Clan of Three Staffs (Hill Chargers Book

1) Chloe Garner
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/clan-of-three-staffs-hill-chargers-book-1-chloe-garner/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Highland Love Comes Calling (The House of Clan

Sutherland Book 1) Celeste Barclay

https://ebookmass.com/product/highland-love-comes-calling-the-
house-of-clan-sutherland-book-1-celeste-barclay/

The Secrets That You Keep (Haven House Book 1) Chloe I.

Miller

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-secrets-that-you-keep-haven-
house-book-1-chloe-i-miller/

Amassed Forces (House of Garner Book 8) Erin R Flynn

https://ebookmass.com/product/amassed-forces-house-of-garner-
book-8-erin-r-flynn/

Awaken the Highland Warrior (The Connor Clan: Highland

Warriors Book 1) Anita Clenney

https://ebookmass.com/product/awaken-the-highland-warrior-the-
connor-clan-highland-warriors-book-1-anita-clenney/
Trapped: Brides of the Kindred Book 29 Faith Anderson

https://ebookmass.com/product/trapped-brides-of-the-kindred-
book-29-faith-anderson/

Fire Wolf: A Witch Shifter Paranormal Romance (Witch

Shifter Clan Book 1) C.D. Gorri

https://ebookmass.com/product/fire-wolf-a-witch-shifter-
paranormal-romance-witch-shifter-clan-book-1-c-d-gorri/

Connal (Immortal Highlander Clan MacMar Book 1): A

Scottish Time Travel Romance Hazel Hunter

https://ebookmass.com/product/connal-immortal-highlander-clan-
macmar-book-1-a-scottish-time-travel-romance-hazel-hunter/

Highland Rose (The Clan Sinclair Legacy Book 4) Celeste

Barclay

https://ebookmass.com/product/highland-rose-the-clan-sinclair-
legacy-book-4-celeste-barclay/

Highland Vows of Betrayal: Scottish Medieval Highlander

Romance (Love & Lies: The Chattan's Clan Secret Tales
book 1) Shona Thompson

https://ebookmass.com/product/highland-vows-of-betrayal-scottish-
medieval-highlander-romance-love-lies-the-chattans-clan-secret-
tales-book-1-shona-thompson/
Clan of Three Staffs
HILL CHARGERS
BOOK ONE
CHLOE GARNER
Copyright © 2023 by Chloe Garner
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a
book review.
 Contents

Clan of Three Staffs

Land of the Hillfathers

Verida, a City of Magic
About the Author
Post-Credits
 Clan of Three Staffs

“T here are wolves out with the horses.”

