Chapter 4 The God of the Lost
The God of the Lost
i
In his dream Blacktail was caged in Car, a great long one.
It pulled a small herd of beasts behind it like an ox pulling a plow.
It roared down a road at a speed even the fastest hunter could not hope to match.
In his dream he was not a wolf. He was something else, something large and slow and dull-witted.
Prey, he thought. I am a cow, of all things, I am a calf and I am prey.
In thinking this, he fell into another life, swallowed whole.
I am young, he thought. My earliest memory is of the spring.
I am young, and the foul breath of Car and the stinks of the black path are beautiful to me, because I have never been out of my pen, where the dung rises to the top of my hooves and splashes when I move.
Before this morning I never suspected that there was anything more to the world.
But now the wind has freed me from the scent of my dung.
I know smells for the first time. I can see clouds.
But I am afraid. It is not the great speed or the strange scents that make me fear.
I do not understand what is happening, but I know that my mother screamed when she saw me enter Car.
She screamed, but she could do nothing. All our mothers screamed, because the herd has a long memory.
It remembers back to the green pastures of used-to-be, when we grazed free and the bulls protected us and no one splashed in dung.
All our mothers screamed, because in all that long memory no one who was summoned to Car has ever returned.
Car stopped. The cage clanged open. In this terrible place that was the best thing the calf had ever known, he and Blacktail cried out as one.
Men were coming for him.
Their hands stank of blood.
—
Blacktail jerked. Only half awake, he scrambled to his feet, snapped out at the air. But instead of crunching bone and sweet blood, his mouth snapped down on nothing. He blinked. Right. Another dream. Not real. Can’t hurt you.
In a way, though, it could. He slept on a thin crest of ridge bounded on both sides by sheer rocky drops.
In his terror, he had jerked upright without thinking.
Now the edge of the cliff lay a bare paw’s breadth away.
Only luck had spared him. Blacktail blew out a long, slow breath and peeked over.
He suppressed a shudder. He had learned a great deal of ridges since he and the Old Kitty Mother parted ways.
To his now-experienced eye, this particular one seemed small, but only in the sense that if he fell off it he would likely die from the impact rather than starving to death before he hit bottom.
It was spring now, or near enough. The land of his childhood was far behind him, as were the foothills where he met the Old Kitty Mother. The horde of hunting men and their slave dogs had long since faded into the distance. Perhaps they have forgotten me?
Probably not.
Not long after his chat with the Old Kitty Mother he passed into the proper mountains.
There he learned the shape and flavor of true misery.
He remembered looking at the mountains from a distance and thinking that they appeared rather handsome—especially at sunset.
But up close they were an endless series of frozen boulders overlaying drops sheer enough to make a falcon puke.
He spent the winter picking his way across them and starving as he did it.
He had been preoccupied with trying not to die, so most of his memories of the journey were rather vague. He considered this a great mercy.
He had never been this far south. Come to that, he had never known anyone who had been this far south.
The land here was different from what he knew.
Mostly what grew here were bushes, deep green and prone to prickly thorns.
There were trees, yes, but not many—certainly not enough in any one spot to call it a forest. Those trees he did see seemed to his eye to be in a certain amount of pain.
Their bare branches twisted skyward, grasping at a sun that blazed, but brought little warmth.
Short, thick, and stumpy, they smelled dry.
There were others like nothing he had seen before—stumpy and leafless, but studded with needles up and down the trunk.
Around the time of the last full moon, or perhaps the one before that, he had been forced to a halt.
He remembered that day well enough. In the afternoon he glimpsed flat land through a mountain pass and rejoiced, thinking the worst was behind him.
Then, just before dusk, the wind began. He took shelter in the shadow of a boulder that overhung a ledge barely wider than his body.
The storm howled for three full days and nights, perhaps longer.
The cold was bitter. Snow lay over him in drifts.
Only occasionally did the wind lull enough for him to hear the rumbling of his stomach.
