by Mark J Rose
Matt looked up at the man hovering over him and whispered through his teeth, “You hurt my horse, you’re dead. I swear—” The man kicked him hard in the side. Matt’s breath left him again and he had to focus on filling his lungs with air.
“We should kill you,” the man said.
Matt heard Thunder whinny and snort. There was struggling again, then another high-pitched whine and more snorting.
“Saddlebags are full,” one man said.
“We split it when we get back to camp,” was the reply.
My money! Matt thought briefly of how David Taylor, Grace’s uncle, had tried to convince him that his success shouldn’t depend on the money in his bag. Lying on the ground, unable to move, Matt laughed aloud. David’s experiment was about to become reality.
“What’re you laughing at?” the man said, looking down at Matt.
“This animal won’t shut up,” another whispered loudly. “Them Quakers gonna hear this racket.” The horse responded by rearing on his hind feet and screaming.
“Hold him,” Deep Voice said. “How hard can it be?”
“This horse is off the hooks,” another said.
“We quit the road,” Deep Voice instructed, “and circle ’round them Quakers.” He looked down at Matt. “Dump him over the side. Fall will kill ’im and look like an accident.” Deep Voice gave a clever smile to his partners and said, “We kin divide the swag first chance we git.” Matt tried to sit up, but Deep Voice kicked him again. “You think you’re gettin’ up?” he taunted. Matt became aware of the two other men moving close and then felt them grab him. He struggled as they pulled him to the side of the road. One punched him, and immobilizing pain shot through his head again.
“Levi Payne says good day,” Deep Voice whispered in his ear. “He don’t take kindly to people interfering with his trade. You hear?”
Levi Payne?
“I said, you hear?” He smacked Matt’s face.
“I hear,” Matt gasped.
**********
Matt was in free fall as they threw him over the cliff. The drop should have killed him, but he landed in a thick clump of trees that had been growing unseen from the road. The vegetation broke his fall, supporting him briefly, and then he tumbled like a rag doll down onto the riverbed, hidden from the road.
5
Scout, Part I
Scout had watched people come and go on the farm ever since he was a puppy. He’d grown used to the strange men who would gather from time to time, and it became a game to dodge them as they went about their activities. He’d growl when they came too close, even at the ones he knew weren’t a danger. The Taylors were his pack, and the strangers had to learn quickly that it was unacceptable to threaten the pack.
As he watched them carry the young man into the barn, the place where he slept every night, Scout immediately sensed that something was different. The man didn’t smell like anything Scout could recognize. It was as if he didn’t belong to anyone’s pack, anywhere. The young man had no recognizable scent, and the only way Scout could tell he was a man was by seeing him with his eyes. The young man was almost transparent, like he’d appeared from a stream of water or from nowhere at all.
They’d treated him differently right from the start, and Scout knew that it must be because they couldn’t tell from his scent whether he was good or bad. Unlike other strangers on the farm, the Taylors accepted the young man almost immediately, especially Grace, the young woman. Scout had watched her, too, since he was a puppy. She spent almost all of her time with the horses, undistracted by the men they brought to the farm to be her mate. Those men had smelled of desire and fear.
When this new young man arrived, Grace acted differently, stopping often to watch him as he walked about the farm. When she talked to the young man, Scout could hear the strain in her voice. It was like the voice she used when she chased him out of the barn, but different in some way the dog didn’t understand. It was confusing when Grace spoke to the young man. Her voice sounded angry, but she didn’t smell angry. She smelled like when she spent time with her favorite horse, the speckled one she curried and brushed every day. She smelled of hunger and attraction when she was around the young man. He smelled of nothing that the dog could recognize. The man’s scent was colored grey.