Rock was off of his pallet before he was even fully
awake, finding his sandals and reaching for his cloak. In the
corner of his tent, there was a spear and a staff, and he grabbed
both of those, going out into the dark and following the sound of
Edwin’s footsteps.
Normally, he wouldn’t have worried all that much about wolves
out with the horses. With the sheep, every day of the week. With
the chickens, he might not have gotten out of bed because the
damage was likely to be already done by the time he got there, and
the perpetrators long gone. The goats could hold their own, and the
cattle knew how to handle big predators, too, but he would have
gone to do his part in keeping the herds safe, there, as well. But the
horses? It was a fool of a wolfpack, likely half-starved and
desperate, that would intentionally go out among the Hill Chargers.
And Rock was hardly impartial, but he would tell anyone listening
that his Hill Chargers were the least likely to lose in a fight with
wolves among any of the clans. They were bigger than horses
anywhere else, and wise to the ways of the mountains, fast and
smart in ways that put hillfolk boys to shame until they reached a
certain age and maturity. Some of the young stallions would invite
such an opportunity, Rock thought, to test themselves against
something other than a trainer’s hand.
 But it was spring foaling season, and the Clan of Three Staffs
was stopped to let the foals get their legs under them before they
went on again. It was a predictable season each year when the clan
would seek out a well-sheltered spot where the herds could graze
without running risk of eating the grasses down to dirt and where
the boys could hunt and fish as they liked and the mares could take
to the woods for a time to drop a foal on their own, bringing back
the spindly-legged creatures when they were a few days old, and
then be ready to move on with the herd again within a few days
after that.
Paterack would protect the mares and the foals with his life, but
he was at a disadvantage with newborn foals at his back who
wouldn’t know how to flow with the herd and keep themselves out
of harm’s way. And they were in close to the mountains, here. There
was every reason to expect this was a mountain pack, down looking
for easy prey in the cold, dry season. They were big animals,
themselves, with canine teeth the size of Rock’s thumb, and they
knew how to take down the biggest animals with careful, patient,
sapping ploys that exploited every mistake until someone went
down.
There were footsteps around him as the other men followed the
noise of the boys who were shouting at each other and lighting and
staking the sentry torches.
Once again, the treatment here was different than normal.
Any other time, Paterack would run the herd and, once the men
arrived, simply keep the herd moving and under control while Rock
and the rest of the men hunted down the wolves and either killed
them or drove them away. It was important that the mares not panic
and scatter, but they were good about that. A horse preferred to
have a horse in front of it, when the world was dangerous, and they
clumped naturally.
The problem was that a new foal, through to at least three or
four months old, was like to get trampled in that chaos, so the boys
knew to keep away from Paterack and the herd, and just set up a
line of fire that the wolves would be loath to cross.
 The horses weren’t enthusiastic about fire, but the wolves feared
it like their own death, and Paterack new how to use the line of fire
to keep the wolves further from the herd as he moved them more
carefully. He knew that the boys weren’t going to come charging in,
and that the men would keep more distance, and he behaved
differently for this season.
All of the foals were his, as far as he was concerned, and he was
a bold, protective, and intelligent father to them.
There were the tiny squeals of fear and pain as the two littlest
foals struggled to keep up and the horses around them kicked and
nipped them to get them back where they needed to be, and a loud
whinny as one of the mares lost track of her foal.
Rock dropped his shoulders, running with the staff out to one
side and the spear to the other, listening to the footsteps around him
to make sure that the other men were on both sides as he listened
to what the boys were doing and what Paterack was seeing.
If anyone knew what was going on, it would be Paterack.
As far as Rock was concerned, the stallion was in charge until
Rock was absolutely certain that he had the situation in hand and
could manage it, himself.
There was a snort and two hard stomps as Paterack warned a
wolf back, and Rock angled toward it, making a hissing noise that
was answered on either side by the other men as they shifted into a
wedge that would follow him.
Over the sound of the milling feet and the unsettled horses, Rock
heard Paterack charge and retreat, snorting again.
The stallion would be focusing on keeping the wolves from
driving between himself and the herd, keeping the pack in front of
him and focused on him, but keeping them back from his sides. He
would hear the men coming and plan for it, but he would be keeping
his eyes forward until the wolves were no longer an immediate
threat.
As Rock got closer, he could hear the growls as the wolves
challenged Paterack, but he wasn’t worried about the ones that were
threatening the stallion.
