The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

  The first one pulled his bike up beside her and stayed there. She felt all Shane’s muscles harden under her, but the horse kept walking.

  “Hey, girlie! Where’dja learn to ride?”

  There were yips from the other bikers to show that this was meant as mockery. The man had placed a leering slur on “ride.” Bobbi looked down at her questioner with distaste, seeing the things he wore to mark what he wanted to be: boots, leather vest, earrings, tattoos, dirty hair stringing back from his unhelmeted head. Seeing also the marks of what he really was: graying strands in his scraggle of beard. Flab bulging above his belt, though muscles bulged in his arms. No form behind the form. This man was like a flat thing, all surface, nothing beyond. She wondered briefly where he had misplaced his soul.

  “Get lost,” she said.

  “Hey, tell ya what! Get down off that horse a minute. C’mere. I’ll give you a real ride.” He laughed smuttily, and so did his friends.

  It had not occurred to Bobbi yet to look frightened. She hadn’t reckoned on the way these bikers would react to her, a teenage girl out on a black horse that was walking along without saddle or bridle or even a halter, and neither horse nor girl acting scared.

  “Stuff it,” she said.

  The man made a grab at her leg, trying to pull her off Shane.

  Bobbi reacted quickly, swinging her booted foot to knock the man away. But Shane was even quicker than she. Before her boot could connect with its target, Shane whirled and let fly at man and motorcycle with both hind feet. There was a crash as bike and biker landed in the dirt. Bobbi heard, but didn’t see, for Shane had stretched out into a gallop.

  And she heard the buzz as the bikers came after her. And she knew not even Shane could outrun them on the road.

  Even as she thought of it, she felt Shane gather himself, and she grabbed at his mane with both hands. Three junked cars hulked beside the road at a curve, coming up fast. Shane cleared the middle one in a long, strong jump—Bobbi winced, feeling her stomach flip. She was not used to jumping anything bigger than a fallen log on the trail. She’d been coon hunting on a mule that would leap a barbed-wire fence, but her job then was to get off first, duck through the wire, drape her jacket over the top strand and clear the terrain on the other side.… No telling what sort of rock or sharp metal might be on the other side of this junker. But Shane landed in weeds and was off at a hard gallop. He knew what sort of men these bikers were. He knew they would find a way around the abandoned cars and be after him quicker than they could curse.

  At reckless speed Shane snaked through the woods, taking a twisting way between close-spaced saplings and giant oaks, crashing through brush, jumping rocks and fallen trees, trying to throw the bikers off. Bobbi flattened herself over his neck and shielded her eyes against branches with one hand. Behind her she heard yells much like the yelps of hunting dogs. Wheels spun, engines whined. The bikers were enjoying the chase. They liked tearing up the forest with their tires. They enjoyed destroying things. If they caught her, they would enjoy the—what? The kill?

  The bikers roared closer. Bobbi recognized the shouting voice of the biker who had wanted to give her a ride.

  “Tight ass!”

  She did not look at him or reply.

  “Bitch, you wait! I’ll show you a couple things.”

  “Damn,” Bobbi muttered into Shane’s mane. She was beginning to feel frightened, though not for herself. She knew Shane too well for that. Not only the black stallion Shane, but the man, or more-than-man, the legend. She had lived with it almost since she was born, in her dreams, in the stories she read for school, in a hundred TV shows, even before she had met Shane in her father’s notebook. She knew what was likely to happen, and it frightened her. What was sure to happen, if the bikers left Shane no choice.

  They were fanning out to either side of the black mustang, finding themselves easier terrain than what he chose for them, catching up with him. Soon they would try to cut him off.

  A thick fallen tree blocked the way. Shane leaped across; the bikers veered around. Then—

  “Shane!” Bobbi gasped aloud.

  A rocky ravine a good twenty feet deep sheered down at their feet.

