Authors: Robin McKinley
Ash, on the other hand, whose back was deliberately turned, could be depended on to know and understand exactly what happened; she was merely being polite. Lissar guessed it was Ash’s refusal to add to another’s humiliation during the puppies’ early training that had led to their all being so implausibly willing to leave wrong-doers alone instead of joining into the fray. One of the reasons puppies weren’t hunted till their second year was because this restraint was not a general characteristic of the race; Lissar had helped, once or twice, sort out the mêlée in a back meadow when training turned into a free-for-all. Not, of course, that there had ever been any question that Ash would demean herself by puppy antics; her style, since she had ceased to be a puppy herself, was more in her refusal ever quite to remember that she was not supposed to put her paws on Lissar’s shoulders and lick her face any time she chose, whatever Lissar might be doing at the time.
It began to snow mid-morning. They had been running across open land, but Lissar decided to cut back to the road, to make travelling a little easier. The haunted feeling behind her eyes that told her where she was aiming would keep them from going wrong; but there was no point in falling in snow-covered holes any deeper than necessary, and the holes in the roads were shallower. The snow began to come down heavily. Lissar halted long enough to pull her boots out of her pack, and reluctantly put them on. She felt half lost as soon as her feet were no longer in contact with the earth; but the snow was burning her skin. They ran on.
T
HIRTY
-T
WO
THE ROAD GREW STEEPER, AND THE GREY LIGHT BECAME FAINTER
as the trees crept closer and closer to the narrowing road. And then it was no longer a road at all, but a rough track. The dogs, with four long slender legs apiece, seemed never to have any trouble keeping their footing; she, two-legged and top-heavy, was clumsier. As the incline grew their pace slowed, and steaming pink tongues were visible. Ash, who originally led the way, dropped back to stay at Lissar’s side; Lissar curled her fingers in the long ruff as she had often done before, although the physical warmth was the least she took from the contact.
They had to camp several nights on the way. It was hard to tell in the snow; one camp, it seemed to her, might have been the same shallow cave Ash and she had huddled in the night after meeting the dragon. Nor could she guess haw long it would take them to get to the little cabin she remembered, for she and Ash had wandered for some weeks before she had made up her mind to come down to flat farming country again, and look for people.
The sun showed but rarely through the clouds during their journey, and the snow fell, sometimes heavily, sometimes gently, but fall it did, and went on doing. The clouds looked low enough, sometimes, as if there were a roof of snow solid and tangible as any other roof, with the trees as poles holding it up.
It was on the ninth or eleventh day that they arrived; Lissar had lost track. The increasing depth of the snow worried her; even the dogs were floundering, and she had to trudge, step by heavy, plowing step. There would be little game for them up here, less still that they could catch in this footing; fleethounds were made for running fast over bare ground. She hoped she had brought enough supplies after all … she hoped they would find the hut before the snow simply buried them. There were also two sores under the dogs’ harness that she did not seem able to halt or ease, Fen’s shoulder and Ferntongue’s ribs, no matter how she padded and rearranged the offending straps. The one thing she did not worry about was where they were going; asleep or awake, the direction was plain to her, as plain as a beacon across the grey snow; as bright as a Moon-track across black water.
The hut looked just as she’d left it in the spring: small and empty, shabby and welcoming. She had not permitted herself to worry that it would be occupied. The wood-pile looked untouched; or if someone had visited since she left, he or she had replaced anything that was burned. The roof was still a firm straight line, and the window was still closely shuttered. No smoke drifted out of the chimney. She would not have known what to do if someone had been there; she was almost dizzy, now, with the intensity of the invisible beacon which had brought her here.
She fought her way through a snowdrift up onto the narrow porch and lifted the latch; the door opened, and seven dogs and one human being, plus a great deal of snow, fell indoors.
There was barely enough floor space for all the dogs to lie down; even so there was a good bit of overlap, heads on others’ flanks, tangles of eight and sometimes twelve long skinny legs; the entire room looked, Lissar thought, like a large version of the puppy-box that they’d used to carry the puppies outdoors when they were still quite small; she remembered how Ossin … she stopped the thought.
