The trouble was that every particular stretch of the world had its own way of killing you, and the countermeasures were usually highly specific too. What worked in the Kickapoo country wouldn’t always work in the north woods, and neither set of skills would map right onto the shortgrass plains of the Dakotas. He guessed that went double for mountains . . . which, to date, he’d mostly traveled in the summertime.
“OK, it looks like our luck has run out,” he said, jerking a thumb upward.
Rudi and Edain looked up, took deep breaths to taste the weather, looked at the snow, blinking as flakes drove into their faces.
“You could be saying that,” Rudi said with a wry smile, and the other Mackenzie added:
“Just a wee bit.”
Rudi went on: “I’d say we’re in for a really bad one—last of the season, perhaps, but bad. By tomorrow morn ing it could be twelve feet deep. Good day to stay home drinking mulled cider and roasting nuts by the fire and telling stories.”
Ingolf joined in the laugh. They were experienced woods runners and hunters, after all. Just not in as many environments as he’d seen. Rudi wrapped his knit scarf around his face, leaving only the eyes uncovered.
“And cold enough to freeze off your wedding tackle,” Ingolf said. At Edain’s grin: “I’m not joking, kid. I’ve seen it happen.”
The young man looked stricken and visibly refrained from a reassuring clutch at himself. Rudi thumped him on the back.
“And are you glad you switched to trousers the now, eh?” he said.
Edain shuddered and nodded. They were all in thick wool pants over long johns and fleece-lined boots of oiled leather, with bulky sheepskin coats worn hair side in and knitted caps and good gloves; that and the heavy packs made them look like fat white snowmen in the growing blizzard. They had their cased bows and quivers over their backs as well, and the two clansmen wore their plaids and carried six foot quarterstaves of ashwood with iron butt caps. The warm clothes weren’t perfect protection against freezing to death, particularly if they got wet. And they would, if they kept walking too long, or they’d simply get buried, if the snow could come as deep as the other two said.
“OK, let’s keep an eye peeled for someplace to fort up,” Ingolf said; louder now, to override the soughing of the storm. “You guys have been up here in summertime, right?”
“That we have,” Rudi said, and Edain nodded vigorously. “In the general area, as it were.”
An hour later Ingolf was starting to get really wor ried. The wind was slashing at them like a Sioux raiding party off the high plains, coming from any direction or none without any warning; and it carried enough snow to feel as if someone were socking you with a snowball every half second or so. He could barely see ten yards, and that only when a gust cleared the way, and the snow was up past his knees. That meant even with the pants bloused out and tucked into the boots snow was working its way inside, then melting and running down into his socks; the burning in his calves and thighs was bad enough to distract him from the feet.
Ingolf thought Rudi was looking a little worried too—it was hard to tell when all you could see of a man was snow-covered eyebrows, what with the cap above and the scarf wrapped around his face below. And of course Rudi wouldn’t show it. The best way to keep fear under control was simply to refuse to acknowledge it; not to others, and not to yourself if you could help it.
He scraped the wet clinging stuff off his face with one glove and peered ahead. “I think that overhang ahead is our best bet,” he said, pointing. “Unless you know about a real cave around here?”
“No, I don’t,” Rudi said. He hesitated, then nodded. “Better than nothing.”
The snow was starting to sting when it hit exposed skin, ice crystals hard and sharp in the colder air. They fought through a gust like a punch in the stomach and into the shelter of the overhang, where the rock of the mountainside showed bare and leaned a little over the trail. It wasn’t a cave by any means, but it did slope in six feet back from the trail proper, with a floor that was nearly horizontal. From the way dirt and needles had mounded up there it didn’t flood. Ingolf looked around as best he could.
“We need some saplings!” he shouted into the others’ faces. “These firs are too big!”
Edain was lost in a stolid misery, ready to keep going until he dropped but more likely to do that and die than think; Garbh nuzzled at him, whining. The elder Mac kenzie shook Edain until some semblance of humanity returned to the gray eyes.