Scout’s sensitive nose allowed him to swim in the smells that surrounded him, and they gave him a more complex picture of his environment than could ever be obtained by sight. As a puppy, he knew every one of the animals and humans on the farm by scent. As he got older, he learned to build a detailed picture of their movements and moods by the multilayered smells that intermingled through the barns and fields. His nose told him when they were scared, or angry, or when they were sick. When someone cut himself on a fence or a stone, he knew exactly where the blood flowed. This young man was a mystery, though, because nothing about his scent was familiar. His was like clear paint on the vast canvas of brilliant, colorful smells that made up Scout’s universe.
Why had they accepted him, then? Were they as confused as he about how to treat this stranger? Scout had growled at him those first days on the farm, like a child scared of the shadows the moon created. He didn’t know how to treat a shadow that looked like a man. But, as the young man spent more time with the family, Scout began to recognize his scent, and then he didn’t seem so strange. The young man named Matthew was becoming part of the pack and they began to feel safe around him—except the young woman, who still had smells of stress and arousal. Scout wasn’t surprised when they paired off as mates.
Scout stood next to Grace on the day that Matthew left on Thunder. He was struck by the saltiness of the tears in Grace’s eyes and could smell her sadness. This confused him, because tears in Grace’s eyes usually came when she smelled of anger. Scout thought nothing of it when Matthew and Thunder rode away. Members of his pack often came and went, and this was no different. Scout had been a puppy the spring Thunder was born and they’d played almost every day since then. The dog stood by Grace when Matthew left. She didn’t shoo him away as was her habit, so the dog followed his instinct to comfort her until they returned.
Scout had expected them to come back before dark, as they always did when they left early in the morning, but they hadn’t. The dog slept in the barn himself that night, waking often to listen for the young man. At sunrise, Scout squeezed through the small opening in the barn door and sat facing the road, watching, but Matthew and Thunder still didn’t return. He waited there each day looking out into the horizon.
Grace would come out in the morning as Scout sat in the road. She would pet him and speak softly, as Matthew had often done. Scout could still feel the grief in her as they both looked into the distance. The dog was overjoyed on the day that Grace called to him to go riding. They repeated this ritual over the week and the dog began to look forward to their rides. He ran alongside her just like when he, Matthew, and Thunder had chased her across the Richmond countryside. Still, though, Scout checked Thunder’s stall every morning and the hay barn every night and their emptiness would make him feel sad and alone.
One night he noticed that he could barely smell Matthew in the barn. He walked to the stall and he could only just smell Thunder, who had once been one of the brightest colors on the canvas of his world. Barely any evidence of their existence on the farm remained. He went out that next morning and sat waiting and watching the horizon, like the days before. Then it occurred to him that they were vanishing, and that if they waited any longer, there would be no scent for them to follow to find their way home.
Grace stood on the porch watching Scout that morning. He turned to her once, then decided to run. He’d find Matthew and Thunder and bring them home. He stood up and started down the road, glancing back only once to see her on the porch. She watched with crossed arms until turning to her father, who had come out to join her.
“The dog’s gone,” she said, nodding to a dust cloud in the horizon.
“He’ll be back,” her
father replied. “He’s chasing an animal or something.”
“No,” she said. “He’s been waiting there every morning for Matthew and Thunder to return. He’s gone to find them.”
“I’ve seen him sitting there,” he replied. “That doesn’t mean he left to find them.”
“He went to do just that,” she said. Her voice was without emotion, and her father remained quiet. He too had watched the dog every morning, wondering if he might leave.
“I pray he’ll be fine,” her father said simply.
“Me too,” she replied.
“What is it about that young man?” he asked, staring at the tiny dust cloud. He wasn’t looking for an answer. “Sometimes I think we would’ve been better to have left him under the bridge.” He smiled softly, looking at her and wondering her reaction.
“Me too,” she replied, though not as convincingly. “You didn’t, and now I pray he returns with his horse and his dog.” Her father remained silent. The situation was too complicated for him to pray for anything except guidance and that his daughter would be safe and happy at the end of all that he’d started by lifting the stranger into his wagon.
