by Jessie Haas
And now there was more, smeared on his yellow poncho where Robbie’s nose had rested. James gripped the cheekpiece and bent to look at Robbie’s muzzle. Then he turned away, feeling sick.
No, it couldn’t be as bad as that. He looked again.
All right, it’s not that bad. Just the end of Robbie’s wiggly, expressive upper lip, bashed on the rock. Bruise and contusion, raw patch of flesh the size of a quarter …
He could not continue the assessment. The shock to his own nerves was almost as great as that to Robbie’s. He straightened queasily and rubbed the little horse’s neck.
“All right, that’s it. Let’s go home.”
He wasn’t going to attempt the ridge again. He set off along its base, leading Robbie. The trees grew thick on all sides, and the footing was rough. Limping, James chose the easiest path, though it led in slightly the wrong direction. Somewhere soon he would see a place to turn.
It wasn’t actually a path, just a series of relatively open spaces between the trees and undergrowth that drew the eye. A serpentine progression; so many yards in one direction, so many in another; stop, look, and turn again. He tried always to keep the gray spine of the ridge in view, but after one complicated series of zigzags, he looked and it was gone.
He stopped, gazing back beyond Robbie’s haunches. Already he was a little unsure of the way they’d come. Should he try to retrace his steps or go on?
Go on, he supposed. Here under the trees, the afternoon was already darkening toward night; he would have turned back soon, even if he had found the trail. He thought he was heading in roughly the right direction. Soon he would hit the ridge again, or come out someplace familiar.
Robbie followed docilely. He was tired and upset, and seemed to draw reassurance from James. It hardly made sense. James was the one who had dragged him from his dry stall, forced him over rough country, and gotten him hurt. James wasn’t even sure where they were anymore.
“Quit it!” he said when Robbie reached forward to nudge him confidingly in the back. “You don’t know anything, horse!”
The ridge did not reappear. A series of fallen hemlocks and ambitious young thickets drove them gradually downhill. Shooting pains began to radiate from James’s knee. His legs were soaked. His nose dripped. Wind shook a shower of droplets from the tree branches. When the wind stopped, the shower went on. It was possible to get wetter.
Nobody knows where I am, he thought, remembering how quietly he had slipped out of the house. They wouldn’t miss him till chore time, and then there was nothing they could do.
Curious, how unsettling it seemed to be incommunicado. It added an extra thrill to the sensation of being lost—
Not lost! he told himself quickly. Mislaid. He would not be lost—he wouldn’t feel lost—while he still had Robbie’s company.
Instantly his imagination supplied a new scenario; Robbie breaking loose and galloping away, leaving him alone. Robbie arriving at the barn door with broken reins and scarred saddle, hungry for his supper.
Robbie, arriving at the barn door!
He stopped and looked hard at his little horse; the careless, silly young animal with the bashed lip and trusting expression. “Do you know the way?”
It was often so in stories, the sagacious horse taking the hero home; the lost hero, the wounded hero. James had accepted it as a romantic convention. He didn’t really believe in the mysterious sixth sense, the supposed inner compass possessed by animals. After all, he was an animal, and he’d never felt it. It was notably absent in the present circumstances.
Still, worth a try.
He stepped back to Robbie’s side, leaving the reins slack. “Go on, boy! Go home!”
Robbie turned curiously to face him. James stepped back again. Robbie turned. They made a full circle.
No good. Robbie was obviously depending on him, which meant the inner compass hadn’t a clue. James started to walk again. He wondered if he was destroying his knee.
Maybe if he mounted and just sat there, Robbie would take the initiative.
It was hard to mount. His legs were stiff and tired, and the soaked jeans stuck to his skin. But it felt wonderful to take the weight off his knee and rest. He let the reins hang in long loops. When Robbie didn’t move, he urged him gently. “Go on, Rob.”
Robbie stepped off tentatively. At first he seemed to do as James had, choosing the open places and the easy going, wandering at random. He had no concept of James’s extra height above him. James had to stay alert, ready to fling himself on Robbie’s neck whenever a low branch came at him. He was scraped and soaked and stabbed with twigs. Rain pattered on his slicker.
