Free The Outlander by Gil Adamson Page B

keep them both
     warm, while their common breath followed them in meaningless Braille.
    On the fourth day, the mare scented the air wildly and stood electrified
     at the edge of a steep meadow. At first the widow did not know the object of its terror,
     and then she did. A massive old grizzly stood just clear of the far trees, but the
     roan’s poor eyesight had not located it yet. The widow staredin terror at what stood across the meadow, swinging its head from side to side as
     if in similar disbelief. Light brown and sleek and fat, it was bigger than she had
     imagined any animal could be. The shadow of an entire cloud passed slowly between
     herself and the bear. Sun penetrated into the deep grasses and flowering weeds. She
     clung to her dancing mount as the mare puffed and trembled, unable to find the source of
     its dread. And then the bear was gone; it simply backed away into the darkness of the
     trees. The widow amended her trajectory and went on, praying.
The Lord roars from
     Zion. These are the words of the Lord.
    TREES, EVERYWHERE . And the sun above. A whispering of
     wind in the high branches and every pine needle and summer leaf moving. The widow rested
     atop a boulder in a clearing and removed her boots. The saddle was hung lopsided on a
     branch. She walked slowly around in the soft mud and rubbed her cheeks with the heels of
     her hands, clearing her head. All morning she had been assailed by memories,
     inappropriate, ironic ones. Not the usual phantoms but something else, some catalogue of
     places and things — and for each she suffered a transient yearning. A familiar
     street corner, a broken banister railing in her father’s house, a wet newspaper
     full of potato peels in the kitchen. Unpopulated, these memories, but each one
     nonetheless saturated with human presence, like an unattended meal still steaming.
     Something was coming, some message — each memory sculpting its own silhouette. She
     fought them off, struggling the way a swimmer does who must not rest but does rest, only
     to return to the surface, sputtering. A gang of drab sparrows played tactical games
     among the deep indentations her feet had madein the mud. The mare
     shook itself like a dog, and they all flew away.
    She had now spent six days and nights alone in the mountains, and still
     she didn’t know where she was. Yet she wasn’t frightened, merely attentive.
     The thing to be feared always came from within: exhaustion, unsound thoughts, ignorance,
     starvation. As a child she had been dragged away from a panicking horse because she had
     failed to see that it might injure her, the hired man shaking her by the shoulders,
     shouting, “Do you want to get me fired?” And yet, she had been nearly
     demented with terror by a dream in which her hands fell off at the wrists. That summer,
     her bed had been set outside on the screened veranda where it was cool, and when she had
     wakened screaming, the caged birds by the door had volleyed about their little wicker
     palace. The sound of adult feet thumping down the hallway toward her, where she sat
     rigid and shrill, her arms out before her, staring at her hands, still seeing them gone.
     All the next day she had nursed a miasmic horror: she was unsound, dissipating, her body
     unable to hold together. And the blame for it lay in dreams. This was the locus of fear
     for her, a worm in the heart, where hope rotted in its dark whorls, where unwanted
     visions leaped out — the darkness of her own mind. And yet here she was alone in
     the wilderness, strangely content.
    It was a bright, soft morning. In the sun, the air was warm enough for
     bare skin, while under the trees the mare’s breath blew into vapour. An arctic
     chill crept the boundaries of each shadow and gusted from the deeps of the woods. The
     widow rested her feet in front of her and stared down at the white and blue toes. The
     mud soothed the soles of her feet and she shuffled