“I suppose so. An old mare said they were supposed to bring good luck.”
“Do you believe it?” Estrella asked.
“Not really. That’s just superstition.”
They continued on through the rough and broken country. The stallions, who rode as outriders, suddenly became alert, their ears twitching. The wind shifted and then the herd caught the scent. Meat eater! Big meat eater!
“Where is it?” nickered Estrella.
“I can’t see it yet,” Arriero answered. “Pack close!” Hold On, Grullo, and Bobtail took up defensive positions.
Some luck those sun ponies brought! Estrella thought.
“There it is!” Grullo whinnied. “And a mate!” The horses swung their heads.
Two immense catlike creatures were stalking down from the low bluffs. Their coats were unspotted, but otherwise they looked much like the Shadow Eater from the jungle.
Grullo and Bobtail pressed the southern flank of the herd, turning the horses and urging them to speed. The cats were the exact tawny color of the bluffs from which they had descended. They loped onto the flats at a leisurely pace and began to position themselves on either side of the herd.
They’re waiting for us to tire, Estrella thought. The male was big — bigger than the Shadow Eater. Estrella’s first instinct was to gallop, but she knew she had to slow her pace. The cats would wait until the horses had run themselves out and then they would split the herd and pick out the slowest or the most defenseless. It came to Estrella like a picture, a nightmare she had seen before. She whinnied the signal to slow.
“¿Lento?” Azul asked incredulously.
Hold On nipped her buttocks as a clear reprimand. Don’t question the boss mare. Estrella saw this from the corner of her eye and it shocked her. She was the boss mare. She knew she was leading the herd north, but she was still so young. She wouldn’t even be a full-fledged mare for a long time. Still, there was business to do. Boss, leader, jefe. The word didn’t matter. She must act.
The herd slowed from a flat-out gallop to an easy canter. Estrella noticed that the cat on Hold On’s side blinked and backed off a bit.
She whinnied, “What’s the other one doing, Grullo?”
“The female, she’s … uh, slowing, but she has her eye on Verdad.”
They continued on at a lope for several minutes. Estrella hoped the cats would get bored, but the big creatures stayed behind them. The male peeled off to find a better attack position, but the female stayed where she was.
Estrella whinnied to Arriero and Hold On. “Steady now! I’m turning the herd toward the cat. When I squeal, I want the stallions to break for her.”
Hold On nickered in surprise. “You want us to fight?”
“Exactly!”
Estrella pivoted and the herd turned, no longer running parallel to the female cat but heading straight at her. Estrella whinnied the high-pitched command and the four stallions tore out from the herd and reared, their hooves striking at the flawless blue sky.
The female cat shrieked in surprise. One of Arriero’s hooves struck the side of her head and she was stunned. Her mate flashed to her side.
This is bad! Estrella thought. Then, all at once, the four stallions wheeled around and leapt in place, making an enormous twisting monster in the air. The cats seemed to freeze at the spectacle.
The stalllions landed, and Arriero, the largest and most powerful, spun around and bucked. He caught the male with his hind hooves and flung him into the air. Blood spurted from the pale fur of the male’s belly. His mate squealed and bolted.
The stallions were breathing hard, their deep chests heaving from the adrenaline that charged through them. Estrella raced up to them, and the rest of the herd followed. They approached the cat cautiously.
He was obviously dying. His mouth pulled back in a grimace to reveal two long fangs that could have easily torn any horse apart. He was gasping and grunting, and to Estrella’s mind, he seemed to be saying, Who are you? What are you? It dawned on her that the cat had never seen their likes before. They were new creatures in a new world.
The cat’s breath stuttered and his flailing slowed. He was barely moving now, struggling for each breath. He was noble and brave. He had not hung back in the middle of battle, and he had sprung into danger to help his mate.
Estrella bent her head low toward the cat and whispered the answer to the question he seemed to be asking.
“We are horses. We are the first herd!”