Gradually, though, he began to sense a trend to Robbie’s wandering. It seemed wrong; surely they should be heading more toward the east?
Or was this east? Without the sun for guidance, all directions looked the same. The day was completely gray around him; gray sky, gray mist, lit by a flame of maple or golden, frost-touched fern, but no sun. The moss grew all around the tree trunks. Perhaps it was thickest on the north side, but James couldn’t tell from the saddle, didn’t think enough of the theory to bother dismounting.
All at once Robbie stopped short. He tossed his head up, testing the air, and then a tremendous neigh shook his body. He started to trot. James fell onto his neck as the dimly seen branches leapt back at him.
It seemed they were on a trail. Lying on Robbie’s neck, he sometimes saw what looked like bare, packed dirt; but in the dusk he couldn’t be sure.
Robbie stopped again and dropped his head, nearly shooting James out of the saddle. His breath came in loud, excited puffs—sniffing something. Peering down the dim sweep of Robbie’s neck, James discerned a shadowy mound of horse manure.
They were on a trail!
Having gleaned all available information from this heap, Robbie trotted on. He kept his head low and stopped often, apparently smelling other piles of manure. James could no longer make them out. He held tightly to Robbie’s mane against the jolting stops and kept his head down, for it was too dark to see the branches.
Once more Robbie paused, then gave a loud neigh with an excited blast of breath at the end. Then he listened, so still that the beat of his heart moved James in the saddle. James listened also, thought he heard a faraway whinny. Robbie’s body seemed to settle in relief. He started off again.
He seemed to have forgotten that he bore a rider. His step had the power and spring of a stallion at liberty. To James, it was like riding a trained dressage horse in light collection, a little like riding Avatar.
For a moment, in the pleasure of the motion beneath him, he forgot he was lost. This was as fine as anything he’d ever gotten from a horse, and Robbie was doing it all by himself. An earlier paradox popped back into his head. If Avatar was man-made, then how could Robbie do this, all by himself?
Answer, of course—Avatar was not man-made. He was man-enhanced. His movements were nothing that was not natural for a horse … but a horse left alone would not naturally do them. Avatar was, in fact, more natural than a natural horse.…
And James, who had ridden a long way to escape questions such as these, had found them waiting for him at the edge of the woods. He grinned at himself. Up ahead, now, he saw gray light through the trees.
Robbie accelerated, slipping a little on the wet leaves. They broke out of the woods at the top of a long slope, and James found himself staring down at a strange house and barn.
He straightened from his crouch and made Robbie stand, filled with unreasoning disappointment. So much for the good old sixth sense! Where were they? He supposed he’d have to ride down and ask.…
Robbie jerked the reins impatiently, neighing. Close at hand, an answer came out of the darkness, and James heard the thud of trotting hooves. Shadowy horses approached. Some distance away they stopped, milling. He could just make out a line of fence posts.
A sudden light flared down in the yard. The kitchen door opened, and a man stood there, looking up the hi
ll—a familiar man, in a red-and-black plaid jacket. He was the professor and breeder from whom James had bought Robbie over a year and a half ago.
He stood looking up toward his horses a minute, then seemed to see James. The shiny yellow slicker must stand out brilliantly against the black hill and the black woods. The professor lifted one hand in calm salute.
Robbie shifted under James, almost unseen. Little horse. James touched his neck, apologizing. In his mind’s eye he saw Robbie, silly, mischievous colt, hunting his way along the dark trails; keen, nervous, still unsure in his ancient animal understanding; making his way back here, to the place where he was born. Little Robbie …
A gust of wind drove the rain rattling against the slicker; cold on James’s face. He raised a hand in belated answer to the professor’s wave and pointed Robbie down across the field on a long diagonal, toward the gate and the trail home.
THEA
“HERE, THEA!” Phillip called. “Here, Thea! Thea!”