He wanted to take out the ones backing those ones up.
 The ones looking for a path around that Paterack wouldn’t cut
off.
The ones who were looking past the stallion at the foals.
Lance, Rock’s brother, would have a long hunting knife and a
staff, and Furrow would just have a long, heavy staff. Alan carried a
spear and an axe. Every one of them had a role in a fight with
wolves, the way every one of the wolves knew his business going
against a stallion. The hill wolves knew what they were doing, going
against men, as well, but they knew better than to go against a Hill
Charger, in Rock’s experience.
They were up against mountain wolves, five to one odds, which
meant that they were up against beasts that could get the entirety
of Rock’s throat into their mouths, but who had only rarely if ever
gone up against a man with a weapon. The pixies and the stone
elves up in the mountains used magic against such packs, and the
other fae were more terrifying than the wolves; in an encounter, the
wolves were likely up against something that would attack with
claws and teeth just as readily as a weapon.
Rock was good with a weapon, as were all of the men.
And the women.
And the boys.
That was the nature of hill life.
You were born with a staff in your hand, they joked, and you
could use it to fend the dogs off before you could walk.
Because the dogs, good-natured as they were, they’d steal your
lunch if you weren’t looking.
There was a swish through the grass off to Rock’s left, and he
swept it with the staff, hitting a body that was too heavy to be one
of the boys. Something jolted away and Rock hissed again, drawing
the men in closer as he thrust the spear at the spot where he knew
the wolf no longer was, but he’d hit things like that before, when a
wolf had found itself indignant at being struck and recentered to
spring at him.
He swept the staff in a half-circle in front of him as Paterack
trumpeted a warning and thumped on the ground again, closer, now,
and off to Rock’s right.
 If he was reading it right, he was standing right in the middle of
what was going on, not entirely unlikely to stab a wolf with any
given thrust of the spear even as he used the staff to clear a range
around him.
There was a sharp squeal as someone off to his right found flesh
with metal, and the wolves broke their formation as they realized
that there was more at play than just the horses, now.
Rock saw a gray ruff up through the tall grass as the boys
continued to crowd closer with the sentry torches, one lighting the
next. They would leave a channel for the wolves to escape through,
because the worst possible outcome was one of the boys getting
mauled when the men set the wolves to retreat, but they would
inevitably push as hard as they dared, each of them taking a new
torch and running forward as far as he could stand it into the
illuminated edge of the darkness and staking it there before running
back to the group.
So long as they stayed together, like that, it was rare for one of
them to get involved, and Rock’s mind wasn’t on them at all, other
than that he appreciated the light.
He struck at where the ruff had been, the point of the spear
finding flesh, but not in a meaningful way.
The wolf whined and barked, then growled and charged him.
Rock was ready, locking the staff into the inside of his forearm and
knocking the wolf from his feet with a sweep of the staff. The wolf
scrambled, only just momentarily set off-balance, but Rock was on
him with the spear again, hitting fur several more times, but not
managing to draw blood again before the wolf turned and fled into
the grass once more.
Such was the way of wolves. They wanted to make him flee, or
to put him into a corner where they could harry him into a mistake.
They rushed and retreated, feinted and nipped and dithered. He
swept the staff behind him, hitting something just about in the nose
by the feel of it, and the second wolf darted away into the grass, as
well.
Paterack was getting closer, the angry stallion driving the wolves
into the teeth of the men, now, then Rock heard him leave, trotting
back to the herd and beginning to run a line back and forth along in
front of them, scenting and waiting to see if the wolves would
manage to resume their attack.
Rock hissed, finding the responding hisses and then clicking to let
Alan know that he was going to come pair up with him. Lance and
Furrow matched up as well, off two staff-lengths away, and the boys
stabbed more torches into the black earth, working on setting up a
boundary line now. They still wanted to let the wolves go without
any more fight than was necessary, but Paterack started to shift the
herd toward the curving line of torches, using them as a shield
against the pack.
And then there was nothing left around them.
They’d taken no pelts, which was a shame; wolfskin blankets
were a prize among the hillfolk, but it was a success, as night
ambushes went.
Paterack drove the herd in closer to the camp, still trotting about,
scenting the air and listening hard, but he was no longer signaling
that there were wolves about. Rock straightened, leaning on his staff
and looking over at Lance.
“Think we ought to get the sheep in,” he said, and Lance nodded.
“I’ll take the boys and drive them in closer,” he said.
The horses were always on the mountain-side of the camp. They
preferred it, and they would tell Rock and the rest of Clan Three
