Authors: Robin McKinley
After two days of too few rabbits, they had a piece of extraordinary luck: Ash and Ob pulled down a deer. Much of Ob’s puppy pigheadedness was the boldness of a truly superior dog trying to figure out the structure of his world, and he worshipped the ground Ash and Lissar walked on. His adoration had the useful result of making him preternaturally quick to train (even if it also and equally meant that he had to be trained preternaturally quickly and forcefully); and all the puppies seemed to comprehend, after their first hungry night on the cold ground (and no prince and waggon to rescue them the next day), that something serious was happening, and that they had to stop fooling around and pay close attention.
Ash focussed and froze first on the leaf-stirring that wasn’t the wind. Lissar noticed how high up the movement was happening, and felt her heart sink; she hoped it wasn’t another iruku, another monster such as Ash and Blue and Bunt and Kestrel had flushed, almost to disaster. She hoped that Ash could tell what it was, and that the fact she looked eager meant that it wasn’t an iruku. Lissar gathered the puppies together, and they began to circle upwind; as they approached the point where the animal would scent them, Ash struck off on her own, Ob and Ferntongue following at her heels. Lissar and the rest kept their line.
It was beautifully done. The deer broke cover, and Ash and the two puppies flanked it. Lissar was astonished all over again at how swift her lovely dogs were; and they tracked the deer, keeping pace with its enormous, fear-driven bounds, their ears flat to their heads, without making a sound. The deer, panicking, tried to swerve; Ob blocked it, and Ash, with a leap almost supernatural, sprang to grab its nose; the weight of the dog and the speed at which they were moving flipped the deer completely over. It landed with a neck-breaking crash, and did not again stir. Ash got up, shook herself, looked over her shoulder to find Lissar’s face, and dropped her lower jaw in a silent dog-laugh.
Everyone’s bellies were full that night, and the next. Ash woke up snarling the second night, and whatever it was that had been thinking of trying to scavenge the deer carcass changed its mind, and thrashed invisibly away through the undergrowth again. Lissar threw a few more sticks on the fire and put her head back on Ash’s flank. She could hear the last murmur of growl going on, deep in Ash’s chest, even after Ash put her own head down.
It was the fifth night after they had fled the king’s city, during which time Lissar had merely headed them all for the wildest country she could find the nearest to hand, that she heard, or felt, that inaudible hum for the second time; the same subliminal purr that had led her to the lost boy some weeks before. She felt like an iron filing lining up to an unsuspected magnet: she thrummed with seeking.
She put her head down on her knees and thought to ignore it; but it would not be ignored. Then she breathed a little sigh of something like relief, for it had been difficult, even over no more than five days, not to think about what she was doing, not to know that she had no idea what to do next, where to go. Five days not to think of Ossin. She stood up and stamped out their little fire; turned to orient herself to the line of the call, chirruped to her dogs, and set off.
This time it was only a lamb she found; but when she set it in the young shepherd’s arms—for the call had merely realigned itself once she’d found the little creature, and told her where to take it—the girl’s eyes filled with tears. “Thank you,” she said. “I am too young, and my dog is too old, but we are all there is, and we need our sheep.”
A week later Lissar brought another little boy home to his parents; and four days after that she was bending over an odd little carpet of intensely green plants bearing a riot of tiny leaves when her hands, without any orders from her, began gathering them, at the same time as she felt the now-familiar iron-filing sensation again. The plants’ roots were all a single system, so they were easier to pull up and hold than they initially looked; she plucked about a third, and broke off–the central root so that it would repopulate itself. When she came to a small cabin just outside the village she had returned the boy to a few nights previously, she tapped on the door.
A woman somewhere between young and old opened the door and looked unsurprised at Lissar and her following; and then looked with deep pleasure at the festoon of green over Lissar’s left arm. “Do your dogs like bean-and-turnip soup?” she said. “There is enough for all of you.”
The prince’s ball had been toward the end of the hunting season, the end of harvest, when the nights were growing discernibly longer, and the mornings slower to warm up. But the early weeks of the winter were far less arduous than the time Lissar and Ash had spent alone in the mountains. A large territory imperceptibly became theirs, and many villages came to know them, catching glimpses occasionally on Moonlit nights of seven long-legged dogs and one long-legged woman with her white dress kilted high over her thighs, running silently through the stubbly fields or, rarely, bolting down a brief stretch of road before disappearing. It was an interesting fact that no domestic animal protested their passing; no guardian dog barked, no anxious chicken squawked, no wary horse snorted.
