Mercedes Morgan's Arc

Chapter 14 of 21

By afternoon the trees thickened around Mercedes and the slope leveled. The scent bundle still dragged behind her, and the herd still followed. But she saw what lay ahead and her stomach dropped. The frozen forests below the pass were bare snow under bare trunks. There was no cleared ground, no cut hay, no browse dug out for wintering elk. If she led thirty-four animals down into empty woods, they would sniff the snow, find nothing, and drift apart into the trees by dusk. The scent trail could hold them in a line. It could not feed them. She stopped the horses at a break in the spruce and thought it through. Her family's home sat two ridges west, along the old elk paths. Her grandmother had kept the wintering ground when the herds still moved. Mercedes had helped stack hay there as a child, before she understood what the stacks were for. If any cut hay still stood in Icebenz, it stood there. She unhooked the sled from the roan and left the lame horse tied under a spruce with the cub. She kept the scent bundle on her belt and started west at a run, boots breaking crust, breath white in front of her. She came out of the trees above her family's home in the last hour of light. Smoke rose from the chimney. On the flat ground beside the house stood a fresh bundle of harvest hay, tied with cord, gold against the snow. Her grandmother stood on the porch in a brown coat, one hand on the rail. She had cut and stacked the hay herself. She lifted her chin when she saw Mercedes on the ridge and pointed at the bundle without a word. Mercedes climbed down. Her grandmother said the trapper had come through two weeks back and told her the elk were on the pass. She had cut what she could. It was enough for three days if Mercedes rationed it. Mercedes loaded the hay onto her back with a cord sling and turned east before full dark. Her grandmother watched her from the porch and did not call her back. Mercedes reached the sled by moonrise, hitched the roan, and laid the first handfuls of hay in a wide ring at the tree line where the slope flattened. She dragged the scent bundle through the ring twice to seal the smell to the ground. Then she walked up the line to meet the herd. The bull elk came first through the trees, followed by the cows, followed by the calves. They found the hay in the ring and lowered their heads to it. Mercedes counted them as they ate. Thirty-four. The wintering ground held them. She had three days to make it hold longer.