Free The Outlander by Gil Adamson Page A

branches. A blessing of her young life had been the fact that she remained more
     afraid of her own mind than of the dark. In fact, she loved the night. Still, here among
     the trees there was the call of unknown things. Small scrounging sounds to the left . .
     . or in front? She had taken the saddle off the horse and now she lay with her head on
     it and listened. The horse puffed. She reasoned that the mare would alert her to news of
     a predator. She did not know that a horse’s eyesight is far worse than even a
     man’s. All it has is a sense of smell, and that depends on the wind. Throughout
     that long night, the widow listened to the movements of the mare, and tried to ignore
     the question of how she would catch it in the dark if indeed something came through the
     trees toward them.
    Morning came in a fug of humidity, the sun a hot smudge above, the ground
     steaming. When the widow stood, she discovered her skirts were soaked. She bent and
     wrung them out, but they stayed damp and heavy, and the cloth lapped coldly at her
     calves as she mounted the horse and rode. They went on through groves of aspen, and the
     widow saw the clawmarks of bears on smoky trunks, impossibly high, near her waist as she
     rode. All about lay the papery shreds of torn bark.
    The next morning, the air grew colder. She was climbing the range day by
     day. She sat in meditation on the saddle’s rhythmic creak, the suck of hooves in
     the wet leaves. She was obliged to dismount from time to time and draw the mare from an
     impassible web of hemlock or a corral of dead and fallen pines. She worried she was
     going in circles or even retracing her steps.
    They went on into hollows and draws, then up again, along ridges and
     across clearings that smelled of mint. The blue roan was fattening, since the widow
     stopped often to let it feed, and it seemed stronger by the day, stepping across alpine
     meadows so green and seemingly cultivated they spoke of heaven. White dots of mountain
     goats moved along vertical bluffs with tiny kids following in awkward dashes over the
     precipitous terrain. The widow watched their pinpoint hops.
    She bathed quickly at the edge of a frigid mountain stream and the water
     stung and lacerated her nerves. A painful cleansing. Where possible she used her long
     hair to dry herself, for she dared not use her clothes, and the old lady’s fur
     coat simply slithered coldly over her skin, absorbing nothing. She paced naked in the
     sun, teeth clenched, hugging herself,watching the mare as it
     wandered and grazed. She had forgotten completely about the saddle blanket. Oily and
     stiff as it was, it might have warmed her. She did not know how to properly hobble a
     horse, but by now had intuited how to tie the reins to one foreleg so the mare could
     bend and eat but could not gallop or even trot away from her when she came to collect
     it. She found stiff dried moss with which she tried in vain to curry the horse’s
     coat, and she lifted the mare’s hooves and dug pebbles from the frog with the old
     man’s bayonet. This much she remembered to do.
    She ate her mouldy bread and soggy fruit. The bushes were full of berries,
     but she dared not eat anything unless it was recognizable, and nothing was. She saw
     rabbits, which now looked like food on legs, but could not devise a way to catch them.
     She saw an eagle and several fat foxes, and at dusk, grey owls gliding silent on the
     night air with their enormous wings. She put on the fur coat and discovered just how
     small the old lady really was. She cut her skirt up the middle, front and back, and,
     shivering and naked with the needle in her hand, sewed it into wide black pants so that
     her knees would no longer be exposed as she rode. This was a good solution, except that
     now she had to remove her clothing entirely when she needed to relieve herself. In the
     cold night she was obliged to rise from her dozing and walk the mare to