By the time she had gone out to haul extra wood indoors the dogs had spread out so seamlessly that she had to dig under a dog with every step (frequently to the sound of aggrieved moans) to find a place to put her foot. Most were snoring by the time she got the fire lit; several of them could not even be awakened to get their packs pulled off, and she had to wrestle with the straps, lifting up bits of limp dog, to pull them free. There was this to be said of a dog covered floor, came the thought in the back of Lissar’s mind: she could not see the dark ugly stain on the floor near the door. She piled the bundles any way on the table, climbed back through the welter of bodies, and up onto the bed, which a still-wakeful Ash had been protecting from all marauders. Lissar stayed awake just long enough to hear Ash breathe a sigh as long as a winter storm-wind, and to feel the dog’s head drop into the valley between her ribs and pelvis.
She woke up at last because there seemed to be something preventing her from breathing. There were now four dogs on the bed, and one of them was lying across her face. She pushed the hairy body aside, recognized that it was Fen, and observed that it was morning. And, sleepily looking around the familiar room, she finally noticed the one change: her note of thanks was gone from the table.
The first weeks were simple if strenuous. She had no time to think, and wanted none; her days were full of fire-tending, and of hunting and cooking food. They had brought much food with them, but seven dogs eat an enormous amount, especially short-haired dogs in winter weather. What time was left was spent in grooming them, checking for hidden splinters in the foot-pads, possible sores in tender places; and relearning how to bathe herself out of a bucket. She did allow herself a moment or two to regret the bathhouse; generally she kept careful watch against any thought of Goldhouse’s country, city, or son.
The winter before there had been only the two of them, she and Ash; the occasional rabbit or ootag sufficed, even if both Lissar’s and Ash’s ribs had showed through their skin by spring. Fleethounds were not meant to hunt in deep winter; they floundered and shivered in the snow, and their feet were cut painfully by ice crystals, and they could not range far from the hut. None of the puppies showed any inclination to grow a heavy, curly coat like Ash’s; and Ash and Lissar could not hunt for them all alone. Lissar sometimes left the puppies in the hut and went out on snow-shoes; but her average was not as good as Ash’s, and she worried about her expenditure of energy against the amount of food she managed to bring home. There were fewer cattails this year, and even the marshiest places were frozen solid.
Ash disappeared occasionally—as she had done the winter before, although that recollection made Lissar worry no less—for several hours at a time, simply not being there when Lissar led her half-frozen charges back again to the fireside. Ash never failed to bring something home from one of her expeditions; but even the fattest ootag, rendered thriftily into soup, would feed them all but once, and that leanly; and as the winter wore on, the ootags grew thinner too. The snow had grown so deep and the weather so bitter that Lissar feared that they would not reach the lowlands before they perished of the cold if they left the hut and risked it; and she wondered that she had been so determined to come here, wondered at the call, which had always brought her to finding something lost, that had brought her here. Had the call drowned out the sense that should have told her how better to prepare? Should she have assumed that this winter would be that much harder than last? On what grounds should she have made such a guess? Why had the call come at all?
She tried to comfort herself by thinking that she did not know how fierce the winter was in the farmlands; that it had begun easily meant nothing. Vaguely she remembered stories of being snowed in, mending harness, stitching elaborate pillows or wedding-dresses, whittling new pegs or pins or toys for children or grandchildren, going outdoors only long enough to feed the beasts. Were those stories of ordinary winter, or of extraordinary storms? She did not know. Nor, if she did climb down the mountains again, did she know where she might go; she could not spend all winter in anyone’s barn. She could not think of returning to the yellow city … and there her brain stalled, and threw her back once again to thinking of how to feed her own beasts on this mountaintop.
Some days the wind howled and the snow blew so that it was a struggle to go outdoors even long enough for necessary purposes. Lissar did not remember that there had been many days like that the winter before; nor had the snow against the wall of the hut facing the prevailing wind reached the eaves, as it had this year, and drifted over the roof till it melted in the warm circle the chimney made.