If some witch had come to him then, offering to magic him out of the rocky plains in exchange for offering his hindquarters as a sanctuary for starving fleas, he might well have accepted.
But the storm passed. He found a stream that was drinkable, if a tad salty. Desert rodents were stringy but edible.
Now it was springtime, or near enough. There were still hills, but the proper mountains were behind him, only their peaks visible over the horizon. Even the memory of that storm was enough to make him shiver, but this night was pleasant.
The question, though, is what to do now. The way down off this ridge was clear to him. It was easy enough and safe. Nonetheless, he had lain here for a day and a night, unsure what to do next.
At the foot of the cliff lay a great road, wider than any he had ever seen.
Once he had thought of Car as a beast, a hunter something like himself.
Now he wondered. Herds of them thundered by in either direction.
The ones closest to him moved west. All day and all night they stampeded as an endless stream, moving as fast as anything he had ever seen.
Beyond those, an equally great number moved toward the east. They, too, were in quite a rush.
Blacktail could make no sense of it. If they had all been moving in the same direction, he might believe that they were fleeing something or moving toward food.
Or maybe migrating? But it seemed to him that just as many moved one way as the other.
If that is so, why don’t they all just stay where they are and save themselves the effort? They must be very stupid indeed.
Still, he remembered the sacrificial squirrels he had seen.
Stupid or not, Car had ground them beneath its hooves well enough.
The tiny black eye, squeezed from its socket, regarding me.
Mindful of this, he waited all day and all night for the last of them to pass by so that he might make his way across in safety.
But that, apparently, was not to be. Sometimes they were many and sometimes they were few, but the migration never truly stopped.
He pondered it as he watched. Just after sunset of the second day, understanding came to him.
At night, when the eyes of Car shone out in darkness, the black path looked to him like a river made of light.
That, he realized, is the essence of it.
Car moves along the black path not as a migrating herd, but as water in a river.
He sighed. He had his answer, but like most things lately, the taste of it was bitter.
Herds, no matter how large, may be outwaited.
Sooner or later you will see the last of them.
Sighing, he gathered his feet under him and stood. But rivers must be forded.
He picked his way down the incline, his heart hammering in his chest. Once his foot dislodged a small avalanche of pebbles, something he had not done since he was a puppy. He cursed himself for his carelessness, but Car did not seem to notice. The sound was lost in its endless roar.
A shallow ditch ran alongside the path, half filled with black water. The things that floated in it stank of rotting man-food, carcasses, piss. He lay in it anyway, nervous to be without cover so close to the stampeding herd of Car.
In the predawn gloom, Car’s white eyes were clearly visible.
At first Blacktail had had trouble judging their distance from him.
After some days’ study, he realized that if he looked on them as prey, he could predict the time of their passing with the same casual precision that he predicted elk breaking from the herd.
After this one passes, there will be a gap. He stood and made ready to run.
This close, the wind of Car’s passing blasted his fur off to the side and rocked him on his feet. My god, he thought. It’s so huge.
With a leap and a roar, he sprang from cover and began his crossing.
The first half of the distance, he knew, would be easy.
In the late hours the road was less busy.
Car moved faster then but stuck mostly to the side farthest from him.
That was good. Even so, the road was far from empty.
Halfway across, he heard the roar of one bearing down on him.
He skidded to a stop and glanced to his left, just as Car shot by directly in front of him.
Half a beat later another—perhaps its mate?
—went by to his rear, nicking the tip of his tail as it passed.
He sprang forward into the gap left by their passing, then leapt over the stone barrier that divided the eastern migration from the west. He was halfway across now.
The copse on the far side felt very close, the safety of it tantalizing.
His heart hammered in his chest. He sprinted for the far edge as fast as he had ever run.
The muscles of his hind legs burned. The pads of his paws gripped the stone beneath his feet.
Almost there, he thought. That wasn’t so—