Thea sat in the center of his bedroom rug with her white paws primly side by side, blinking up at his face. The impression she conveyed was of a cat who knew exactly what was going on; who held him in tolerant affection but wasn’t going to jump through hoops for him.
He rattled the cardboard container of cat treats. Her pupils jumped wide for a second, but she only adjusted her paws and purred audibly at him across the room.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Phillip cried. She was making him feel like a fool. He went across to where she sat and gave her a treat. She ate it with dainty satisfaction, then rubbed around his legs approvingly.
“Hey! Who’s training who here?”
“Mee,” said Thea.
“Yeah, you! You’re a witch, that’s what you are!” He picked her up and lay across the bed. Thea arranged herself on his chest, paws tucked under her breastbone. She beamed down into his face, purring so heartily that he felt the vibration through all his internal organs. Once again he felt he’d done just what she wanted.
“You know what I think?” he said. “I think you cats are an alien race, taking us over by mind power. You make us your slaves, and you make us like it. The human race is doomed!” At the moment he did feel taken over, with Thea’s purr humming within him and the condescending looks of approval she cast him from time to time. Poor nice dumb slave Phillip! A pat on the head will make him feel good.
“You treat us like dogs,” he said.
Dogs could be bought with a little approval. Dogs could be bullied. Dogs could be trained. Dogs were smothery, and slobbered affection on you at inconvenient moments. Rebuke them and they lay around looking sad and sighing. Dogs were heavy.
Pigs, now … actually he preferred not to think about pigs. He considered other farm animals as he had known them. Cows were vague, stubborn, and seemed unrelated to people. Cows and people treated each other as objects, and obstacles. The relationship, on both sides, was conducted on a level of low cunning … except that cows were innocent, however annoying; like crying babies. Humans were not.
Goats were different, now. His two aunts, Vivian and Pat, kept goats, and it seemed almost like they lived in a commune. The goats weren’t pets, they weren’t spoken of like children; but they weren’t just livestock, either. They were more like partners, and Vivian mentioned them casually in her letters—Amy, Leah, Tony.…
The neighbor’s motorcycle roared to life, tearing apart the quiet afternoon. Thea jumped, sat up on Phillip’s chest looking annoyed, and then soothed herself with a bath. The motorcycle revved for several minutes before the neighbor departed, trailing the sound a long way behind him. Phillip clenched tight fistfuls of the bedspread. “Bastard, I hate your guts!” he whispered. Why should people have so much power to ruin other people’s quiet? Damn it.…
Thea glanced up suddenly from her laundry, and a second later Phillip heard a girl’s voice. “This is the house.”
Go away, he thought. Shut up and go away!
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” said another voice—an older woman. Burglars, casing the joint? Jehovah’s Witnesses?
“I’d like to see the girl, anyway,” the younger voice said wistfully. “Greg’s gone bananas over her.”
Greg would be one of the half dozen boys who whirred up their dead-end street on bikes all day long, hoping for a glimpse of Carrie. They looked to be his own age. They probably didn’t know that Carrie was three years older and going to nursing school in the fall. Phillip had marked them down on his mental list of people not to make friends with.
“Oh, look! Chicks!” the old lady cried. “I should have thought keeping chickens would be illegal in this part of town.”
“Everything interesting’s illegal in this part of town,” the girl said bitterly.
Well, now, a girl after his own heart! Ruthlessly he dumped Thea to the floor, swiveled on his bed, and peeked out the narrow crack between the edge of the curtain and the window frame.
Out in the sunny street, looking over the picket fence into the yard, stood a tall, straight girl in jeans, and a taller, straighter old lady in a denim jumper. No Bibles, but both had a fanatical look about the mouth, a look of intolerance.
“Chickens are disgusting things,” said the woman, after they had watched the baby chicks a few minutes.
“Why?”
“Oh, the way they peck at one another. If one is hurt, showing a little blood, or it looks the least bit different, they’ll all gang up and peck the poor thing to death. Makes you ashamed.”