  There was no time to stop. There might have been time to turn aside, to skid slantwise down the steep slope or run along the edge, easily brought to bay either way. Shane had no intention of doing either. Even clinging to his neck as she was, Bobbi felt the powerful spring of his hindquarters, and it seemed to propel all the breath out of her. With an energy, a focus, a concentrated force like nothing she had ever felt in man or stallion before, Shane leaped toward the far side of the ravine. But it was a crazy leap; Shane had to be crazy. No horse could jump so far—

  Too scared to scream, Bobbi hid her face in black mane. Shane had carried her into midair, with nothing but his body between her and the rocks below, and the curve of his leap flew forward into nothing, and he and Bobbi were falling, falling—

  Shane’s reaching forefeet struck about halfway down the opposite bank. His hooves dug in, his forelegs curled like the arms of a fighter landing a punch, his shoulder muscles bulged, and he surged upward. His hind hooves grabbed. Hindquarters bunched, then sprang. Bobbi’s hands tightened around the base of his neck, feeling the sweat break out on Shane’s chest as he brought her up the side of the ravine and over its lip to the more level floor of the forest.

  Without even a pause to catch his breath, Shane galloped on. Bobbi moved her hands to his mane, raised her head and stole a glance behind her. Even before she looked, she heard the waspish buzz of motors and knew. The bikers had found a way through or over the ravine. They would run Shane until he dropped.

  Shane dug in his forefeet, slid to a stop and whirled.

  Bobbi understood. He frightened her, but she understood. She sat straight on his back, sharing his defiance. Shane had given these men every opportunity to give up, go their own way and let him be. He had tried to spare their lives in every way he knew. He had run from them as long as he was going to run. Now it was showdown time.

  Shane stood squared off and rock firm, neck arched but low, head extended in a stallion’s threat gesture. The warning was clear. This was to be a duel to the death.

  The bikers understood as well as Bobbi did. Engines faltered, cycles muttered to a stop. At a safe distance the three of them sat their mechanical mounts, eyeing Shane.

  “You stupid no-neck fugheads!” Bobbi yelled. “Go away, or you’re going to get killed!” Her voice shook on the last word. She did not like what was happening any better than she liked the men who had been pursuing her.

  The one who had tried to grab her pulled a knife from a sheath at his belt. His face, Bobbi noted, was sweating above his graying scraggle of beard. “Come on!” he ordered the others. “The horse is wore out. Let’s get her!”

  “You get her,” the man next to him retorted.

  Even from the distance Bobbi saw the flush of anger redden the first biker’s face. “Christ!” he yelled. “You scared of a girl on a horse?”

  “That ain’t no horse,” the third man said in a low voice. “Look at its eyes.”

  “Jesus shit!” The one with the knife didn’t look. He spoke with the scorn of a frightened man who won’t acknowledge his own fear. “All right, you two scumbags watch. I’ll show you how it’s done. I’m going to kill that horse. And then I’m going to lay that tight-assed bitch, and you two dickless wonders don’t get a piece of her.”

  He revved his cycle and roared toward Shane.

  The black mustang waited until his enemy had gained some speed. Then Shane also sprang forward into a driving gallop. The biker saw him coming, spun his cycle sideways and lifted his knife. He meant to slash as Shane charged past him. But Shane was quicker than any dodge or any knife. He lifted into a low rear. One deadly hoof struck the man’s uplifted hand, sending the knife flying. The other smashed into the man’s head.

  Bobbi shut her eyes.

  She heard the motorcyc
le fall and lie sputtering in the dirt. With momentum still carrying him forward, Shane cleared it and the body in one leap. It took him a few strides to come to a stop.

  Bobbi looked at the other two bikers. Close in front of her, they sat without moving, white-faced, their eyes staring. They would not hurt her.

  Shane turned and left that place at an easy lope, knowing that only silence would follow.

  Bobbi’s fingers twisted and clenched in his mane as she rode. Her insides felt sick. She had seen dead bodies enough in her sixteen years, rouged and laid out amid flowers in funeral homes, but she had never seen a man killed before. She tried not to think of the smashed-pumpkin sound his head had made, or of the color pink. Instead, she thought of what he had meant to do to her, and felt at the same time better and worse.

  She noticed that Shane was making his way through woods again instead of taking one of the many logging roads and snowmobile trails. The black mustang was keeping to the densest cover.

