
"Wade upstream? In this?" stuttered the one whose teeth had chattered; he was rail-thin, an ex-architecture student who'd wandered in years ago.
"Better to be cold than caught, Carl-me-lad," he said. "And they won't be far. Not carrying that weight of mutton, and hungry with it. And with children. It's getting cold, too. They'll figure nobody'll be after them, and stop to cook it and eat. Now quiet."
They moved on through the woods and up the steep slope at an angle, a dense forest of tall candle-straight trunks, Douglas fir and western hemlock interspersed with brush and yew, the weed tree of the understory. There was a method to it; you didn't try to hurry, or be absolutely silent-that was impossible. Instead you stopped after you'd made a noise, waited for a second or two, then went on again. A forest at night was full of noises, creak and crackle and vegetable groaning, the drip of moisture from that afternoon's rain, the clicks and whirrs of dark's creatures, the whoo-whit! of an owl, the far-off yipping of a coyote. Footfalls and the occasional crackling of a branch could fit right in, especially if the ones listening weren't woods-wise.
The dogs whuffled, coursing back and forth-faintly contemptuous of how slow humans were, he sometimes thought. The slope grew steeper, and he carefully used the metal spike on the butt of the spear to anchor himself.