Then Rudi shouted back to Ingolf: “I think there’s an old burn just down from here!”
They all threw their packs down in the back of the overhang, where the snow was thinnest, laid their swords over them, then took off the coils of rope tied to the out side of the horsehide haversacks. Those had metal clips swagged onto their ends, and snapped together.
“Work as if your life depended on it,” Ingolf said. “Because it fucking does!”
Rudi turned out to have some old-time metal tent pegs in his pack. Ingolf beat two of them into a crack in the rock with the back of his tomahawk.
“You’ve got to be ready to haul up!” Rudi yelled at Edain. “Are you ready, clansman?”
Edain whacked himself on both cheeks with the palm of his glove. “That I am, Chief!” he shouted back through the white noise of the wind.
The rope went through the notches in the steel pegs; Edain took a hitch across his back and wrapped it around his left arm, paying out with his right. That way he could walk backward against the weight when he was hauling in. The two older men went down the rope swiftly, using it more to steady themselves than to bear their weight, through a screen of snow-heavy bush and into a patch of tall thin Douglas fir saplings, wrist-thick and fifteen feet long. He couldn’t tell how big it was, not with the snow swirling thick about them, but it was more than enough.
“Perfect!” Ingolf said. “Get ’em!”
They both had hatchets—his own was his tomahawk. He cut a sapling off at knee height with two strokes, fore hand and backhand, and pushed it over; it caught on half a dozen uncut ones as it started to slither downslope. The next time the round handle turned against the slippery surface of his glove; he wrenched himself aside, and it was the flat that bounced against his boot rather than the cutting edge . . . enough to hurt, but he broke a cold sweat at the thought of what a wound would mean here and now.
By the time they’d sent four bundles of saplings up to Edain, Ingolf was afraid that everything would blow away anyway. He and Rudi climbed back up to the trail to find that the younger Mackenzie had already started stacking the saplings in a half-moon, their butts braced with rock and the tops trimmed and jammed against the stone, each woven to the next with their branches. The other two men pitched in; by the time the little shelter was complete snow had already covered its sloping sides six inches deep.
When they crawled inside and pulled the small door of branches to behind them the—relative—quiet was more stunning than the noise outside had been. They all lay panting in the dense dark while their ears recovered enough to hear the muted wail outside. Cold got Ingolf moving again; it was actually better in here, and improving as the body heat of three men and a dog warmed the still air, but not what you’d call comfortable . . . and between sweat and melted snow, he was wet at the skin.
Snick.
The flame of his lighter showed the rock of the over hang and the semicircle of trail the sapling shelter cov ered. When he began scraping a circle clear and piling tinder—of which they had plenty, since the ground was covered with fir branches—Rudi and Edain looked at him in alarm.
“You can’t light a fire here, Ingolf,” Rudi said. “We’ll smother—the snow’s making this as airtight as a kitchen bread box. Our body heat will keep us from freezing.”
Ingolf grinned as he stripped off his gloves. It felt good to be able to smile without ice crackling from his face.
“Watch and learn, children,” he said.
He’d brought in a
fair amount of bark, as well as deadwood; the bark was from some fortunate mountain larch trees, thick and furrowed and fairly fire-resistant. He tied sections into a rough hollow square tube, reinforced it with sticks, and thrust the completed article up along a crack in the rock at the edge, through the sloped saplings and the snow on top of them. More of it made a smoke hood beneath the improvised chimney, and then he got a small fire going on the floor. Flickering reddish light opened out the little chamber they’d made, seeming to push back the noise of the storm a bit. The men stripped off their outer garments and hung them from the saplings, making added insulation and an opportunity for them to dry as well.
“Well, we’re not the first here,” Edain said grimly, as he spread the boughs across one corner of the overhang.
What had seemed like another brown rock was in fact a skull. The bone was clean and dry, long since picked bare by insects and decay; the gold in the teeth gleamed in the firelight.
Ingolf nodded. Edain reburied the remains, and Rudi made a sign over it and murmured a few words he didn’t catch. None of them were much put out; you still found the like pretty well everywhere except places where people had lived since the Change to clean things up. A lot of people had died that year, and skulls lasted.