  “Right,” she said aloud in a hoarse voice. If she and Shane had been fugitives before, they were doubly fugitives now. The police would want to know who had killed that biker, and how. Maybe the man had belonged to a motorcycle gang, the Pagans or the Hell’s Angels, and the gang might come after them.

  “I bet even the blasted federal government is after us,” she said to Shane, “because you’re a mustang.”

  She felt badly shaken, and reached out to Shane without thinking. A scared horseman always moves to calm his horse. She stroked Shane’s neck. She reached up and laid her hand on the white scars of his brand, and Shane did not pull away.

  Chapter Seven

  Shane nosed her awake in the middle of the night.

  Sleepily stirring in her nest of dead leaves and hemlock boughs, Bobbi did not at first know where she was. She dreamed that the touch was Grandpap’s, that Pap was shaking her to awaken her before dawn for a day’s hunting. Then she shivered and woke up, and there was the black form of Shane standing over her, looming in the chilly night.

  “What is it?” Bobbi asked groggily, too sleepy to show surprise that the black horse had touched her of his own accord. Just as well, she knew later, thinking back on the moment, that the night was dark and that she was too numbed by sleep to feel much. Shane would not have wanted to see the flush of joy on her face.

  She sat up without waiting for an answer. There could have been one from Shane’s eerie eyes, but she did not want that, and instinct told her such answers were not for the small questions. She listened and looked around for her own answer. There was no sense of danger in the night. Shane stood by her, waiting.

  “You want to go on? Now?”

  It would have been better to go on in the daytime, when Bobbi could see what she was doing. But she got up, flexed her aching body and scattered her bed, hiding her traces as best she could in the dark.

  “I guess you have your reasons,” she said.

  Shane stood by a log, making it easier for her to get on him. He kept to a walk through the woods, over the uneven and unseen ground, and Bobbi laid her head down on his neck, closing her eyes and covering them with one hand to protect them from branches.

  After a while she began to hear distant traffic noise. The rumble of trucks carried clearly on the night air. She sat up and looked at the headlights strobe-flickering through the trees. Traffic was light at the time of night, but she could tell it was a big highway. A four-lane.

  “You knew this was here,” she said to Shane in amazement. “But how—no. I won’t even ask.”

  After a moment she added, “I take it we have to cross.” Shane had brought her to the expressway in the dead of night, when it was least likely they would be seen.

  Steep embankments topped with chain-link fence flanked the highway, making it a ravine that not even Shane could leap. After a moment’s pause he turned leftward, picking his way along the top of the bank, just behind the fence. It was unlikely that anyone would see a girl in dark jacket and jeans riding a black horse up there in the black of night.

  Bobbi kept silent, wincing each time headlights swept over her, or seemed to. She could not think how they were going to cross. Even if they could get through the fence, sheer rock fell below.

  She felt Shane’s head come up. He was looking at something ahead.

  “We’re in luck,” Bobbi breathed. In the headlights she could see the concrete span of a bridge crossing the highway. Better yet, no neon signs glared. No gas stations, no fast-food huts.

  As Shane walked closer, Bobbi could see why. A small secondary road overpassed the four-lane, with no access. No cloverleaf. No exits. The chain-link fence curved toward the bridge and joined with its railing. The narrow blacktop ran through woods, over the highway, and into woods again. At the time of night, traffic on it would be nearly nil. For two fugitives, it couldn’t have been a better bridge.

  Shane stopped to study it.

  “Go for it!” Bobbi whispered to him excitedly.

  He tossed his head in annoyance and did not move. In a moment Bobbi understood that Shane was waiting for the traffic to clear on the highway. It was a slim risk, that somebody passing under the bridge might notice the dark horse and rider overhead, but it was a risk he did not want to take.

  For what seemed a long time, but might not have been more than five minutes, girl and horse-man waited. Bobbi felt herself grow tense with impatience, felt Shane’s body between her legs filling with tension of the same sort. At last she felt him bunch for his run. Another moment and the sky over the highway would be dark … it was. Shane burst from a standstill into a canter and clattered onto the bridge, running for the other side …

  Out of the woods ahead of them rattled a mud-splattered pickup. Headlights swept onto the bridge, caught them in high beams. Even Shane could not dodge them. There was nowhere to go. Trapped on the narrow road between railings, all he could do was keep running. Atop the black horse, Bobbi passed the pickup so close that in the greenish glow of the dashboard she could see the startled face of the man behind the wheel as he stared back at her.