6
Rum Quidds
“Told you he’d be quiet,” the shorter one, Ephraim, said. “You woulda kilt him. He’s mine. I’ll get a fine price.” He had tied Thunder to a tree with a rope next to their other horses some distance from where they set up camp. Now that they were no longer near, Thunder had stopped straining against the rope. They could see him stooping down regularly to graze on the grass and leaves that surrounded the trunk of the tree.
“We split everything three ways, even the horse,” said the man with the deep voice. They called him Samuel, and sometimes Sam.
“You woulda kilt him,” Ephraim repeated. “Not me, though, I knew.”
The taller one, Myles, spoke up. He towered over the others by almost a foot. “It doesn’t matter, Eph,” he explained. “We all helped. It’s always been three ways.”
Ephraim was silent for a while and then said, “Well…fine.”
“Three ways,” Samuel repeated in his deep voice. “That’s how we always do it. Plenty for everyone.” They looked down at the saddlebag and the tricorner hat lying at their feet. Samuel reached from his seat on the log and pulled the saddlebag into his lap. “Bag’s heavy.”
“Three ways,” Ephraim emphasized. There was indignation in his voice, and it was evident that he was still bothered by having to share the horse. They were used to Ephraim’s tantrums, so ignored him. Samuel unbuckled both sides of the saddlebag as the other two looked on in anticipation. He pulled out the first item.
“Three ways for sure with this one,” Samuel exclaimed. He held up the silver flask. The others cheered as he opened it and took a drink.
“Pass that ’round,” Myles commanded. “Startin’ our celebration early.” He grabbed the flask and took a long swig as his companions watched, then howled like a wolf. “Oh, that there’s good!”
“Three ways,” Ephraim repeated. He reached out for the bottle and took a drink, coughed, and handed it back to Samuel. Each had another pass before Samuel looked again into the saddlebag. The others drank again as he began to pull out the items and set them on the ground. They giggled like children as each item joined the pile. “Them’s some queer stampers,” Ephraim said, looking at Matt’s hiking boots. He took another swig and passed the whiskey to the tall man.
Ephraim and Myles smirked at each other as they watched Sam unpack. Only the two of them now shared the bottle, and each made sure to drink as much as he could every time it passed. Samuel finally looked up, realized his partners were drinking without him, and reached out his hand. “You drank it all, you bastards!”
Ephraim and Myles beamed, then turned serious as they looked back at their partner sitting on the stump. Much of the clothing and gear from the saddlebag was now on the ground. “Aw, hell,” Myles exclaimed, “you can take more for your share cuz’a the bottle.”
“Damn right,” Samuel said in his deep voice. He took a long last swig of the whiskey to finish it off. “What we got here?” he said as he pulled out a small package wrapped in cloth and bound in twine. “’Tis heavy.”
“Statue, maybe,” Ephraim declared, “or figurine.” He was already slurring.
“What the hell’s a figurine?” Myles asked.
“You know, like a small statue,” Ephraim explained.
Samuel eased the cloth away. To everyone’s astonishment, fifteen gold coins dropped onto the ground. “We got the prize, boys! Fifteen joes!”
“Rum quidds, that is,” Ephraim slurred happily. He smacked his tall partner on the back.
“Gimme here,” Myles said. “I want my five now before they go.”
“I want my five and them stampers,” Ephraim said, pointing to Matt’s boots.
“Hold on,” Samuel instructed. “There’s more.” He looked inside the bag for a moment and then unloaded the rest of the gear on the ground. For emphasis, he shook the saddlebag upside down.
“Any more gold?” Ephraim asked.
Samuel sorted through the items. “No more packages.” There was folded clothing, another leather bag, white bottles with labels that had been removed, a small transparent box containing oblong figures stacked in a row, a mess kit, and a few other miscellaneous items that didn’t look the least bit interesting to any of them.
“That rascal probably had more gold,” Ephraim said. “We should’ve checked his pockets.”
