Cloud's Rider

“He’ll show Rick Pig. He’ll come back and he’ll show him.”

“If he comes back with that horse he’ll take orders like any rider in this camp, kid. The way he’ll take orders over at Mornay if Da

“Yes, sir,” Randy said.

“Good you learn that.”

Chapter 20

The afternoon had gone to that strange daylight afternoons had in the woods, in the mountains, and the trail was going the same way it had—Cloud’s burst of speed flagged in a high altitude gasping for breath. Out of condition, Cloud was. Born up here, maybe, but they were both a little soft, and settled to an unheroic amble through the woods, along the road to Mornay. He walked at times, rode at times. Cloud had carried him quite a lot to start with, and he didn’t want to push Cloud to foolishness in his enthusiasm: it was possible to get a whole list of ailments from too much exertion at altitude and he’d heard them all from Ridley as well as Tara and Guil.

Miraculously, in Da

He was resolved not to scare the horse twice. It hadn’t been the brightest move he’d made, coming up on that horse ambivalent about shooting. Now he was sure he wouldn’t. He tried, because Cloud could be a fairly loud horse when he wanted to be, to encourage Cloud to send out friendliness and goodwill to the ambient at large and an image of <Da

There were tracks of game—though sign was rare, and totally absent along one area of the road, well-shaded and sheltered from the snow-fall, where he would have thought small tracks might have persisted. Nothing but themselves was moving about—he didn’t pick up the <rider on horse> view of things at ground level that the little spooks sent. But the snow had fallen thick and swirled in under the trees, while the little game, undisturbed by hunters, was in burrows. The silence was deep and wide across the mountain, a kind of breathless slumber, except for the track Spook laid down and the track he laid over it.

He thought that Carlo might be heading to Mornay on his own: Carlo might never have traveled in his life, but he was well familiar with the fact of the shelters. When in his first days with Cloud, and inexperienced as he was of the Wild, he’d taken out to the open, he’d had far better weather and no such shelters in reach.

<Shelter and warm mash,> he thought, <Da

Cloud shook his dark abundance of wooly mane and whipped his tail about.

<Fierce nighthorse male,> Cloud sent into the ambient, and Da

He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t put a name or a label to it—and nighthorses weren’t the only large hunters on the mountain. He’d long since put curves of the mountain face between him and Evergreen—a lot of them. And now, just since the last sharp curve, the nape of his neck prickled as they rode, which sometimes meant something watching—and sometimes didn’t. Sometimes it was just a human’s own imagination padding along behind him, never there when the rider looked back, and never close enough to leave tracks in the rider’s sight.

Which was ridiculous. If anything had been behind them, Cloud’s vision would have spotted it, Cloud’s horse-sense would have located it, Cloud’s knowledge of the Wild would have identified it with far more surety than a human could.

He just decided, in all that silence, not to call out to Carlo aloud as he’d sometimes done, and not to send so loudly as he’d been urging Cloud to do. He rode along through a shadow that deepened as they passed into woods. But past a little wooded spot and around a little curve, he found open road ahead.

And there—he was ever so glad to see—just past those last trees, a wall of logs. The Evergreen-to-Mornay shelter was ahead. He’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t have to tell Ridley he’d missed this one in a snowstorm, and, thank God, despite the snow-fall, he hadn’t.

The road went past it. But the trail he was following didn’t go there. It veered off down a broad gap in the trees that led past the shelter, and just kept going.

Damn, he thought. A logging track, and Carlo had taken it, shying off from the cabin. He stopped Cloud, and stood looking down it. Snow-fall was thick enough the trail disappeared into white haze, along with the farther trees.

It might be stupid to follow. But hehad gear and a gun, and Carlo didn’t. Hecould stay on his horse, and he wouldn’t bet on Carlo’s chances if that trail led down to rough ground.

It was a question how hard to push Carlo, how hard to make him run. He didn’t want to create a disaster. It might be smarter to hole up for the night, use the supplies in the cabin to make a good hot supper and hope Carlo could smell it on the wind.

But when he rode up to the shelter, in which the ambient gave him no feeling of occupancy—just a wooden structure half-buried in snow—he kept thinking that with the snow coming down the way it was and a half-crazed horse under him—

God, what chance did <Carlo> have but him?

Cloud turned without his willing it, with the notion of <Carlo,> too, and a <bad> feeling about the precinct that came on a gust of wind. <Lorrie-lie> was Cloud’s thinking at the moment; and <high in treetops.> Or it was something very like. Cloud blew steam in an explosive clearing of his nostrils and shook his mane in disgust at what he was smelling. Cloud had a notion of <bad> and <movement on the mountain,> and <gap in the world> that boiled up to the top of the ambient in a scary way he’d never before felt from Cloud.

“All right,” he said, patting Cloud on the shoulder, agreeing on the trail in front of them.

The overcast had gone very gray and dim above them. They might be fools to be going away from shelter.

But he hadn’t gone too far at all before they crossed another such clearcut, and came on a bowl-shaped little nook where a big forested crag thrust out from the mountain, rock veiled in snow, bristling with evergreens. It was one of those unexpected vistas the mountain could give you, just unfolding from around a turn. A broad patch was clear of trees and brush, and the immaculate flatness of iceshowed where the wind blew the snow clear.

A mountain pool, frozen over. Tall evergreens stood about its banks.