A river lay well below the hillside trail, winding in S-curves through a meadow intensely green and starred with blue and crimson and gold like one of Sandra Arminger’s neo-Persian carpets, only at this distance the color was more of an is-it-there mist flowing over the velvet, teasing the edge of vision. Beyond was the darker green of forest, turning to blue distance rising to the white teeth of the Absaroka Mountains.
It wasn’t a painting, though: it was full of life. A bison bull shook his bearded head and snorted as red-and-white mustangs swept by with their tails raised like plumes. A pack of lobos had started the horses moving, but they skirted the bison warily as they followed, their heads held high to keep them over the level of the grass. From a twisted spruce below the hillside trail two golden eagles launched themselves into the cool limpid air, banking out over the murmuring white water with the feathers splayed like fingertips on their yard-long wings. Waterfowl rose up in a cataract from a quiet stretch surrounded by willows where a bear nosed through the shallows, climbing like a twisting spire of smoke.
“Now that’s pretty,” Ian said, and everyone nodded agreement; several whistled softly.
Nearby tiny hummingbirds with iridescent orange-red throats circled each other in a buzzing blossom-war.
“Even compared to the Drumheller Rockies, that’s pretty,” he went on. “Even compared to Banff, that’s pretty.”
“Damn, yes,” Ingolf agreed. “I bet the winters here are something to behold, though, even compared to where I grew up.”
“Oh yeah,” Cole said. “Lucky to get two months without a frost around here, probably, up this high.”
He was a native of the interior, if considerably south of this, drier and at a lower altitude. Ian nodded too, looking around at the vegetation. He had a right to be a connoisseur of winters, since the Peace River country lay a thousand miles to the north. The two Mackenzies and the Dúnedain winced a little. They were from the Willamette, off west of the Cascades. Where winter meant chilly and rainy and muddy, not howling weeks of freezing blizzard that could snatch you dead. Campaigning and travel had shown them the difference.
“I’ve done winter training, ski and mountain stuff, in country a lot like this,” Cole said. “And it’s no joke. But it’s pretty then, too. Sort of. . pure.”
They all took a moment to absorb the quiet. The two Mackenzies drew their pentagrams and nodded, then opened their water-bottles and poured libations. Mary put her hand to her heart and bowed. It was actually difficult to say what part of what she saw was prettiest, like a complex piece of music; she’d heard that people came from far away just to walk these woods before the Change, and she could believe it.
The three representatives of the Morrowland Council halted too; they didn’t say anything directly, but they did make that salute gesture again.
“A Scout is reverent,” one of them added.
The whole group-less the unseen but definite escorts who were pacing them out of sight of the trail-stopped at a shelter built into the side of a hill for the night. It wasn’t elaborately camouflaged, but it was fairly inconspicuous anyway, being three-quarters sunk into the slope. There was a bark-shingled roof extending a bit outward over walls of notched logs; a trickle of spring had been turned into a rock pool. A corral stood not far away with stone posts and wooden rails, and a lean-to packed with hay-baled hay tied with straw twists, which was an oddly advanced touch for the backwoods.
Aha, they do use horses, at least sometimes, she thought. Those horse apples are about a day old. This run is a test, too.
The interior of the shelter was interesting, when they spread their bedrolls; neatly folded robes of tanned wolverine fur tied to the bottom of the bunks, mattresses of fresh spruce boughs, clean polished wood table and benches, and a puncheon floor. The stove was an ingenious little affair of stone and metal sheets at the rear with a water heater of salvaged aluminum around the flue, and the food-store was built into the wall where the natural temperature-control of the earth would help it, lined with more aluminum to keep the vermin out.
There was also an arrangement for a block of ice to be inserted above and a water-drain below, and within Ian found a dozen two-foot cutthroat trout, neatly gutted, and bundles of greens and roots. He looked at the contents, at what in the way of herbs and ground roots was racked beside the stove in the usual miscellany of salvaged glass and some rather attractive glazed modern pottery, and rubbed his hands.
“Nothing like running all day to work up an appetite,” he said. “Anyone else volunteering for dinner detail?”
“Caillech is a monstrous fine hand with trout,” Talyn said helpfully, peering over his shoulder and smacking his lips.
“Volunteer yourself, man!” she said, taking his bonnet off for a moment and whapping him with it playfully.
“Well, if it were duck or grouse, I would,” he replied reasonably, adjusting the headgear. “I’m better at those. It’s respectful to make the most of the Mother’s bounty, isn’t it, now? If it’s my part to enjoy eating it, then that I’ll do, as my duty.”
“I hereby volunteer you to go fetch the wood, I do,” she said, then went with him.
“Nobody else?” Ian said, stripping off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves and beginning to scrub his hands. “All right, then.”
“I’ll take first watch,” Ingolf added.
Mary had seen any number of small groups stranded in the wilds by the Change, though most had headed in to more civilized climes as soon as they could; apart from the Eater bands of the death zones, of course. But. .
