Mercedes Morgan's Arc

Chapter 13 of 21

By late morning the last pinch of hay in Mercedes's sleeve was gone. She had dropped it at a bend in the spruce and watched the bull elk sniff the snow where it fell. He took two steps, stopped, and lifted his head. The cows behind him fanned wider. Without a fresh scent ahead of them, the column began to loosen. A young cow drifted toward the trees on the left. Another turned her ears toward a gap in the pines. Mercedes felt the line breaking under her feet. She had days of trail left and nothing to lay on the snow. She waved the horses to hold and stepped off the path. The wind was still running downhill, in her favor. She knelt in the snow and pulled her grandmother's pouches from inside her coat, spilling what was left onto a scrap of hide. Dried spruce tips. Crushed lichen. A pinch of the herbs that had masked her at the summit. She needed the elk to smell home, not hay. She stripped a handful of green spruce from a low branch, broke it small, and mixed it with the dried tips and the last of the lichen. She wound the bundle tight with a length of cord from the sled and tucked a sprig of dry heather into the knot. Then a shadow moved between the trees and Celestia Wayfinder stepped through the crust without breaking it. She did not speak at first. She looked at the bundle in Mercedes's hands, took it, and pressed her thumb against the knot. When she gave it back the bundle was warm. "Drag it," Celestia said. "Do not drop pieces. Let the whole trail be one scent." Then she was gone between the trunks. Mercedes tied the bundle to a length of rope and looped the other end to her belt. She walked back to the head of the column and started downhill at a steady pace, letting the bundle drag behind her through the snow. The bull elk lowered his head and sniffed the line she had cut. He took one step, then another. The cows closed up behind him. The scent held on the snow longer than hay ever had, and the herd tightened again into a single column. Mercedes counted them as they passed a split pine. Thirty-four. She walked on, the bundle dragging, the horses and the cub following on the sled. The frozen forests were still days below her. But she no longer needed to feed the trail. The trail fed itself now, and the herd came down behind her.