The herd traveled on, rested, and then traveled once more. Estrella was spurred forward by the scent of the sweet grass and the image of the tiny horse. They had crossed so much territory now, and she didn’t know how much more was ahead of them. The thought was daunting. But there were no more encounters with big mountain cats. They did, however, come across other animals they’d never seen before and who had never seen them. They’d pause at a respectful distance to observe each new creature they encountered.
Soon they learned to follow the droppings of sheeplike animals with enormous horns, for their trail often led to good grazing. It wasn’t quite the sweet grass scent that lingered in Estrella’s mind, but it was good grazing nonetheless. Once as they were foraging, a storm of orange butterflies rose in the bright morning light.
Estrella gasped. “It’s them. They’re back!” She walked closer to a milkweed plant, where three butterflies were resting. She noticed minuscule white beads on the milkweed. Instinctively, she sensed that these had been made by the butterflies.
“These white dots — the butterflies did this, didn’t they?” she asked Hold On.
“I believe so,” Hold On replied. “I’ve seen this sort of little dot in the Old Land. They are laying their eggs, I believe.” He nodded at Estrella. “Smart filly you are!”
Estrella was pleased with the compliment. Hold On rarely praised. He was not an effusive animal. “Do you think I am, uh, how did you say it? Gaining meadow wis —”
Hold On’s ears pricked forward and he shuddered. Butterflies would not cause a shudder like that, Estrella knew.
“What is it?” she aked.
The wind had just shifted and soon a scent enveloped them that answered her question.
“Deer!” said Hold On.
“Where there are deer, there are often men.” He was trembling. “Men hunt deer.”
“But, Hold On,” said Angela, her dark eyes puzzled, “men don’t hunt horses!”
Hold On cut his head sharply toward the mare. “No, Angela, they capture us!”
The horses detected no smell of men, nor did they smell big cats or other hunters. Still, they were nervous as they came across the deer. There were only three of the creatures, and Estrella thought they were lovely. Small and delicate, they moved with an expressible grace and daintiness. They were curious, but hardly aggressive. And they were so quiet. The little one, smaller even than a newborn foal, was the most curious of all. He took a few tottering steps toward Sky and Verdad, who were grazing side by side, and nickered softly.
The herd was shocked. The older horses had seen deer in the Old Land, but these were different. They were slightly smaller and intensely curious. The deer had never seen a horse before, but when the fawn spoke, the horses understood. His tone wasn’t too different from how deer spoke in the Old Land. All cloven creatures spoke somewhat alike.
“Are you my brothers … my big brothers?” asked the little fawn.
The sound of the fawn’s voice was in a different range, more nasal than the speech of horses. “I — I don’t think so,” Sky replied.
“Your voice sounds funny!” said the fawn. “Is it because you’re so big?”
“So does yours!” Sky replied. “Is it because you’re so small?”
At this, the grown-up horses and the deer all made hiccuppy laughing sounds.
“Who are you? Big deer?” the fawn asked.
“We’re horses come from far away,” Verdad replied.
“We have never seen creatures s
o like ourselves, but then again not quite.” He tipped his head to one side as if he were contemplating the strangeness of it all.
Sky came closer, stretched out his neck, and blew softly. The little fawn stepped back and the doe laughed.
“We do the same when we encounter something new. What are you?” asked the doe.
“I’m a colt,” Sky said.
“A colt. Our young’uns are fawns,” the doe said.
“Are you a glass-eye like Sky?” Verdad asked, peering at the fawn’s milky blue eyes.
“No, I’m blind,” the fawn said. “But watch me! I can do everything any fawn can do!” He began prancing about, then bucked out his slender back legs. “And I can balance on my hind legs and hop a bit.” The fawn continued to dance around, showing off his steps. He was as light as the balls of fluff from the cottonwood trees. Estrella noticed that the deer’s hooves were split, which seemed to give them, or at least this little dancing fawn, amazing balance and agility.
