ReVISIONS (13 page)

Not far, a sheep lay cooling, stiffening in the night. Not the pied's doing . . . but he looked on it with hungry longing.

His own pack rules kept him from it. It belonged to the man. The pack leader. The pied licked his lips, drooling . . . and waited. The pack leader would not let him go hungry, not once the pied's submissive restraint became clear.

The man groaned again, and this time struggled to sit, reaching for the horse beside him in dreamy, fumbling movement. One-handed, he found the bulging leather case at the horse's flank and pulled an object free, a rustling, flapping thing that drove the pied even farther away.

When the pied ventured back, full only of weak and tentative courage, he discovered the man covered by a tarp, and rain beading to roll off the sides. Uncertain, he nosed the stiff material . . . and heard the others arriving. The unfamiliar, and those whose scents had started this miserable course of events in the rain. Those who had shed blood. His rain-soaked hackles rose, and he stalked the edges of the herd, Churras growing uneasy with the new intrusion. The pony mare called a greeting, was answered. Fake man's-light reflected off the wet backs of the sheep, the glistening blades of grass and the small bushy willows scattered through the area.

The pied glanced back. The man hadn't moved beneath his tarp. The man had no idea his territory had been invaded.

But the pied knew.

The pied crouched, whimpering. Shy and frightened and keenly aware of his role here.
Protect the territory
. The sheep were territory; the ponies were territory.

The unfamiliar humans on their unfamiliar ponies, easing in from the east . . . they did not belong in this territory.

The llama knew it; he gave an outraged snort, rose to his feet from the center of the herd, and charged the interlopers. A noose flashed through the darkness, looping over the llama's neck; pony and llama set against one another while men closed in on the long-necked one. The llama gave a sudden bleating cry, one the pied had never heard from its kind before. Moments later, it settled heavily into the grasses. The smell of blood came thick and rank.

In a sudden spurt of action, the pied sprinted from his hidden crouch, bolting through the rocky grasses in a streak of patchy color. All but invisible in the overcast night, he employed the only offense a single lightweight pied had at his command. He struck like calico lightning, slashing an equine hindquarter, a human leg, a soft whiskered muzzle. A horse grunted in pain; a man cried out in surprise. Someone lost control of his panicked mount and crashed away into the night, cursing until the crash of a branch silenced him.

The pied circled tightly for another run, darting and biting and slashing. What he saw clearly, the men seemed unable to perceive in the darkness; their fake lights strobed wildly through the night, hunting him. The ponies were another thing; a hind hoof flashed and the pied dodged—not fast enough. The impact knocked the wind from him and sent him flying to the side.

But it was enough. The men spoke sharply to one another, listened momentarily to the surging cry of the pieds closing across the river, and wheeled their ponies around, leaving in a hasty clatter of even-stepping hooves.

Panting with nerves, cold with the rain, the pied could not move right away. His breath steamed the air, offering up precious body heat. Moments passed; the men did not return. They were not night creatures . . . the daylight would bring them back. But the pied had done his job.
Protect the territory
. Eventually he dragged his bruised body upright. The disturbed sheep slowly huddled back together again, seeking the familiar, but they left a gap around the body of the long-necked one.

The pied went to it, snuffling and inspecting and finding it truly dead. With a furtive glance toward the man, the pied lapped at the blood of the llama's woolly neck, drinking stolen sustenance.

Then, mustering all its courage, it crept back to the man and nosed its way under the tarp to share the shelter and the warmth of their battered bodies.

 

At first Neil wasn't sure just what hurt. His whole body reverberated with it, making his world tilt and swoop. Or was it just that he had to—

Neil managed to roll over on the rocks before he retched up the meager contents of his stomach. For a long while after that he just lay there, head reeling, stomach roiling, his arm making it perfectly clear just what hurt the most. After a time, he recalled a sense of danger, regained a vague impression of the night's stampede. Remembered the stark biting shock of being shot, but not how he'd ended up on the ground. Not how he'd come to be under the tarp.

With an awkward curl of his good arm, he flipped the tarp away, looking down at himself. Formerly wet, now drying. Except for a patch along his belly and side, where his duster had come open and the layers between had all dried. And the ground beside him . . . a small warm hollow of dried grass, directly adjoining that spot he himself had kept dry. A tuft of white and black hair.

He frowned, didn't try to make sense of it. Spent a few precious moments ripping tarp with his hunting knife, binding his arm to his side in the most awkward of ways. Sweat poured off his face and sprang up on his chest; he took a timely lurch to the side and heaved over the rocks. Finally, carefully, he sat up.

Zip grazed to the south, saddle slightly askew, reins looped just behind his ears and under one hoof. As Neil watched, the pony deliberately lifted that foot, moved his head aside, and grazed on. Wise creature. No doubt the tolter had saved his life several times over during the night.

The other tolter, her light packs in place, grazed at the other side of the spreading herd. Ben was nowhere to be seen. Not far from Neil's uncomfortable resting spot, the river roared, full of rain and fury. They wouldn't cross it today. Maybe not tomorrow. A full-sized horse could make it, but not the sheep. Not the tolters.

He couldn't go back. The station was compromised. And he needed help, before this arm became infected and he lost it—or it killed him. He was lucky enough he hadn't bled out.

In his packs, the radio sat useless. Drained.

Abandon the sheep? Take a tolter back upstream along the canyon, where a footbridge over the narrows let a man cross?

