Chapter 5: What the Trail Gives Back

~ Emmie ~

The hoofprints lasted until midmorning.

She had followed them northwest along the river bank with the careful attention her father had taught her — not staring at them but reading them in her peripheral vision the way you read moving water, letting the pattern speak rather than forcing it. They were clear in the soft ground near the river’s edge, overlapping and purposeful, pressed deep enough to tell her the horses had been loaded when they passed. A camp on the move. Everything packed and carried.

Then the ground hardened as the bank rose, and the prints grew faint, and then the bank became rock — a long shelf of basalt that tilted toward the river at a shallow angle, black and cold and absolutely unreadable — and the prints were gone.

She stood on the basalt and looked northwest and tried to think.

Kanti stood beside her. He had walked all morning without complaint, his hand in hers, his stride adjusted to match hers in the patient, adaptive way she was coming to recognize as characteristic of him — he watched how she moved and matched it, watched where she stepped and stepped there too, as though he had decided that her judgment about terrain was sound and worth following. She found this trust almost unbearable in its weight. She could not afford to be wrong.

She crouched and looked at the basalt. Nothing. She looked at the far edge of the rock shelf where it met the soil again, fifty yards ahead. She would have to get there and hope the prints resumed.

“Come on,” she said, and they crossed the basalt together, picking their way carefully, and when they reached the soil again she found — with a relief that moved through her like warm water — a single clear hoofprint at the very edge, pointing northwest, as though left there deliberately for someone who needed to know which way to go.

“There,” she told Kanti, pointing.

He looked at the print and then looked northwest and said something quick and certain.

“My thought exactly,” she said.

The hunger announced itself properly around noon.

She had been aware of it since morning in the background way of something you are managing rather than experiencing, but by midday it moved to the foreground and planted itself there with the blunt insistence of a physical fact. Her stomach had stopped asking politely. Kanti was quieter than usual — not distressed, not crying, but subdued in a way she recognized as the particular quiet of a child whose body is directing all available resources inward.

She had to find food.

She knew what grew in these mountains in September — her father had made her learn it the same way he’d made her learn to read sign and build fire, on the theory that knowledge was the only baggage that didn’t slow you down. Rose hips on the thorny thickets near the water. Pine nuts in the right cones. Camas bulbs if she could identify them correctly, which mattered enormously because death camas grew in the same places and looked similar enough to kill you if you were careless or desperate.

She was not going to be careless. She was not going to be desperate. She was going to be careful and methodical and she was going to feed this child.

She found rose hips first — a sprawling thicket of them on a south-facing slope above the river, the hips fat and red-orange with September ripeness. She filled her coat pockets with them and gave a handful to Kanti and watched him examine one carefully before biting into it, and the face he made at the tartness was so purely, completely four years old that she laughed — actually laughed, the sound coming out of her startled and a little rusty but real, the first genuine laugh in longer than she could calculate.

He looked at her with great dignity.