Staffs when predators came down out of the mountains. The wolves
would have retreated up toward the mountains again, but that was
no guarantee that they wouldn’t attempt to circle wide around and
look for less intimidating prey.
The cattle could hold their own for long enough for someone to
get to them, if the wolves came at them, but the sheep were easy
targets.
The chickens were kept in their hutches at night, at the center of
the main camp, so they were as safe as anything could be, just now.
Lance whistled for the boys and set off at an easy lope away
from the firelight, and Rock went over to extinguish the torches after
a while, standing watch with Furrow and Alan for another quarter
hour as Paterack finally settled and the mares stopped churning
around and started to space back out again.
“I’ll check the foals, if the mares will let me in close enough,”
Alan said, and Rock nodded, still leaning on his staff, his spear
balanced just point-up in his hand, the butt of it resting on the
ground.
“I’ll make sure to look at them all in the morning, too,” he said.
“Wish we’d put some of them down,” Alan said. “They know
where we are, now. They’ll just be back tomorrow.”
“I took blood,” Rock said. “They’ll think twice.”
There was the sound of barking as the herd dogs greeted Lance
and the boys and roused the sheep to get them moving.
Some of the clans kept herding dogs in with the horses, as well,
but Paterack loathed them, so Rock let him hold the herd himself.
The dogs would have known that the wolves were out, but they
were trained to always stay on their task. The sheep-dogs to the
sheep, the cattle-dogs to the cattle, the goat-dogs to the goats, and
the camp-dogs to the camp.
If the wolves had been in numbers large enough that Rock had
been concerned about the pack splitting and going after multiple
targets, he would have called to rouse the whole camp, and he
would have had the camp-dogs come out to go at the wolves with
them, but so long as they were dealing with a normal pack, there
was no reason to wake everybody up for this.
At the half hour, Alan came back and the sound of sheep bleating
died down again.
“Couldn’t get in close enough to see the black one, but the bay
with the star was fine, and the one with the blaze came to see if I
had a carrot for him.”
“He’s one of my favorites,” Rock agreed. “We’ll see how his
conformation comes out, but he ought to be a very nice lightfoot.”
“You going to breed Smarty again this year?” Furrow asked.
Each of the families had their own herds of sheep and cattle, but
they didn’t attempt to split the goats - that was a fool’s errand - and
Rock was technically responsible for the horses as the head of the
clan. All breeding decisions fell to him.
 “I’ll let Paterack cover her,” Rock answered. “Thought about
going with Tarawan, but his foals just haven’t been as tall as I’d
expected them to be.”
“Nice lightfoot though,” Alan observed.
“Full up to the point of trading them at this point,” Rock said.
“Don’t care how good they are, if there’s nothing to be done with
them.”
“I’ve been hearing there are a number of other clans looking to
trade for Tarawan foals, where they come out good lightfoots,” Alan
said.
“Rather pull her to camp through her heat than have her drop a
Tarawan, give her a year fallow,” Rock said. “Smarty has too much
power in her to just be lightfoot. Her wildstone foals are much more
useful.”
Furrow snorted.
Rock knew that he’d rather be breeding for earthgaits, but he
and Rock had had that argument too many nights to count over
pella, and this was not the night for it.
“Nothing wrong with giving her a year,” Alan said.
“Other than that we lose a Smarty foal for the year,” Furrow said.
Rock was with him, there. Smarty was a full sister of Rock’s
mount, Highness, and one of the best mares in the herd. The minute
she showed signs of foaling fatigue, he would put her off for a year,
but she seemed to thrive as a dam, and every one of her foals was a
prize. It was a shame to forgo one just because he was indecisive.
And he wasn’t.
Rock favored wildstones, unrepentantly and undisguisedly. Most
of the clan leaders did.
A lightfoot was a specialized type, one that could go over even
hard terrain without jolting about a rider. Not many of the clans
specialized in them, and the Three Staffs had half a dozen of the
best of them. They traded well, at high value, because when you
needed a lightfoot, nothing else was going to be good enough.
The clans rode about in wagons, when they weren’t fit to sit
astride a horse, but the wagons were rough and uncomfortable. A
lightfoot was comfortable for even the very elderly and for pregnant
women, so long as they were strong enough to sit upright.
Alan liked them because they brought prestige to the clan, and
Rock could understand that. But Paterack was one of the five
mountainborn stallions, the great treasures of the hillfolk, and it was
Rock’s sacred duty to not just the clan but to the hillfolk in general to
capture as much of the power of the stallion in his progeny as
possible.
Yes, it made for horses that were harder to handle, with more of
a sense of independence and agenda, but he scarcely minded that.
That was what Hill Chargers were.
And there was no guarantee that there would be more
mountainborn stallions coming.
No one had shown a talent for hillsinging, yet this generation.
Sometimes they would go a span of years without one, and it