“Ashamed?” The girl looked, frowning, from her grandmother to the baby chicks. At last her expression lightened, and she shook her head decisively.
“No. Now you sound like Dad.”
“How so?”
“Oh, he loves to do that—point out something that animals do that seems vicious, and … and … uh …”
The old lady had made some mental leap and now looked perfectly enlightened, but she let the girl struggle on.
“Well, he somehow makes out from that that the world is basically bad, that people can’t help the terrible things they do, and we might as well not even try. And I hate it!”
“Hmm,” said the old lady thoughtfully. “Deriving a moral principle from animal behavior—that’s quite sentimental thinking, Kris.” The idea appeared to give her satisfaction.
Then she looked at the chicks again, and the satisfaction disappeared. “On the other hand—”
“Oh, look!” the girl interrupted, pointing at Phillip’s window.
Phillip jerked back from the curtain and flattened against the wall, heart beating rapidly. I won’t answer the door, he thought. No one’s home.…
“Her name is Thea,” said the girl. “Isn’t she neat?”
“Oh, yes, she’s somebody!”
Phillip relaxed against his wall. Thea stood with hind paws still on his bed and front paws on the windowsill, her body stretched long across the gulf.
“Show-off!” he hissed. Ignoring him, Thea got gracefully onto the windowsill and settled herself, like a queen granting audience. She was purring.
“My, she’s quite a little minx!” said the old lady.
“Hi, Thea,” called the girl. “Remember me?”
Wait a minute! thought Phillip. How does she know Thea’s name? He risked another furtive peep but had to duck back too quickly. She did look familiar.
“Well, we shouldn’t hang around too long,” said the girl when they had admired Thea some more. “What if they come home?”
“I thought that was the whole idea.”
“No-ooo! Aunt Mil!”
“Sorry. I misunderstood.…” The voices were starting to recede. Phillip came boldly to the window, watching the two straight backs disappear up the street. They were talking again. What had the old lady been about to say when she was interrupted? On the other hand …
The girl made a wide gesture as she disappeared beyond the third house down. What on earth were they talking about?
“No, Th
ea, you can’t come.” He ducked out his bedroom door and shut it quickly in Thea’s face; out the kitchen door, down the driveway, stopping at the end, and watching the two high heads until they turned the corner. Then he sprinted after them. Please, nobody see me doing this. Nobody’s looking out their window …
When he reached the corner, the two figures had disappeared.
Phillip shoved his hands in his pockets and began walking rapidly, glancing down the side streets as he passed, whistling. He spotted his quarry in the third street and turned down it, slowing his gait to a shamble, looking innocently into front yards. The girl and old lady turned in at a hedge and a red mailbox, and he remembered—a half-seen girl sitting on the steps, Thea running toward him. “Don’t be taken in,” she had said.
Just for the looks of it, he loitered down to the end of the street, which dropped off like their own in a steep, eroding sandbank, down to the river. There he stood, watching the broad, murky, undramatic flow. How do I get to know them? he wondered. How do I find out what they’re talking about?
He thought of a way, but by the time his chance came, he was almost too angry to use it.
It was Friday night. They were going to the mall with some of the new friends his mother had made so easily, and Phillip had refused to come along.
“Phillip’s being difficult,” his mother said at last to the other woman. She laughed to show it didn’t matter, but Phillip heard the angry edge to her voice.
“Well,” said the other woman heartily, “all teenagers rebel. Comes with the territory.”
Oh, Christ! Phillip swung away to stare out the window, blowing his breath out audibly.
Carrie gave him a wink as she hitched her pocketbook strap up onto her shoulder. She was last out the door, and before she shut it, she called in softly, “So long, rebel. Don’t play with matches!”
Carrie understood, but she was still going to spend the evening at the mall.
He stood at the window watching them arrange themselves in the car; the other man driving, with his father in the front seat, the three women in the back. His father’s chest looked sunken, as if it had been hollow all along and a sudden blow had caved it in. Phillip wondered if that was real, or only his imagination. He’d heard his mother say hysterically, “His lungs are just gone!”