The fire cast a grateful warmth. The little shelter would have been habitable without it, given the depth of snow piling up outside to insulate it. But it certainly helped to have their own temporary hearth.
“This is a good trick,” Rudi said, grinning at Ingolf. “Home away from home.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go quite as far as to call it homelike, if you take my meaning, Chief,” Edain said. “I’ll remem ber the way of it though, if I’m ever caught out like this again.”
“I learned it from an old Anishinabe named Pete—Pierre, actually—Pierre Walks Quiet. He worked for my father,” Ingolf said. “Wandered in from the north woods a couple of years after the Change and ended up boss ing the Readstown forests for us—timber runner, look ing after the game, stuff like that. He helped teach me woodcraft when he took me and my brothers on hunt ing trips . . . and scared the bejesus out of us with stories about the Windigo. We get a lot of snow, and we get it every damned year.”
Rudi stretched and yawned. The sun was probably barely down outside, but they were all ready for rest.
“I’m part Anishinabe myself,” he said. “One-eighth. My father’s mother’s mother was Ojibwa. My blood father came from your part of the world—farther north and east a bit, if I remember the old maps.”
Ingolf nodded. You wouldn’t have thought it from the way the young man looked, except maybe the high set of his cheekbones and the slightly tilted eyes.
“And I’m a member in good standing of the tribe called hungry,” Edain said.
He mixed meal from a bag in his pack with melted snow and set the dough on a thin metal plate over the fire that he greased with a pat of butter. It rose and browned, filling the shelter with a mouthwatering smell that was not quite like baking bread but close enough; Ingolf felt his hunger return as warmth and the scent reminded him of just how much effort his body had put out today. The meal was premixed with baking soda and a little salt, a Mackenzie trick he admired; it gave you something a lot better than the usual travelers’ ash cake.
The rest of their supper was the last of the pork chops and trail food; after today they’d be down to leathery, salty smoked sausage for meat to go with the hard cheese and dried fruit. Oatmeal and some of the fruit went into a pot of water, to cook overnight in the ashes and be ready for breakfast.
“When you’re hungry enough, this all tastes good,” Rudi said.
“When you’re hungry enough, your bootlaces taste good,” Ingolf said tolerantly. “Hope we don’t come to that on this trip.”
Though we probably will, sooner or later, he thought, and went on aloud: “Now for another trick.”
He’d collected the saplings he needed along with the firewood, and he had plenty of leather thongs in his pack; a few minutes’ work gave him two teardrop-shaped snowshoes, a little crude but usable. The Mackenzies watched carefully as the shavings peeled away from the wood beneath his knife and he tied the ends together and knotted the webwork across. The only tricky part was the square opening in the middle and the loop to catch the toe of a boot.
“I’ve heard of those, but I’ve never actually used them,” Rudi said, turning one over in his hands. “Skis yes, sometimes, snowshoes no. Not much call for them down in the valley.”
“There’s nothing like them for deep snow in the woods,” Ingolf said. “Especially when you don’t know the ground; you’ve got better control than you do on skis, even if it’s slower. Your turn.”
He watched closely, but the two younger men were both good with tools and used to handling wood and leather, and produced passable if not elegant results.
Then they played paper-stone scissors to see who’d take which night watch. Nothing was likely to hit them from the outside in weather like this unless it was a par ticularly mean bear, but someone had to keep the fire carefully, given the combination of open flame and the tinderbox materials of their shelter.
Then the two Mackenzies made their evening prayers; it made Ingolf feel a little self conscious about the way he’d gotten lax over the years, so he said a rosary. It would have made old Father Matthew smile, anyway.
“Wish we were over the mountains already, though,” Edain said, wrapping himself in his sleeping bag and stretching out on the crackling, sweet scented boughs. A smile: “Mom told me not to get my feet wet, you see.”