had been ten years since Quen had been fit to do it. She was riding
a lightfoot, these days, not going up into the mountains.
One of Rock’s lightfoots, if he still knew the latest of it.
He sighed and picked up his staff.
“I’ll make sure the boys are back on watch,” he said. “To bed,
men.”
Alan clapped him on the shoulder and Furrow gave Rock a wave
before he set off.
Rock used his staff as a walking stick, giving Paterack and the
herd room as he went past to look for Lance. No reason to force the
stallion to reorganize the herd just because Rock had been by.
As he got far enough away from camp, everything was lit silver
under the stars, easy enough to see. He picked Lance out and
angled toward him as Lance did the same.
“Sent Edwin and Marco back up to stand watch,” Lance said as
he got close and they both angled back in toward camp.”
“Don’t expect we’ll see them again,” Rock said. “I got too much
blood on my spear. But they know where we are, now, and we aren’t
going anywhere for a bit.”
Lance nodded.
“Marco did a good job with the boys,” he said, and Rock grinned.
 “He’s a good boy. Good instincts.”
“You have firm plans with the Windbears for the season yet?”
Lance asked, and Rock shook his head.
“Skyview ceremony went well, but they wanted to wait to make
plans until they knew more of what they were going to be doing this
summer,” Rock said. “I suspect we’re going to be arranging a meet-
up with them yet this season so they can work out what they want
to do about it.”
“Moira wants to know whether he’s staying,” Lance said.
“Don’t know if he knows, yet,” Rock said. “Still caught up in the
idea of the girl. Hasn’t thought about the future that much.”
Lance smiled out ahead of them, glancing back as one of the
dogs whuffed and a sheep answered in disgust.
“Those were good days,” he said. “Anything is possible, at that
age.”
“What of Terro?” Rock asked. “He’s been making noises like he
wants to set out on his own, to my ears.”
“That’s what I hear, too,” Lance said. “But his mother isn’t ready
to hear it, and so we don’t discuss it. He’s still a boy, in her eyes,
and if he isn’t going to take a wife and settle with the clan, she puts
her face against it.”
Rock frowned, pausing as they got in closer to the camp.
“Hard, after losing one,” he said.
Lance nodded.
“I’m not pushing her,” he said. “And Terro knows she’s still
grieving. He’s not going to set out until she’s a bit more ready for it.”
“Can’t keep a wild colt from wanting his head,” Rock said.
“No,” Lance agreed. “But with the way of things, Marco probably
knows better than either of us, where his mind is.”
“He’s a good boy, too,” Rock said.
“Not good enough to take a wife and support the clan,” Lance
said, and Rock grunted.
“He’s a good hillman,” Rock said. “Moira’s grief aside, there’s no
call to try to tie him to the clan.”
“Easy for you to say,” Lance told him. “Your wife doesn’t cry at
night when she spots your son staring the mountains down.”
 “You think it’s the mountains?” Rock asked, and Lance sighed.
“There’s no telling. I see it, too, though. The mountains call him.”
The mountains were a hard life. There were men who were good
at it, who lived long lives up there, but mostly they went up and
never came back down again, and that was all the story the clans
ever knew of them.
Rock was glad that Marco didn’t seem to be leaning that way, but
he would have been proud of him, even if he had.
Hillfolk were drawn to hard lives because, like their colts, they
wanted to prove themselves against the greatest challenges.
They didn’t breed soft any more than the Hill Chargers did,
because soft things were food, up here. They didn’t live long lives.
Even considering that, Rock needed a next generation, and wild
colts didn’t lead clans and young generations.
“He’s a good boy,” Rock said. “He’s going to make a mark on the
world.”
“That he will,” Lance said, setting off once more.
At this range, they were in earshot of the camp, and they both
went quiet, to allow the rest of the camp to sleep.
The wolves were gone, for now, and tomorrow was a full day of
work. Everyone needed rest while they were able to get it. Rock
clapped Lance on the back, then went back into his tent with Jenny,
putting his staff and his spear away in the corner again, sliding his
sandals under the bed and reaching over to hang his cloak on the
peg on the rack with the lamp.
He didn’t need the lamp, to be able to find the peg, because it
was always in the same place, no matter how many times they tore
down the tent and put it back up again.
He and Jenny had been doing this for two decades, now, this
tent and a half dozen incarnations that had come before, as the
children had come to them and then grown out of the marital tent
into their own. At this point, they were probably in the last version of
tent they would use, if you neglected that the entirety of it would be
replaced, one piece at a time, for the rest of their lives.
He lay down next to his wife, who rolled over and checked his
chest for wounds.
 “One piece, then?” she asked drowsily.
“Haven’t got me yet,” he answered, rolling onto his side to face
her in the darkness.
“The one that does is going to have to face me,” she answered,
her hand dropping as she slipped back to sleep. He grinned at her in
the dark and nodded.
“Fearsome day that will be,” he murmured, closing his eyes and
falling quickly asleep, himself.