Say good-bye to his career with that. The ranchers might nod, might understand and might offer sympathy for his plight, but they wouldn't hire him. Never mind the college degree, the two years of proving himself as a
partido
herder. He'd spend his time as an itinerant shearer who did catch-work the rest of the year.

Neil ran a hand over his face, rubbing gritty eyes and bringing his hand away bloody. He stared, puzzled, and began to understand that somewhere along the way—most likely right in this spot—he'd fallen from the pony and hit his head.

From staring at his hand, dirty and scratched and now bloody in all its work-worn creases, he focused outward. For the first time he found the dead Churra not far from him, its legs stiff in a parody of death, a grimace lifting its muzzle so its teeth showed, its dull eyes only half closed. No blood. Just driven to exhaustion in the pouring cold rain and stressed beyond its endurance.

Neil knew just how it felt.

Over the tumbling sound of water against rock, a high, sharp whistle hit Neil's ears. He turned—not too fast, but with the creaky bones of a man much older than his twenty-seven years—and caught the broad wave of a man on horseback, standing on the other side of the river.

The camp boss.

Relief washed over Neil, relief so great it caught his breath and came out in a short, sharp sob. He waved back, glad there was no opportunity for shouted conversation over the river noise. He couldn't have trusted his voice.

The man rode a tall, rawboned bay. He'd make it over the river and then back; he'd have food and he'd be able to radio for help. And most of all, the sheep were here. Not all of them; even in his blurry state Neil could see he'd lost more than a few. But it was the boss's job to keep the stations secure. As long as Neil hadn't abandoned the flock. . . .

He'd come out of this okay.

He took stock of things. There was his rifle; he caught it up, checked it. A round waited, chambered sometime during the night. He tried to remember; couldn't. Dammit.

Movement caught his eye: the pied. Gangly yearling pied with its sweep of a tail held low, its absurdly large ears canted back. Not laughing, as so many of them seemed to be. Worried. Focused on Neil, as if waiting to see what happened next. As if it mattered.

Neil looked again to the dry hollow beside his own resting spot, reached out to catch the clump of hair and rub it between his fingers. Soft. Undercoat. Surely not . . .

No matter. The pied would run when Neil climbed, so painfully, to his feet.

It didn't.

From his new vantage point Neil could see the ravages of the night. Three more sheep down, stiff and dead. The others scattered enough to make half a day's work in gathering them up again, some even straying uncharacteristically into the lowland willows, cottonwoods and hackberries that sprang up fifty yards back from the water's edge.

In the middle of it all he found Ben, a lump of llama fur somehow too small to have fit the animal's bold personality. Dried dark blood smeared Ben's throat, splashing down his chest with the powerful spurt of a cut throat.

He gave the pied a sharp, narrow-eyed look, seeing for the first time the way blood smeared across its face and, diluted by rain, pinked across the white fur of its chest. But no single pied could bring down a llama. No pied could even get close without taking damage.

 

The pied took a hesitant step. Limping. Stiff and sore, and newly bolted from the warmth of his place by the man's side. But he couldn't read the man's body words, so mixed up as they were with injuries and unsteady posture. Even as he watched, the man sank slowly down to his knees next to the dead sheep.

The pied gave a tentative wag of his tail, low between his hocks. Flattened his ears, tipped his lowered head slightly.

The man sank down lower behind the sheep. An invitation.

The pied took another step. He thought of companionship and warmth and the sheep this man might offer, feeding his pack members as he should. He thought of the strange satisfaction of a night at this man's side.

Another step.

 

But Ben hadn't been wary of this one. And here it came, covered in blood, limping and hurt. Kicked, as likely as not.
But no pied could . . .
He closed his eyes, trying to connect the unusually scattered sheep, the dead llama, and the wounded pied into some logical summation of this tortured night.

Behind Neil came the splash of the rawboned bay entering the water, its repeated snorts of disgust and protest. He shoved away the whisper of a thought that something wasn't quite right. That something
more
had happened than the seemingly obvious.

Because no boss would understand how Neil had let the pied live this long, never mind that it had been no threat. No boss would see the blood, look at the llama, and fail to mark Neil down as the most remarkably foolish
partido
herder ever to handle a flock of sheep.

No boss would give him a second chance.

Neil's rifle rested on the back of the dead sheep, the glint of its barrel hidden in wool, the muzzle aimed at the pied. Oh, God, it was all sly, all submissive, slinking up to him with blood on its lips. He glanced back at his former resting spot. Where there'd been two of them.

His finger squeezed the trigger.

Thus Spake Zarathustra (music by Richard Strauss
¹
)

 

Light. Dark. Light. Then fire . . .

(Light is the Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda. Dark is the Enemy, Ahriman. All persons, whether they know it or not, choose one or the other: life or not life.)

Light. Dark. Light. And fire . . .

(Those who choose light—they add to the world. Those who choose dark—they subtract. All people are marked by the lord they have chosen: a sign invisible to earthly eyes, yet shining forth after death when all must pass over the Bridge of Judgment.)

Light. Dark. Light. Ahh, fire!

(The true signs of light and dark cannot be written by human hands. Yet, my followers, if you wish to carve symbols, use these: a simple cross for good, a horizontal stroke for evil. The cross points in all four directions, showing how the Wise Lord reaches over all the lands. The horizontal stroke suggests a corpse lying dead on the ground. The signs are unambiguous . . . are they not?)