Page 59 of Into the West

He was nagged about that wretched boar once the last barge entered the forest proper, but every time he checked, the dog Howler was doing his self-appointed duty, keeping the stupid creature from going off the path. Howler must have herded pigs before this, because he was doing all the right things that worked with a pig, and not doing things that worked with sheep but would not work with a pig. Staring, for instance. A dog could always get a sheep to move by staring aggressively at it. Pigs didn’t care. No, Howler interposed himself between the pig and the forest, if need be making short little runs at it. It almost seemed as if the dog could read the pig’s mind, although what it was probably doing was reading the pig’s body language. Before the boar could make up its mind to go in the wrong direction, Howler made it impossible to go there.

The poor lad was getting tired, though. Belatedly, now Kordas wished he had known about this sooner. A sugar beet dangling from the side of the barge just out of reach would have gotten that wretched pig’s attention; a sugar beet was now, and truffles in the forest were maybe. Such an immediate offer of a reward presented something desirable much better than the forest could. Alas, there was nothing like that in any of these barges.

If I’d known about this earlier, we could have trapped the damned thing.

But most probably the pig’s owner hadn’t wanted to bother him about it, thinking the problem was trivial, and would solve itself—either the pig would finally decide to rejoin its herd, or something would eat it. It had probably never occurred to the man that the “something” could prove to be a hazard.

And here it is. The unexpected. A thing I didn’t anticipate because it never occurred to me that any of these animals would manage to dislodge their charms.

In the case of the pigs and cattle, it should have been impossible, because the charms were circlets of bent metal like earrings, pierced through the thick part of their ears. But . . . somehow this boar had lost his, and not by tearing it out of his ear, either.

Maybe I should ride up to the next part of the convoy and get something a pig would think of as a treat. A nice smelly chunk of cheese . . .

Maybe it was just that the pig, and Howler the dog, represented the very last of the expedition passing through this blasted place. Until they were all through safely, it didn’t feel like he could lower his vigilance, which irked him. There always has to be just one more thing, doesn’t there? He sure didn’t want to send anyone back to meet him with boar bait, and by the time he rode up to the kitchen and back, they’d be almost out of the forest. To be honest, he didn’t want to put more strain on poor Arial. There was a limit to the Golds’ endurance, and he had the feeling she was close to it, riding up and down through a stressful place with scarcely a pause all day, every day, and today, most of it being at a trot or canter.

I can’t ask her to do more. It isn’t fair.

He patted Arial’s neck. She hadn’t gotten used to that undercurrent of hate, either. She wasn’t lathered, but her coat was damp from nerves, and he suspected it was only her trust in him that kept her on the now-well-worn path.

Dammit, woods! he thought with irritation. We are leaving enough lovely manure to keep you thriving for the next decade. The least you can do is show some gratitude!

The forest was, apparently, indifferent to his wishes. It simply seethed.

By noontime, half this section was finally out in the clear—if freezing—air.

We’ll be out of here well before sundown. He concentrated on that. Can’t be soon enough. I’m getting edgier, and I thought I was already too tense about this. Maybe I’m still not sharp enough about it? Being this alert is brutal.

When three-fourths of the section was out of the forest, he stopped riding up and down the riverbank and stayed with that last barge of the last string. He’d heard the scraping, tapping sounds from every barge that passed, where he’d surmised an underwater tree snag dragged against them. It was then he heard a loud thunk and scraping noise, and he spotted a chunk of broken barge about the size of three men pulled along in the last barge’s wake. The barge was taking on water, and with clearly audible cursing, the old man scrambled to reach the bow. Shouts from further up the string took on urgency. Shudders and cracking sounds convulsed the entire string. The old man reached the fore of the last barge, retrieved a hand axe from the fore’s toolstand, and half-leapt, half-fell to the second-to-last barge when the slack between them suddenly vanished. The string had stopped, held up by the disintegrating last barge, which was likely seized dead by the underwater snag.

Kordas knew they didn’t have much time. Arial gave him a last dash, which brought him waterside to the wreck. “Come on!” he yelled at the old man, who was hacking at the mooring ropes looped to the jammed-up timberheads, stretched taut from the wreck to the barge he was now on. All he got back from the old man was cursing, and more axe strikes.

Behind the barges, three dragonflies landed on the large piece of boat wreckage. Then six.

They left the Forest—

Rose leapt from Arial, and in ten strides, she was on the barge beside the old man. Kordas saw Rose do the only overtly rude thing he’d ever seen her do: she forcefully took the axe from the old man and took over the job of hacking at rope. The man tumbled back and scrambled to get up as the aft of the barge inexplicably heaved up, and its hull cracked amidship. Crates and bundles slid forward and crashed, and this sudden new danger made Rose stop her axe-work and grab at the man. Unfazed, the man yelled to his dog, even while Rose was bodily hoisting him.

The water frothed below the broken barges.

In the Red Forest, dragonflies gathered in geometric patterns of two to six, staying at the edge of the trees’ shadows. They just—hovered.

The pig was more than worrisome now. It was actively trying to get past Howler, who was running out of strength. And just as the lead barge of this string rebounded from the sudden braking and broke free of the trees, what Kordas had been afraid of all along happened. The pig put on a burst of speed, feinted to the right, then dashed past the dog to the left, running faster than any pig had a right to, especially one that had been fretting and trying to dodge all day. The dog made a dash after the pig, but dropped to the ground at the old man’s shout of “Howler! Drop!” swiftly followed by “Howler! Here!” It was probably habit for him, because the disintegrating barge was no place the dog would want to be.

The dog recognized that his master was relieving him of duty, and with a sigh that visibly heaved his flanks, he padded wearily, and warily, toward the barge, its ears back and tail low. More crashes came from the two doomed barges. Loom hardware smashed against the loom’s own carefully stacked framework, exploding out in bursts of deadly splinters. On the second barge, waxed canvas tore loudly. Rose and the old man escaped over the split in the sawmill barge’s deck to the third-to-last barge—the one with two Gate uprights laid atop it. The uprights hadn’t been lashed down. Why bother? A barge was far too stable, and their weight too widely distributed to shift on the placid, slow river.

Below the water, something yellow, striped in ocher and black, punched upward through the barge hulls and flailed like an unbalanced auger, grinding the hull into sections no bigger than a pie pan. It was as if the riverbed was standing up.

The pig, aware that he was no longer being pursued by Howler, bolted into the Red Forest and began snuffling the ground.

Should I shoot the damned thing?

What if the forest reacts poorly to me killing something inside it?

What if the forest reacts poorly to—

But then all those thoughts became completely moot, as the pig found what it was looking for, rooted intensively at one spot, and finally employed its trotters and even teeth on the place. It had found something it wanted to eat.

So had the trees.