Garbh curled up against his stomach; now that it wasn’t so cold in here it smelled powerfully of wet dog, the wet leather of their boots and gear and the tallow that greased it, and the more pleasant scents of fir sap and the sputtering coals and the slowly cooking oat meal. Even the muted howling of the wind was comforting, with a full belly and a soft place to sleep.
“Wish we didn’t have to leave at all,” Rudi added. “Curse the Prophet and whatever it was you saw on Nantucket both, Ingolf. Nothing personal.”
“Not much point in cursing it, any more than the weather,” Ingolf said, twisting to find a comfortable position. “Mind you, times like this I wish I was settled down somewhere with a nice warm girl and a good farm, myself.”
“No, it doesn’t help . . . but cursing it makes me feel a little better,” Rudi said, flashing him a grin.
“I’d settle for the nice warm girl right now, meself,” Edain said. “Not that you two aren’t good compan ions for the trail, but you’re a mite hairy and smelly for perfection.”
“Bite your tongue,” Rudi said. “You might be camping out with my half sisters.”
“No offense, Chief, but . . .” Edain said, and shuddered theatrically.
“You two done much traveling together?” Ingolf asked. In other words, “Why did you pick this kid?”
“Just a wee bit, you might say,” Rudi said. “And he was with me up at Tillamook last year, when the Haida hit us.”
“So was Garbh,” Edain said, and thumped the dog’s ribs.
“Yeah, but she wasn’t so useful,” Rudi said. “Tell the man about it, Edain—we’re all going to be together a long time, and we need to know one another.”
“Chief—”
Modesty, Ingolf decided, listening to the protest in the tone. Who’d’a thunk it?
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Wasn’t that the fight where Saba’s husband got killed?”
“Sure and it was,” Rudi said. “He was on a trading trip; the Brannigans and their kin are all good at that. Myself and Edain and a few friends had been travel ing up north, seeing the sights, you might say, and went along with Raen and his wagons for the last bit when they headed to Tillamook. I know the baron there, and could introduce them. Then . . .”
Edain stayed silent. Rudi snorted. “You tell him or I will, boyo!”
“Everything was fine until we got to the coast,” Edain said at last, starting sl
owly, as if dragging things out of the well of memory that wanted to stay submerged. “This was . . . by the Wise Lord, more than a year ago now. Fall of the year before last. We were riding along and singing—”
* * * *
County Tillamook,
Portland Protective Association
Coastal Oregon
October 1, CY21/2019 A.D.
It was upon a Lammas night
When corn rigs are bonny
Beneath the Moon’s unclouded light
I lay awhile with Molly. . . .
The song died away, muffled in the clinging mist, and they rode on in silence; though usually you couldn’t get four young Mackenzie clansfolk to shut up, riding abroad for adventure and strange sights. The air was too thick, and the way it drank sound made the song forlorn.
I feel like a ghost, Edain Aylward Mackenzie thought, peering through the fog.
Then he shivered a little at the thought, spitting leftward to avert the omen and signing the Horns. Thick morning mist off the sea puffed and billowed about them, and moisture dripped from the boughs of the roadside trees. Drifts wandered over the graveled way; the fetlocks of the horses stirred it like a man’s breath in smoke. Slow wet wind soughed through the Coast Range firs behind him, louder than the sounds of the little caravan’s hooves and wheels; the Association baron and Rudi Mackenzie rode directly ahead.
“These clansfolk have come all the way from Sutter down to see about your cheeses and smoked salmon,” Rudi said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder towards the wagons. “Not to mention that attar of roses stuff you wrote about. If trade’s not below your notice, Juhel.”
“Men with wheatfields and vineyards in their demesne and Portland on their doorstep can afford to get picky about dérogeance,” the young baron growled. “What I’ve got is trees, grass, cows, potatoes and fish. God has given this land and these people into my charge—and now that I’m Anne’s guardian, the whole of goddamned County Tillamook’s on my plate till she’s come of age, not just Barony Netarts. It’s up to me to see to it the people prosper. I’m sick of courtiers making jokes about Tillamookers in wooden shoes.”