“It’s why he’s so curious, I think,” the doe answered. “He wants to know everything he cannot see in this world. And he’s a fast learner.” She nuzzled him.
The stag with his towering rack of antlers dipped his head regally to Estrella. “We welcome you. You are not meat eaters but grazers. There is plenty of bunch grass, and then beyond, there is the sharp grass and the buffalo grass.” The stag went on for a bit about the various grasses.
“Is there one called the sweet grass?” Estrella asked.
“Sweet grass …” He cocked his head. “Yes, I believe I have heard of it, but it’s far to the north. A long distance from here. But this grass is very good. Perhaps not quite as tender as the buffalo grass or the blue grama grass —”
The fawn, however, had grown bored and he interrupted.
“Perhaps you are like the Once Upons!”
“The Once Upons?” Estrella asked.
The doe turned to Estrella. “I can’t explain the Once Upons. They are … a mystery. They were not deer or horses. They only had two legs, not four.”
Estrella felt a chill run through her. Was the doe speaking of men?
“They’re not here anymore?” Hold On asked nervously.
“No, not for a long, long time.”
“Where did they go?” asked Grullo.
“No one knows. That’s the mystery. They moved on, dissolved like dewdrops in the morning sun,” the doe replied.
“But they left their pictures,” the fawn said. He had grown quite excited and was almost dancing on his tiny hooves. “They did! I can’t see them, but my ma tells me about them. And the ones cut into the rock I can trace with my tongue.”
Estrella was not sure what exactly the fawn meant by “pictures,” but she imagined it might be like the star pictures her mother had told her about. Or perhaps they were like the carvings of the Virgin.
The horses grazed with the deer family for the long sunny hours of the morning. Estrella stayed close to the doe and the stag. She was learning things from them. They had a curious way of marking territory by rubbing their heads against trees. They also told the horses that the mountain cats were not the only meat eaters. There were wolves as well, not as large, but with very sharp teeth.
“Ah, wolves!” Hold On said. “Yes, they were a danger in the Old Land, too.”
“And then there are smaller ones. Very sly and with sharp teeth as well — coyotes.”
“¡Perros zorros!” Hold On exclaimed. “We had those. They raided the chicken houses.”
“Raspadores de hueso — bone scrapers! That’s what we called them,” Grullo said. “Cowardly brutes who’d come in after a larger animal made a kill, to pick out the eyes and any last flesh left on the bone.”
Estrella listened carefully and could not help but wonder if she were gathering meadow wisdom. Each day, each night, they discovered something different and new. To think that in the beginning of her life, she had been confined to the tight, shadowy space of the hold. It seemed unimaginable now. She looked up and saw the ghost of the moon riding in the noon sky. It was like a shadow of what had been and what might come.
The country was empty, but beautiful. In the morning, when the sun was still under the clouds, the world turned a fragile and luminous pink. It was a land that had been sculpted by wind. There was fallen timber on the ground, weathered and carved by wind so it looked swirled like water, like the eddies of a lively stream. The wind was a force that could change the very substance of things. The long silvery grass could suddenly become a roiling ocean. Clouds stretched into sharkish shapes and fled before sudden breezes. It was a land of many changes, quick changes.
Indeed, as the horses drove farther north, they learned the weather could shift in a matter of seconds.
On one day not long after they left the deer, the sky began to darken as the herd grazed in the early morning. Dusky clouds rolled up on the horizon and there was a bite to the air. The older horses became fidgety and flinched from their withers to their rumps. Although there were no flies around, they swished their tails nervously.
Estrella turned her head to look at Hold On. His normally soft brown eyes seemed to shudder with light.
“What is it?” Estrella asked.
“Weather,” Hold On replied.
“More rain?”
“Not just rain. Snow. The great whiteness.”
Estrella pricked her ears forward. “It came to your pasture once?”
“It smothered my newborn colt.”