“A Scout apparently knows what the hell they’re doing,” Ingolf said to her as she sat beside him on a rock. “I’ve seen plenty of wild men but not many who knew their way around the woods as well. Old Pete’s folks, yeah, though they weren’t as. . as tidy. Remember the Southsiders that Rudi picked up east of the Mississippi, Jake sunna Jake’s crew? They didn’t know anything.”
“You took the words out of my mouth; they barely knew what made babies. Or the London Bunch, north of the lakes? They were pathetic. At a guess, the Morrowlanders have a lot of these little places as bases for hunters and people working the woods for foods and medicinals and whatnot,” she said. “We have something similar in the Ranger staths, though the climate’s a lot nicer in the Willamette.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t like to go through February here in a flet. This dugout thing would be comfy enough even in winter. . even in the winters they’re supposed to get around here. . but you’d go crazy after a while if you couldn’t get out. Notice the ski-racks, and the second entrance up on the roof section? Back in Richland we do a lot of our heavy hauling in winter-frozen rivers are best of all. Maybe that’s how they keep from going crazy, spend all their spare time studying for Badges and such.”
She nodded. He’d picked a good spot to overlook the little way station; from the tracks he wasn’t the first to do so.
“You took the words out of my mouth again, lover,” she said. “When he was chasing us for the Cutters, George called the Tracker. .”
“Followed us over ground where you’d swear an eight-hitch yoke of plow oxen wouldn’t leave a trace,” Ingolf agreed.
“They’d make valuable allies,” Mary said, her enthusiasm growing. “Not just getting out of our way, I mean.”
Her husband nodded, but frowned as well. “Hmmm. There’s a drawback there.”
“What?”
“We’re supposed to be impressing them. I think these folks make knowing how to do stuff a real big part of their opinion of someone.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Yah, but they’re more. . more formal about it.”
The three Council members were at least impressed with Ian’s pinion-nut crusted trout, accompanied by twice-boiled burdock and roasted arrowroot and bannocks of sweet camas flour studded with dried huckleberries, with a side of Miner’s Lettuce salad with wild onions. The representative of the House of Girls shooed the men out after the meal; evide
ntly a Scout was clean, too, and women got first crack at the hot water and essence of soaproot.
Much later, Mary murmured to Ingolf in the darkness:
“And a Scout likes privacy. Or at least this Ranger does.”
He sighed.
• • •
Ingolf looked down on the Scout headquarters not long after dawn; the air was still chill and a little damp.
“Well, that explains how they got here,” he said.
It was on the shores of a great lake, so broad that the water stretched north almost beyond sight even from this elevation, with occasional small islands and a few sails visible on fishing boats and a landing-stage for big birch-bark canoes. There had been some buildings on the rocky edge before the Change, but it was obvious they’d burned that very night. Mostly because the midsection and tail of the great flying machine still stood, with the scorched and crumpled ruins of the nose stuck into the green scrub that covered the ruins. Bits and snags stood up, and most of a stone chimney. Parts of the aircraft were skeletal where the sheathing had been torn off; aluminum was easy to work and had dozens of uses.
Ian frowned. “That’s a. . 747,” he said. “I think. You can still see the sort of hump thing at the front, it’s not all burned.”
“What?” Talyn said. “Those numbers would mean what, precisely?”
“A type of big flying machine. They could carry hundreds of people.”
They all looked at him; it wasn’t the sort of remark you expected of a Changeling like themselves.
“We had a recognition course for recruits to the Force,” he said, a little defensively. “I don’t know why. Nobody ever thought to change it, eh?”
Talyn snapped his fingers. “Yes, in the ‘Song of Fire and Grief.’ The Chief, the Mackenzie Herself, she saw one such fall and burn in Corvallis on the night of the Change! And made the song about it later.”
Cole whistled softly. “Alyssa goes on about what a great pilot the Bear Lord was, to get a little plane with six people in it down safely. And he landed in a river. Whoever was flying that thing must have been. . something. I’d have expected it to fall like a brick.”
They all nodded somberly. They all knew that the ancients had been able to make huge things fly, but suddenly seeing this-as big as a northern baron’s hall-made you feel it all of a sudden.
The modern buildings became clearer as they approached. From a few remarks their close-mouthed hosts had made Ingolf had gathered that there just weren’t all that many Morrowlanders, less than a thousand and possibly much less, and that this was their winter HQ. Certainly there was plenty of space in the building they were shown to; a room for each couple and one for Cole, and a big dining chamber with only a few other people to share the camas griddle cakes with spicy caramel-tasting birch syrup and-what seemed to be a special treat for guests-French fries, followed by wild blueberries and-another treat-cream. They were courteously shown to a bathhouse afterwards too, before strong hints brought them out again.
Now in summertime most of the Morrowlanders were probably spread out through this vast stretch of wilderness, laying in the food and other goods they’d need in the long deep-snow winters. That made what they’d done here all the more impressive, not least the inconspicuous but substantial storage cellars and icehouses, recognizable mainly by the doors set into what looked like low mounds.
The buildings scattered amid raised-bed gardens and pruned bushes and corrals and many trees were deep-notched logs on fieldstone, carefully set into the south-facing sides of the low hills. The largest reared like a whale among minnows, and from the color of the carved and varnished wood it was the newest, but like the others it had a steep-pitched roof covered in sod. That gave them an intensely green look, like great plants, colored with flowers that must be carefully cultivated despite their wild exuberance.
