The Protectors war

Signe exchanged a brief embrace with Eric, then hugged Lua

"You do that, honey-pie," he said gruffly. Then to Havel: "Take us about an hour and a half to get into position."

"I don't expect they'll try and jump us at the i

"Got me a rope ready and a tree all picked out," the Bearkillers' second-in-command said grimly. "That big one back to the tavern would do right nice."

Hutton hated bandits with a cold passion; three Idaho amateurs had jumped him just after the Change, and they'd figured out what had happened to firearms before he did; plus they'd been survivalists of a particularly nasty breed, the Aryan Brotherhood. They would have killed him and raped his wife and daughter and then probably killed them if it hadn't been for Michael Havel and Eric Larsson stumbling onto the scene, fresh out of the wilderness where their plane had crashed.

A mirror flicked a signal from atop Walnut Hill: the All clear. Havel swung into the saddle-a plain cowboy-Western type, not the more specialized military models the Bearkillers had been making the last few years. Signe got the herd moving; she'd grown up around horses, at Lars-dalen and the family ranch in Idaho, and she was still better than he was at handling the beasts en masse.

He leaned over to speak a last word to Hutton. "Just get in place on the north side of Holdridge Creek and keep a sharp eye out for the signal," he said. "We'll take it slow to let you have time to do it without drawing attention to yourselves, and there's plenty of cover. We'll come on in the afternoon, or next morning, depending on what we find at the Crossing Tavern. If they jump us anywhere, it'll be between there and the Protector's border, so they can hide the horses in the marshland. The reports are pretty conclusive that nobody gets snagged at the tavern itself."

Of course, if they blow our cover, they might make an exception.

Hutton nodded and gripped his hand for a moment; Havel waved to the others and followed. As he went he turned and looked over his left shoulder at the Amity Hills-at Walnut Hill, in particular.

Would it be worth keeping a permanent lookout there? he thought.

The hilltop posts were useful for keeping an eye on things-he'd scavenged telescopes and binoculars everywhere they could be found-and lights and mirrors let them flash a message quickly. But building them high enough to be useful was expensive in labor and materials, and each required a crew who could be doing something else:

Like plowing this land, he thought.

They were down from the low rolling heights, cutting eastward across open fields. There had been farms in the hills-undulating country you could call hills only by contrast to the flat alluvial Valley floor-and even more orchards and vineyards, but more forest than anything else. The lowland was all cleared except for the banks of the odd stream and small woodlots, or had been before the Change; and this close to the high ground it was all naturally well drained, unlike the bottomland farther east. Right now it was tall green grassland getting shaggy with brush, spots half blue with May's camas flowers. Ready for the plow, but the trees were starting to encroach and the orchards to degenerate into pathless thickets. In a few decades it'd be twenty-foot trees and heavy brush laced together with feral grapevines as thick as your thigh; in fifty, dense mixed woods. He'd grown up working-class of a deeply rural sort in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and he knew what it was like to take down a big tree with ax or a crosscut saw, and to get the roots out without dynamite or a powered winch.

The problem is that there just aren't enough people around-to do that, or anything else. So my grandchildren will have to bust their asses: or:

"Signe?" he said. She glanced over and he went on: "Didn't you tell me once most of the Willamette was grassland when the pioneers arrived? Looks like it's growing up in forest pretty quick now."

She nodded. "That was the Indians. They used to set fires in the autumn to kill off brush and saplings, so there was a lot of prairie and oak meadow. Grazing for deer and elk, and plenty of camas root in the prairies. This would all be solid forest otherwise."

"We might do some burning," Havel said. "Be sort of dangerous, though: have to do it after wheat harvest and be real careful the fires didn't get out of control: "

He made an exasperated sound between his teeth. Ru

And eggs don't scream when you fumble them. And to think I wanted this job: OK, let's be honest in here where it's private: I still want this job. I like making things happen instead of having them happen to me, and I'm pretty good at it, which is good for everyone. And I will purely and surely do whatever it takes to win a fight, which is just what we need with Arminger around. I just don't like some parts of it much.

Signe loped her mount back a little west and waved her coiled lariat at a horse visibly thinking of straying, helping to keep the herd bunched until they crossed an overgrown ditch and swung onto Webfoot Road, turning north. The beasts saw no particular reason not to stop and take a drink from a pond or eat a little of the succulent new grass now and then, but they were reasonably used to doing unreasonable things because humans told them to, and the lead mare was well trained.

Still, I get daydreams about just being a rancher or a farmer myself, he thought. Just honest work to put food on the table and lay something by for the kids. But someone has to run things, or Momma-threw-away-the-baby-and-raised-the-afterbirth types like Arminger and Crusher Bailey will do it.

He glanced eastward; about half a mile thataway you could see why the little county two-lane called Webfoot had gotten its name, but big parts of the swamp looked new, too. There were dead trees in it, their roots killed out by standing water.

"That must have happened when the Keene Reservoir broke," he said. "Damn, but I hate to see things get run down that way."

"Hey, Mike, remember you're not Lord Bear today, and staggering along carrying the Outfit on your shoulders," Signe said, reading his mind with disconcerting ease; that happened more and more often as their marriage accumulated years. "You're Mr. Brown from Cottonwood Ranch, and it's a fine spring day with the sun shining and no cares in this world-except getting our skulls crushed by Crusher Bailey, or our bodies shot full of arrows, but Mr. Brown wouldn't know about that."

"Yeah, life is good for Mr. Brown," he said, gri

There really was a John Brown of Cottonwood Ranch, and they'd met fairly often at conferences. He was one of CORA's movers and shakers, and the Central Oregon Ranchers' Association was as close as the country east of the Cascades had to a government nowadays, not that that was saying much.

"Not that the poor man would appreciate it," Signe replied, and they both laughed.

The rancher was also a serious chill-dill-pickle-up-the-butt worrier, which made Signe's comment sly as well as to the point. He'd always liked her sense of humor.

We get along pretty good most of the time, he thought. Which makes it more of a contrast when we don't.

He relaxed a little and took a deep breath; it was only slightly seasoned with the dust and smell of the horses.