Not drowned. But smothered. It was unimaginable to Estrella. Was the great whiteness like the shark? A huge sliding white shadow and then blood — lots of blood.
But when the snow came, it wasn’t like that at all. First, there was a coldness that seemed to stiffen the air around them. The sky thickened to a color that was neither white nor blue but a metallic gray that reminded Estrella of the bit and the chains that the grooms shoved into her mouth. A wind started to howl that drove the cold straight into them, robbing their bodies of warmth. And then came an engulfing whiteness. Soon, they were all shivering.
The older horses — Grullo, Hold On, Bobtail, Angela, Corazón, and especially Arriero, knew what to do. They huddled up in the lee of an immense boulder in a rough half circle, with their rumps to the wind. The blizzard roiled across the broken land toward them. Puffs of sagebrush hock-high were soon swallowed up by the snow, leaving only the faintest lumps to show where they grew.
When the storm struck, the horses had wandered into a sink basin, perhaps an ancient lake that had dried thousands of years before. Now the basin was filling up with snow. The herd huddled closer together. The older horses began to reminisce about the times the whiteness had come to the Old Land. Hold On alone remained silent.
“This is not so bad,” Corazón said. “I’ve been through worse, I think.”
“The storms on the ship were worse than this,” Angela added.
“Certainly!” Corazón replied emphatically. “I’d rather feel the weather and face it than be in that awful hold hearing the wind shriek and having the ship toss.”
“But you’re not facing it,” said Grullo. “Our rumps are facing it.”
“And you, Grullo,” said Angela, “have the biggest rump of all.”
They all snorted heartily at this. Their breath created a warm cloud of fog that hung over them. Despite the howls of the wind and the bitter blasting swirls of snow, there was something very snug and peaceful about the circle they formed.
The horses talked and told stories as the blizzard blew, long into the night. It was odd to Estrella that stories should bond them more than even the fight against the mountain cats. This, Estrella often thought much later, is when all ten of us truly became a herd.
When the blizzard finally ceased and the horses turned their heads back to the world, the landscape had been transformed. They looked out on a crystalline world of white. In some places, there were snowbanks as tall as they were. But as deep as the snow was, it was light as down. T
hey began to move out from the rimrock, and as they plowed forward, they sent up puffy explosions. Soon they were all frolicking, bucking and leaping, dipping their heads into snowy banks, then tossing up soft geysers of snow. The younger ones stuck out their tongues, enjoying the light tickles of the gently falling flakes. Sometimes they would munch up a mouthful, trying to figure out the exact taste of the fluffy whiteness.
“Look at this!” Sky exclaimed. The colt had lain down on his side, then carefully raised himself up again, leaving a nearly perfect impression of his body. Soon the others were trying the same thing. Estrella just tried resting her head on the side of a snowbank. When she backed away, there was a white silhouette of her profile with even the strands of her mane flowing as if she were running. But most fun of all was to run through the soft billowing undulations of the snowy masses. It was like a white sea — a sharkless sea.
If moving through water was called swimming, Estrella thought, what was cantering through snow called? She wondered sometimes why she had so many questions. Did horses in the Old Land question as much as she did? The land that opened before her also opened her mind in ways that continually surprised her. She thought about the deer family. Had they made it through the blizzard? Would they have turned their rumps to the wind? They were so fragile — would they be smothered like Hold On’s foal?
The blizzard had come down on the deer family with no warning. There were no looming dark clouds on the horizon. They were out in open country a fair distance from rock shelter when suddenly the world turned white with snow and lashing winds. The deer were so light, particularly the fawn, that it was impossible to make real headway against the wind. For a time they moved downwind. The snow began to pile up quickly and the fawn, though nimble, had a hard time keeping up. The fawn had been born in the early spring and had never known winter. This was a late-spring storm, often the most severe type of storm in this part of the country. Although his parents found the impenetrable whiteness daunting, for the blind fawn, it was not that different from his normal world, except for the cold and the wind.
The Escape Page 10