“Looks just a wee bit homelike,” Talyn said in fascination. “But more spread out than one of our Duns. No wall. And no grain fields and not much in the way of herds, either, just these little bits of garden. They must live mostly from the hunt and what they gather.”
The carving was less ornate and less colorful than, say, Dun Juniper, though there was plenty of it, mostly themed on animals and plants, and including inlays of different woods and colored stones. There were totem-pole-like erections in front of a collection of smaller but still big buildings surrounding the main one.
“What are those?” Ingolf asked.
“Those are the Houses of the Troops, and each Patrol has its Den,” George Tracker said; they seemed to use their epithets as surnames, more or less. “They stand around the House of the Eagle.”
Then, taking over the role of tour guide for a moment, he went on:
“That is the Hall of Boys, and that the Hall of Girls, where they meet for special ceremonies. There are the smithies, and the woodworking shop, and the library. That log flume brings springwater for drinking and washing and to turn wheels; it was finished the year I became a Bearer of the Eagle. That long building is-”
Nice composting toilets, too, Ingolf thought; that had impressed him most of all. Same system we used back in Richland.
The first Bossman of the Free Republic of Richland had been a gadget enthusiast, always pulling a new notion out of his books or someone’s memory or from some traveller. He had sent artisans around to show people how to build the composting thunderboxes a couple of years after the Change, and met warm agreement among a people no longer living in fear of starvation and ready for something better than smelly, dangerous makeshifts. The Bossman had been a self-important fussbudget and easy to mock-Ingolf and some friends had gotten a memorable whaling with a hickory-switch from Ingolf’s father the Sheriff for carving a roadside stump into a caricature of him just before a visit to Readstown-but he’d had some good ideas. And he’d been a much harder man than you’d think to look at him or listen to him burbling about how to rig a side-delivery hay rake or a silage chopper, though he’d used others to do the bone-breaking and head-knocking parts of the job.
Ingolf wouldn’t have expected something so sophisticated in a place so rustic as this, though. The settlement smelled clean, too, with less stink and flies than nearly any warm-season farming community. To be sure, they didn’t have much livestock, which were inescapably messy no matter how careful you were. The water and forest were the strongest odors; there was wood smoke, of course, and cooking, and the scorched metal, glue, leather and sawdust of crafts. His nose didn’t detect the unmistakable reek of a tannery, either, which meant they must have put it elsewhere.
The people were out to see the newcomers when they emerged from getting settled, outsiders obviously not being something that were seen very often here. They were all dressed pretty much like the three representatives of the Council, though less elaborately. Apparently everyone wore knee-length pants in warm weather, roughly the way Mackenzies all wore kilts; many of the young children had nothing on but the shorts. There was a lot less jostling, pointing or exclaiming than he’d have expected from backwoods villagers-probably less than there would have been in Readstown, and certainly than in some other parts of Richland he could name. The hunting dogs that were fairly numerous were well-mannered too, hardly any barking and most staying close to their people even while their noses followed the stiff-legged strut Artan and Flan put on in a strange pack’s territory.
Speaking of children and older people. .
“Notice something about these folks?” he said to Mary.
“Lots,” she said. “What in particular?”
“There are plenty of kids, but the adults are all my age or a bit older, and the Changelings, the born Changelings-”
Strictly speaking, Changelings were people born since the Change, of course. More loosely the term included people like Ingolf who’d been young children at the time; he’d been six going on seven. If you used both senses together Changelings were a majority of the population now nearly everywhere, or would be soon. Here they were apparen
tly everybody.
“-just coming full-grown, only a few with babies of their own.”
She blinked and he could sense her focusing, counting and averaging-numbers were something you had to be able to do well on reconnaissance.
“You’re right,” she said. “Like a clump, and their kids, and only a few people in between. It’s a bit odd. And you don’t expect a lot of really old people but there aren’t any. Nobody even as old as Uncle John and Uncle Alleyne, who were about my age at the Change. I’ve never seen anything exactly like it, and we’ve been from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back. Odd.”
“No it ain’t,” he said. “Scouts, before the Change that is, they were kids and youngsters.”
In Readstown these days you were a baby up until you could get around, use the outhouse on your own and do simple chores, then a kid until puberty, and then a youngster until you grew enough and learned enough to do the things a grown man or woman did. After that you sort of slid into being a full adult over the next few years, capping it off when you got your own house and a job or farm or workshop or whatever and started your own family.
Most places were roughly the same, though he was vaguely aware that they’d seen things differently before the Change when being a kid had lasted a lot longer. That Scouting business had been part of the way they stretched things out back then. It must have been irritating, since as he remembered it he’d been eager to grow up.
“My dad was a. . what did they call it. . Scoutmaster. And my older brother was a Scout, and they talked about it a little now and then. And they had some books about it that were real useful, practical stuff. Nobody kept it up after the Change where I come from, though. Too busy.”
“No need, either, I imagine,” Mary said thoughtfully.
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