And Lissar came to welcome the sound that was not a sound, the iron-filing feeling, for this often earned her and her dogs hot meals of greater variety than they could otherwise catch, and many barns were permanently opened to them. Lissar saw no point in sleeping on the increasingly cold ground if she could help it; hay stacks were to be preferred. The puppies learned to climb barn-ladders, not without accidents, none severe.
Lissar now also had hearths to drag her proud company’s kills to; they did not have to guard their trophies from other predators any more, and between their increasing skills as hunters, and Lissar’s finding of missing people, creatures, and miscellaneous desirable items, they rarely went hungry. No one questioned her right to hunt wild game any more than they questioned her right to the dogs at her heels; any more than anyone had ever asked her about the origin of her white deerskin dress. Everyone called her Deerskin to her face, and she established a semi-permanent camp for herself and her seven dogs, in a hollow of a hill, not too far from the herbwoman’s village.
She waited for news of Ossin’s upcoming marriage, but she heard none. She wondered if she would hear it; but how could her new friends not tell her, when they told her so much else, about their cows and their cousins, their compost heaps and their crop rotations. About their babies, their sweethearts and—occasionally—about the yellow city. Ossin’s name was mentioned once or twice, and Lissar believed that she was not seen to wince; but no one mentioned Trivelda. It was hard to know what the farm folk knew or guessed; that they knew she had lived at court, and that six of the dogs that followed her had originally belonged in the prince’s kennels, she assumed; for the rest she did not guess.
It did not occur to her that she was shutting out thoughts of Ossin, and of her—happiness—during the time she was a kennel-girl in a way too similar to the way she had shut out all memory of the pain and terror in her past when she and Ash had fled their first life. She had had no choice, that first time; this time … it had all happened too quickly, and she could not see if she had had a choice or not. The day in the portrait-room had been followed too soon by the evening of the ball. She had been beset by too much at once, and she could not think clearly. She still could not think clearly—but now it was because she did not think she could. It did not occur to her that she might. And so she did not try; and her forgetting began slowly to usurp her life again.
Lissar wondered sometimes what went on behind Fiena’s measuring looks; Fiena was the herbwoman who had fed them bean-and-turnip soup on the first evening of their acquaintance. But Fiena never asked embarrassing questions, and evenings might be spent there in silence, but for the slurping sounds of seven dogs eating stew. It was Fiena who made Lissar a pair of deerskin boots, from the hide of one of the beasts Lissar’s hounds had pulled down, so that by the time the first snow fell, she was no longer barefoot, although the boots, like any ordinary clothing, showed dirt and wear, as her deerskin dress did not.
She travelled in a wide swathe; revisited Ammy and Barley, who were glad to see her, quartered the towns in a larger and larger … eventually she acknowleged that she moved in a circle around the king’s city as if it were her tether and she on a long rope. She spiralled in—not too close; she spiralled out—not too far. But circle she did, around and around, restlessly, relentlessly, endlessly.
Autumn had been gentle and winter began mildly. The game remained in good condition and the puppies grew into an efficient hunting team; more than efficient, joyful. Lissar began directing them more and more carefully, till they as often as not could make their kill near their home-hill, or near one of the farms who would welcome them. She was proud of them, and she knew that had they remained in the prince’s kennels they would have been taken only on puppy hunts next summer, and would not be considered worth joining the real hunting-parties till the summer after that.
But as the season deepened she found herself less at peace than ever, roaming farther and farther away from the villages, with a buzzing in her head like the iron-filing sensation, only without the comfort of a direction to clarify it. At last she found herself in the wilder hilly region on the outskirts of King Goldhouse the Seventeenth’s realm—the northern boundary where she had come down last spring. She stood, surrounded by dogs, staring up the tree-covered slopes, and in herself a sudden great longing.…
She turned abruptly, and began a determined trot south and west, to Fiena’s village and their home-hill, composing a half-acknowledged list in her mind. Onions; apples; potatoes; squash; herbs, both medicinal and for cooking; blankets; a bucket. A comb. A lamp. Something to keep the rain off. An axe. With six more dogs to think of, more than would be comfortable for her alone to carry. She cast an appraising look at her proud sleek hunting hounds.
