“You wake me up any time you think of going out, hear?” He made his grip harsh for a moment, and shook her. <Mama,> was in the ambient, and Callie came through, rifle in hand and <scared, mad> in a way that set Shimmer off in a series of <light-dark> and <hostile mare-in-foal> images.
“What are you doing out here?” Callie wanted to know, and Jennie flinched and ducked behind Ridley, holding onto him, staying close to Rain.
“There’s something out there,” Ridley said. “Hush.” Meaning both of them. A spook in the night with the horses involved wasn’t a situation for a child, but it wasn’t one for a child-mother argument, either. Jennie was spooked enough, and Callie calmed herself down fast—he could feel it in the ambient and he could feel it in Jennie relaxing and being willing then to be near Callie.
“I don’t want to go back inside,” Jennie said in a faint voice. “I don’t want to be by myself.”
“Be still,” Callie said, and calmed Shimmer down with <Callie and Shimmer, Callie and Shimmer, baby inside> with no polite regard of a man and a kid in the ambient: it was something Shimmer and Callie remembered, a physical sensation and a feeling both protective and fierce sent out into the dark and the storm. See your bet and raise you, intruder.
It was quieter after that. They stood together in the aisle of the den, where the wind could blow through from the open outside door; and Slip came inside, a shadow as fierce as Shimmer and almost as possessive of his territory. Ridley met him in the dark—they kept no lights in the den for fear of fire, and all that they could see of each other was blackness deeper than the dark of the aisle and as deep as Rain’s presence.
Deeper still as Shimmer left her nook and crowded in, seeking Callie, forming a defensive bond. Get Jennie out, was the first thing that came to Ridley’s mind, feeling that hostility. But Jennie wasn’t a baby anymore; Jennie was a life defending itself with Rain and Rain defending himself with her: in that way they held the night around them, defining it as theirs, not provoking what was out there, but not accepting it, either.
“There’s someone out there,” Jennie was the first to say. “People out there.”
Ridley felt it, too, in the same moment, and knew Callie did.
“Several someones,” Callie said.
Human and horse, separated off from them in the storm and the snow.
On the other side of their wooden wall there were hundreds of human minds, deaf to the ambient.
The other side of their wall was the whole village of Evergreen, full of life that, isolated from the horses, couldn’t hear the dark outside the walls, walled in for the winter, cut off from the world for the season. Snows had come before this one, and the phone lines were down for the winter. The miners had come in. The loggers had. But without a horse in the midst of the strangers out there, they couldn’t have heard them that clearly—they’d have only gotten their existence from small creatures in burrows, and spotty at that. That strong a sending was a stray rider out there, maybe not alone, maybe with some lost group of miners they hadn’t known about: foolish novice prospectors did come up the mountain sometimes with the truckers, and the really foolish ones were secretive, just too nervous about their finds to let riders know they were there so riders could protect them.
Or it could be some group of miners who’d planned to winter-over underground and had something serious go wrong. He knew of two such that were staying—dug in and well-stocked and betting their lives on keeping the Wild out of their burrows all winter without a rider’s help.
But sometimes that wasn’t a good decision, and they’d been feeling things generally spooky on the mountain for weeks. There was the ghost of that feeling in the ambient now.
The question was—where had a rider come from, and why come here and not to the rider’s own village?
“I can’t pin it down,” Callie said finally, and Jennie said,
“I’m scared. Rain’s scared, too.”
“Calm him down,” Ridley said, with no sympathy. “Right now. Think of <flowers.”> That was what they’d always taught Jennie to do when the spooky feelings came: that was her calm-image, and < flower> came to mind, a timid and shadowy flower, at the moment, a lost in the dark, <shivering, scared flower.>
“Callie,” Ridley said, “tell the marshal what we’re picking up. Better put more guards up.”
“Bitter night,” Callie said. “Awful time to be out.”
“Sure don’t envy them,” Ridley said. Callie didn’t argue with the need to get the marshal and didn’t argue about who was staying in camp with Jennie while she went through the snow-passages to advise the marshal. Callie just traded him the shotgun for the rifle, as the thing she’d need more if somehow vermin had gotten into the passages, as could happen if things went catastrophic tonight. And Jennie, it turned out, had brought the hand-torch from the barracks: light flared as she turned it on and gave it to her mother.
“Clever child,” Callie said. “Deserve your ears boxed, is what.” Callie left at a fast pace. The light died as Callie disappeared through the shattered passage door.
Shimmer wanted to follow Callie into that passage and did, though she wouldn’t get past the barrier that sealed off the village passages from the horses and would have to back out; while close in the company of Slip and Rain, Ridley put his arm around Jennie. The reprimand for taking the emergency light had slid off without a sting: worry about the situation hadn’t slid off at all. They hadn’t brought up a fool. Jennie knew things were serious, knew they weren’t her fault, and worried because things were happening that weren’t ordinary or right.
It didn’t make sense that anyone was out there. Ice wind was what they called storms like this on Rogers Peak. If one got started, you didn’t run the risk: you tucked in and kept low until the wind stopped.
This rider—these presences in the storm—hadn’t done that.
And in the last of autumn the mountain had been carrying frequent disturbance to them, night visions of fire and blood, game on the mountain seeming to run in surges, abundant one day, gone the next, with no ordinary sense to the movements. The seniors had said things like that happened worst of all when it was setting on a bad winter. The wild things sensed the weather coming—so the seniors had said.
And there were stories how when the vermin got to moving in waves, they’d surged right over defenses and right down some miner’s burrow. You stopped it fast and drove them back with shotgun blasts, or you went under for sure.
He didn’t want to think about that with Jennie and Rain there: any young horse was noisy and spooky enough without encouragement—and in Rain’s case, increasingly uncomfortable to have around the den. The colt would be waking the village on his own if Jennie didn’t keep him quiet, and it was all but dead certain Rain was the culprit that had initially spooked Shimmer and Slip by picking up a far sending like that.
“Silly lad,” he said, and patted Rain’s neck, while Slip was standing close by, great fool that he was, sending <fierce nighthorse male,> and at the same time seeking shelter in the human presence.
Rain was, he decided, no small part responsible for the rolling panic that had now sent Callie over to scare hell out of the marshal and his deputies, and, remotely possible, Rain might be the entire reason the autumn had felt as spooky as it had. Rain was weaned this fall, he was coming on puberty this winter, and a young horse in that mood was all ears and all sensation. Rain kept the neighborhood disturbed, and with mating season on them, was having sensations beyond the understanding of an eight-year-old, even if she had seen Slip and Shimmer getting babies.