  Shane barreled into the woods on the other side. Ducking branches, Bobbi swore, “Damn.” It was not strong enough. “Oh, crap, damn, SHIT.”

  The search would be hot after them again.

  “There wasn’t a single car on that road the whole time we sat there,” she grumbled to Shane.

  She blamed herself for not watching the side road while he was intent on the expressway. She could have watched, she could have said something. Only, Shane had taken charge from the beginning, and she had gotten used to sitting on his back, carried away, swept away into adventure.… Riding Shane was utterly unlike riding a horse. It was more like riding a romance. But now she blamed herself for not putting reins on him, taking control of her own life. In woods behind her was a man lying dead by a downed motorbike, when maybe she would have handled it differently.…

  Or maybe she would be raped, mutilated and dead instead of riding on a black mystery at midnight.

  Closer to morning, now. Dawn was lightning the sky, and as soon as he could halfway see his footing Shane settled into a distance-covering lope. He would put as much forest as he could between Bobbi and the bridge before six kinds of cops swarmed out and the choppers started flying over. Bobbi tilted her weight forward, rocked like a baby by the rhythm of the canter, but her thoughts were uneasy. She was not used to being protected. That was one thing she liked about Grandpap. He always treated her like a man. Well, almost always.

  Shane stumbled, regained his footing, and surged on. Hit a hidden hole or a root beneath the dead leaves on the ground, most likely.

  Bobbi’s stomach was nagging her with hunger, and there was nothing for her to eat. The Snickers bar had been last night’s supper. By the time the sun was up, she felt so ravenous she could think of nothing else but how to find herself some food. She wished she had paid more attention when Grandpap and his cronies had talked about the wild-growing foods they used to gather. Too
early in the year for most of those, anyway, even if she knew them. She would have to risk stealing from someone’s kitchen. If she could get Shane to take her there.

  Shane faltered in his lope and slowed to a walk.

  The going was really too rough for a lope. No ordinary horse could have managed it. And the heavy flat-tire sound of a chopper vibrated in the distance. Bobbi turned her attention that way, and Shane speeded his gait to a trot, heading for the cover of some hemlocks.

  Only the one copter appeared. Bobbi felt nearly insulted. As the day wore on, either it flew away or they left it behind, and they no longer had to hide from it.

  She and Shane had struck a sort of flat-topped, leaf-strewn mound, a long mound that ran straight as a rifle barrel through the woods. It made much easier going than the rumpled slopes of the mountainsides, and Shane followed it. Trees grew out of it from time to time, but not as thickly as they did elsewhere. Creeks and ravines cut across it at intervals, and in those cuts Bobbi could see the remains of stone pilings. The mound was, in fact, an old tram bed, the built-up roadway for the tram line that had taken lumber out of these hills years before. It ran on southwestward for miles.

  Thinking as she was of her stomach, it took Bobbi a while to notice that Shane was moving along at walk and jog trot, when this would have made a better place than most for a gallop. It was only half a day since the man in the pickup had seen them, and she, for one, still sweated at the memory; she would have thought Shane would be moving at top speed. But the mustang was picking his way down the sides of the streambanks, walking across the bottoms and trudging up the opposite slopes—and this was the same horse who had leaped a fifteen-foot ravine the day before! The thought struck her, making her stomach knot more sharply than hunger could, and she exclaimed aloud.

  “Shane! Your hooves!”

  Those small, black hooves, small as a dandy’s polished boots, not really wide enough to carry the weight of a rider …

  Bobbi leaned over and tried to look. She couldn’t see whether they were cracked, or worn, or which one, or how. Shane was unshod, of course, and the rocks he had come across, the leaps he had taken, should have lamed any horse before now. But Bobbi had been thinking of him as more than horse, and she hadn’t realized …