Ash felt her dignity very much compromised by the makeshift harness Lissar put together, useful but unbeautiful as it was. But, as ever, she was willing to perform any task Lissar asked of her so long as it was plain what the task was. She suffered having the harness put on, but once she realized that when the pack was in place it was heavy, she set about getting back out of it again. Lissar contrived to dissuade her of this and Ash reluctantly accepted the inevitable, standing in her characteristic pose of disgruntlement with her back humped, her feet bunched together, and her head low and outthrust and flat-eared, swinging back and forth to keep Lissar pinned by her reproachful gaze.
Lissar had accumulated much of the gear she wanted to take already at her camp; for the rest, after some anxious thought, she called in various favors from several different villages, that none need feel preyed upon—nor any guess her plans. Then she had had to devise a harness, and sew it together; this all had taken time, while the thrumming in her head went on, persistently, almost petulantly, as if it would snatch the needle, thread, and mismatched straps out of her hands and say, Go
now
. The puppies, who felt that so long as they kept Lissar under their eyes they had nothing to fear, had little reaction to Lissar’s new activities. Ash, who had known her longer, was suspicious of the bits of leather and stiff cloth Lissar dealt with so painstakingly; but, her look said, when Lissar had hung the first results on her, she had never guessed anything as dire as this.
The puppies had watched the drama of the harnessing of Ash very intently, so when Lissar turned to Ob with another harness, he dropped his head and tail but did not protest. If the perfect Ash permitted this and the adored Lissar asked it then he could not possibly refuse. She had made only three harnesses, to begin with, for the three strongest dogs—Pur, still the biggest, was the third—and distributed her bundles among them, keeping the most awkward items, including the bucket and axe, for herself. But then the other dogs were jealous of the special favor of the harnesses, of the work these three were honored to perform: they knew that Ash was their leader, and Ob her second-in-command, and Pur the toughest. The remaining four sulked.
Thus it happened that seven dogs wore harnesses, and while this put off their departure, it meant Lissar could carry more supplies than she had planned; all the better.
The sky was an ominous grey the morning they set out; she hoped she had not delayed too long. But she shook herself, like a dog, she thought, smiling, settling the unwieldy pack on her own back—she had spent more thought over balancing her dogs’ burdens—and as she did so, she felt the same orienting tingle that she had now so often felt. This time she knew, as she did not usually know, what it was that drew her: a small hut, high in the mountains, where she had spent one winter, one five-year winter. Where she had met the Moonwoman.
The dogs were all sniffing the air too, tails high, ready for an adventure, even if they had to carry freight with them. Meadowsweet sidled up to Harefoot, bit her neatly in the ear, and bolted—not quite fast enough. Harefoot’s jaws missed her, but seized a strap of her harness, and in less time than a breath there were two dogs rolling on the ground, their voices claiming that they wanted to kill each other but their ears and tails telling another story entirely.
Lissar was on them at once, grabbing each by the loose skin over the shoulders, barking her knuckles on the packs to get a good grip. “
Shame
on you,” she said. It wasn’t easy, lifting the front ends of two ninety-pound dogs, whose shoulders were thigh-high on her to begin with, plus their packs, simultaneously; but she shifted her grasp to the harness straps, which had been laboriously made to withstand a good deal of abuse, and heaved.
She managed to shake the two miscreants two and a half times before her shoulders gave out; the big dogs hung in her hands as if they were still twenty-pound puppies. She set them down again and they stared at the ground, pointedly away from each other, while she resettled their packs. The other dogs were ambling around as if indifferent: none would tease another being scolded; the scolding was enough, not to mention the possibility of the scolding being redirected to include more dogs. One or two were sitting, respectfully watching the show. She hoped they all in their own ways were paying attention. Pur was notorious for picking up nothing by example, no matter how closely he appeared to be watching; Lissar thought that too many of his brains had been given over to monitoring his astonishing physical growth and that there weren’t enough left for intelligence.