Mercedes Morgan's Arc

Chapter 15 of 21

By dawn the hay ring was half gone. Mercedes counted the herd again at the tree line. Thirty-four. The bull stood apart from the cows, head up, nose working the wind toward the mountains behind them. He did not look at the trees ahead. He looked back the way they had come. Mercedes understood then. The old paths through the frozen forest were gone from living memory for these animals. The clearing at the tree line was strange ground. Once the hay ran out, the bull would turn the herd and lead them back up the pass toward the valley they knew. She needed a landmark he would accept. She thought of her grandmother's porch, the cut stacks, the old wintering ground two ridges west. She left the roan tied and ran the ridge line until she reached the flat below her family's home. Behind the woodshed, half buried under a tarp, stood a carved post her grandmother had kept upright when the herds still came. It was taller than Mercedes, cut with the head of a bull elk at the top and smaller faces down its length. The wood smelled of old smoke and cedar oil. Her grandmother had rubbed it every autumn for forty years. Mercedes pulled the tarp free and lifted the post onto her shoulder. Her grandmother watched from the porch and nodded once. Mercedes carried the post east through the snow, stopping twice to rest her arms, and reached the hay ring by midday. She drove the base into the packed snow at the north edge of the clearing, where the old elk paths opened into the trees. The carved bull faced the herd. Mercedes led the living bull toward the post with a handful of hay. He came stiff-legged, ears back. Ten paces out he stopped and lifted his nose to the carved face. He held there a long moment. Then he stepped forward and touched his muzzle to the wood. He did not startle. He did not turn. He lowered his head and began to feed at the base of the post, and the cows drifted in behind him and did the same. Mercedes knelt at the edge of the ring to catch her breath. Under her knee the snow had thinned to bare dirt where the herd had cleared it. A tuft of new grass showed through, blades upright and green against the black ground. She had not seen green in four months. The thaw had reached the tree line. The three days of hay would not need to stretch as far as she had feared. The herd was facing the forest now, and the ground under them was starting to wake.