One afternoon when they had returned from a long, cold, fruitless hunt, and were all shoving at each other to get nearest the fire (there was a slight odor of singed hair), Ash suddenly left the rest of them and went to stand by the door. Several of the others turned to watch her, as they automatically watched their leader. Ob and Harefoot caught it, whatever it was; and then the rest of them did, and quickly there were seven dogs standing tensely facing the door.
There was no window in that wall, and neither Lissar’s hearing nor smell was sensitive enough to pick up what the dogs were responding to. Ash rose to her hind legs and placed her forepaws, in perfect silence, against the door. The long slow exhalation of her breath carried with it the tiniest of whines; so faint was it that Lissar only knew it was there because she knew Ash. She made her way through the throng and set her hand on the latch. Ash composedly lifted her paws away from the door, balancing a moment on her hind feet as if going on two legs were as natural for her as it was for Lissar; and then she dropped to all fours again.
Lissar would have closed the door again if she could, but Ash was off at once, streaking through the gap before the door was fully open. “No!” Lissar cried; but Ash, always obedient, this time did not listen to her; silent but for the crisp sharp sound of her paws breaking through the snow between her great bounds, she ran for the enormous beast standing on the far side of the clearing the hut stood at the opposite edge of.
The puppies, alarmed and confused by Lissar’s cry and Ash’s extraordinary disobedience, and perhaps by the size of their would-be prey, hesitated, while Lissar, hardly knowing what she did, groped for the bag of throwing-stones that hung just inside the threshold, and then laid her hand as well on a long ash cudgel. Then she started across the clearing herself, gracelessly crashing through the snow, listening to her own sobbing breath.
The old buck toro that paused at the edge of the trees and turned to face the dog that charged him, ears back and teeth exposed in a snarl, was as tall at the shoulder as Lissar stood; his antlers spread farther than the branches of a well-grown tree. He had not attained his considerable age by accident, and he did not turn and run when he saw Ash, nor even when he saw Lissar and six more tall dogs break after her. He turned instead toward the most immediate threat, lowered his head a little, and waited.
But Ash was no fool either, and had all the respect possible for the points of the great toro’s horns. She sheered off at the last moment, dashing in for a glancing nip at the shoulder, and darting away again. Lissar gave some terrified recognition to the dangerous beauty of her fleethound even in snow to her shoulders.
It may yet be all right, she thought, floundering through the same snow. He will lumber off among the trees where we cannot possibly come at him: “Ash, it is not worth it!” she said aloud, but she had not enough breath to shout; we will all be very hungry by spring, but we are not starving yet, I will spend all my days on my snow-shoes after this, there will be enough rabbits—“Ash!” she said again.
But Ash merely ran round the toro, keeping him occupied, giving him no chance to retreat among the trees. She swept in once more, bit him on the flank; the hoof lashed out, but missed; a thin trickle of blood made its way through the thick hair.
This was not a proper hunt. A pack of fleethounds ran down their prey; at speed they made their killing leaps, and the prey’s speed was used against it. A cornered beast was always dangerous, and in such situations the hunting-party or -master was expected to put an arrow or a spear where it would do the most good—and save the dogs.
Ash made her third leap, flashing past the antlers’ guard and seizing the toro’s nose. It was beautifully done; but the toro was standing still, braced, his feet spread against just such an eventuality; and he was very strong.
He roared with the pain in his nose, but he also snapped his neck up and back, barely staggering under the weight of the big dog. Ash hung on; but while she managed to twist aside as he tried to fling her up and over onto his sharp horns, as the force of his swing and her writhe aside brought her through the arc and back toward the earth again, he shifted his weight and struck out with one front foot.
It raked her down one side and across her belly; and the bright blood flowed. This was no mere trickle, as on the toro’s flank, but a great hot gush.
“Ash!” Lissar said again, but this time it was a groan. It had still been bare moments since Lissar had opened the door of the hut and Ash had bolted out; Lissar had not quite crossed the clearing, though she could smell the heavy rank odor of the toro—and now the sharp tang of fresh blood. Ash’s blood.