“Them Quakers was almost on us!” Myles exclaimed. He was also now slurring from the whiskey. “We quit the road just in time.”
“We should go back and check,” Ephraim said.
“Too far,” Samuel replied. “I say we go to town, sell the horse, and celebrate!”
“I’m all for that,” Myles declared. “I want the eating kit, the hat, and my gold. None of them clothes will fit.” He grabbed the items and scooped up five gold coins from the dirt.
Ephraim reached down and picked up the boots and the shoes, some of the clothing, and his five coins. “Having one of them high-borns tonight,” he declared.
“We even, then?” Samuel asked. Clothing, bottles, and other items remained on the ground. His partners were distracted with what they’d already taken, and both nodded that he could have what remained. Samuel swept the small items, mostly uninspected, back into the saddlebag. He stuffed the folded clothing in there too and then checked that he had covered the second cloth-wrapped package at the bottom. He had used his hand to keep it in the saddlebag as he pretended to empty its contents on the ground. From the weight, he was sure the package contained more coins. Samuel smiled, thinking of how easy it had been to fool his partners, and he brimmed with excitement over spending the next few days in Wilmington. He’d eat, drink, gamble, and find himself a strumpet to warm his bed.
Samuel buckled the saddlebag, stood, and said, “Let’s go, boys. They’re waitin’ for us in town.” He looked toward the horses and set off for the clearing. Myles and Ephraim followed him in a fit of laughter. They were drunk and had nothing on their minds except anticipation of the next few days.
“He’s gone!” Samuel exclaimed. His partners stopped laughing as they looked around for the horse. When they got to the trees, Ephraim reached down for the rope that had held Thunder. It was chewed through. He looked around, but the horse was nowhere in sight.
“Can we find ’im?” Ephraim asked.
“Nah,” Samuel said. “Could be anywhere.” Samuel knew they could track the horse, but he was eager to go into town, find a room, and check the contents of the second package. “Let’s forget ’im and go have some fun.”
“I’m all for that,” Myles repeated. “We were gonna shoot him anyway.”
“I reckon,” Ephraim said reluctantly. He looked down at the coins in his hand and suddenly cared very little about searching for the horse. “There’s a high-born waitin’ for me in Wilmington. Got my name on her bosom.”
7
Thunder
The horse knew there was danger ahead as soon as they passed the wagons. He was genetically programmed to recognize the essence of a predator. He couldn’t understand why Matt kept pulling him forward on the edge of the mountain. The sounds and scent that rode on the wind told Thunder there was harm ahead. It was something the horse had sensed a hundred times before from the mountain lions, wolves, and coyotes that lingered around the farm. He’d been helplessly confined in his corral as predators circled, and he was always relieved when the dog arrived to force them back into the trees.
Thunder thought about Scout, who could smell a predator better than a horse and had always protected the farm from marauders. The dog was also better at communicating with humans. If Scout were here, he’d have barked and growled to warn Matt. Thunder had tried his best, but the young man hadn’t listened. He didn’t understand a horse kicking and snorting like he understood a dog’s barking.
The predators hadn’t taken him far enough away to forget where they threw Matt over the cliff. Thunder looked back at where they were before the predators tied him to a tree. It hadn’t been hard to chew through their rope. Now that he was safe, Thunder put his nose into the wind and smelled where they’d already been. He’d find Matt and bring him home to his herd. Thunder forced his nose higher as he trotted along the road, then looked around, trying to remember if he had passed this way.
It was hard to recognize the scents as the wind blew stronger, and at one point Thunder lost his way entirely. He stopped, grazed on tall grass, drank from a cold spring, and nearly forgot about Matt. But another air current brought a hint of recognition and he was reminded of where he should go. Even the sounds of his hooves hitting the road were familiar, and so his excitement increased. This was the place where they passed the wagons and then where the road overlooked the river. It was where he’d first known there were predators waiting. The predators of men are other men.