Cloud's Rider

“Hell of a mess.” That was from Tara. “This isn’t vermin damage. They’d have gotten the oil and the flour. Vermin have never been in here.”

Cloud sniffed a torn mattress and jerked his head up with a snort of disapproval. Guil and Carlo were both in the doorway against a backdrop of dusk near darkness.

“Vermin were supper for this thing,” Guil said. “Search the edges. Look for an entry hole. And be careful.”

Da

“No entryway,” Tara said. “That thing came in the way wedid and left the same way; the flue was still shut, and something that size wouldn’t fit up there, anyway.”

“Damn, damn, damn,” Guil said. Carlo said nothing at all. And Da

“You think it just pulled the latch-string to get in?”

“Curiosity might have pulled that string,” Tara said, and in the dying light of the blaze he’d made in the fireplace she ran a gloved hand over dents and scratches around the doorframe. There were others, Da

Bad news, Da

“Camp outside tonight,” Tara said. “It’s foul in there. Let the wind blow through it.”

He didn’t want to stay in the shelter with the stench, either. He shooed Cloud out to clean air and made a fast search for supplies, found a blanket, some cord, a metal drop-lid bin of the size to store grain, which should have resisted pilferage—though there was grain on the floor.

“Spring lock’s been opened.” He used a stick of the scattered firewood to pry the lid up and had his pistol in hand when he lifted it. There was grain inside that hadn’t been spoiled: the drop lid had caught a lot of blows, but the bin, while the lock was open, seemed to have frustrated the creature both in its wood-reinforced weight and in its uninteresting, vegetable contents. He threw another couple of sticks on the fading fire to maintain enough light to see by and began to carry grain out on two battered metal plates that he found in the tangled bedding.

The horses in the main were fastidious enough to smell over the grain he put down on the snow, but Spook had far less hesitation to go nose-down: Spook’s ribs were in evidence under his winter coat— he’d been eating small catches, Da

Meanwhile Carlo had brought firewood from the rick outside and, with Guil advising him, was doing the one necessary thing he could tolerably well manage. Tara began unpacking her kit—and they were in business as a camp, just that fast, with a fire about to get going, snow for melting, a blanket for Carlo and enough guns and horses to make sure the beast that had devastated the cabin was their quarry and not the other way around tonight.

“Shut the door when you’ve finished,” Tara said. “No sense drawing visitors tonight, and we could need it tomorrow. When we leave, we’ll put the pots in the drop bin and leave the door open wide. Fastest way I know to clean up the mess.”

Courting vermin was the damnedest way he could think of to do housecleaning. But it made a certain sense, and thisjunior rider didn’t want to have to scrub it down. He put Carlo to helping him cut evergreen boughs for beds for them and the horses—peculiar thing to be doing, using a perfectly intact rider-shelter for a windbreak, but with the green boughs underneath them, and with the blankets over them and their horses next to them, they’d do all right.

He assured Carlo so, catching anxiousness on Carlo’s part. It was a lot of changes for a kid in one day. But he knew how that was.

And he knew, after he’d had a chance to sit down at supper with the senior riders and get their view of matters, that Spook had hadno choice but the course he’d run—trying to get his rider down the mountain, down the only gap in what was otherwise a rocky face opposite Evergreen, once the truck route had iced and drifted shut.

Same way Guil and Tara had come up, by way of a series of logging cuts and a set of trails Tara knew—they’d come when they’d gotten his message about Spook, and realized they were in trouble. So he forgave Tara if there was anything at all to forgive. And he wasn’t consulted, exactly, about their plan to hunt the beast he’d wounded, but he thoroughly agreed that they should try at first light to account for it here, and that if they couldn’t, he and Guil should get immediately to Evergreen and advise Ridley of the danger.

“The other two of us will go on to Mornay,” Tara said, “and advise them down the road to relay on the warning. We’ve got to find this thing.”

The horses settled in a close ring about them, winter though it was, and although Burn and Flicker made a close-knit pair: it was safety at issue, and <horses watching the night> and <horses and riders keeping warm, snow falling, making white on nighthorse backs, white on blankets.>

Carlo didn’t show a disposition to sleep immediately, but he didn’t seem to track a great deal, either. Carlo leaned against Spook’s shoulder and the ambient grew warm and strange with a new rider’s amazement at the creature settled next to him, at the <woods around them> and the sense of <belonging to each other.>

“Harper never used to call that horse a name,” Guil mused when the evening was winding down toward sleep. “Used to say it wasn’t anybody’s business. Damn-you-horse was the closest to a name I heard him use. Spook’s a good name. Horse that can’t be caught.”

Carlo’s hand was under Spook’s mane. Spook was nosing his rider in the ribs.

They were in that lost-in-each-other stage that Da

Quiet night, Ridley thought, listening to the silence about camp—silence in the woods, in the barracks, at the fireside. They’d risked going off-watch at the den and gone inside, enjoyed a quiet supper, and had no alarms. Je

It was a new game for Je

It was good to hear. It made Callie laugh. Callie was on her way to accepting the boy, no matter his relatives: the plain truth was, Callie likedkids, and the plainer truth was, he himself was an easy mark for a youngster needing help.