P ersephone stared down the goat , the whip in her hand of no use at
all, if he wasn’t going to let her in range of him, and the creature
knew exactly how long the flick of the whip was.
She’d caught him atop the chicken coops, chewing on the hens’
roosting straw, as though that had any food value to it at all.
He knew it didn’t.
Persephone knew it didn’t.
And yet, he ate it.
It was to annoy her.
“Jawbone, I swear to you, I will make a stew of you before the
season is out, if you do not…” Persephone muttered, edging forward.
The goat backed up, lower jaw working like playing a musical
instrument, and he flapped his ears at her.
The Clan of Three Staffs kept six breeds of goat, some for their
meat, some for their milk, and some because they were just too
durable to kill.
Jawbone was older than Persephone.
He didn’t let on that he knew it. Point of fact, he acted like a kid
anytime he caught anyone watching. But he was made of leather
and connecting tissues, and he would make the poorest stew
Persephone could imagine.
“Winds,” Persephone swore, taking another step.
Jawbone backed up again.
 “The herd is that way,” Persephone said. “Go. Just… will you…
go?”
Claire came out from behind the chicken hutch with another
whip, which she flicked at Jawbone’s hindquarters, and the goat
startled, darting away in a bucking canter toward the rest of the
goats.
“He’s in a fine mood,” Claire said.
“I’d just broken it up, him trying to square up a fight with one of
the big bucks, and I turn around and he’s up on top of the chickens,”
Persephone said, curling her whip and putting her arm through it to
wear it on her shoulder.
“Even Talon won’t go against him,” Claire said cheerfully. “Knows
he’d lose.”
“Knows there’s no point,” Persephone said wryly. “He’s no
competition at breeding at all. He’s just cantankerous.”
The girls followed the old goat back toward the herd, making
sure he didn’t try to double back, then Persephone went to get their
horses from the herd, tacking up both of them while Claire watched
over the goats.
The sheep were easy.
The boys just whistled at the dogs and the dogs did all the hard
work of dividing them up and setting them wherever the boys
indicated they ought to go. The cows weren’t quite as easy as the
sheep, because they didn’t jump when they were told, but if you
were patient about it, they’d do anything you asked without any
hijinks at all. The boys were responsible for the cattle, but only
insofar as moving them around from one pasture to the next when
the grass got thin.
The chickens just stayed in close to camp and hunted grain and
bugs, and sometimes you had to send a camp dog out to find the
last couple to get them roosted in for the night, but the roosters
watched over them to the point that they didn’t need supervision
during the day.
Which left the goats.
And for some reason, Persephone’s father had seen fit to assign
the entirety of the goat herd, unsorted and with great humor, to the
girls of the Three Staffs clan.
They didn’t flock. They didn’t herd. They didn’t even pay
attention when you shouted at them. The little ones were cute and
liked head-scratches as much as the next animal, but the meat goats
were more and more unbearable the larger they got.
At least there weren’t any crops planted about, because then it
would have been her job to keep them out of the crops, which was
the veritable definition of impossible.
She hated goats.
She loved them.
Loved them with a fierce passion that bordered on fury when she
heard other people laughing about how hard they were to care for
and what a pointless effort it was to try to control them.
But day in and day out, they seemed intent on proving just how
silly of her it was, and how much more rational her life would have
been if she’d just given up and only hated them.
Claire came to get her mount from Persephone, and the two girls
set off to try to get the goats wrangled into something resembling a
contained space for inspections and milking. Her uncle Lance would
come and look at their feet at some point this week, and Persephone
was determined to have gone through the entire herd ahead of him,
so that she could identify the individuals that needed attention and
watch what he did for them.
He would still go through all of them, but it was a standing
competition between the two of them, since Persephone had been
young, that Persephone was going to make him redundant within
her goaty domain.
Once they got the goats settled, more or less, they set the dogs
to keep the goats within one portion of the valley designated for
them and Persephone started toward the flock of milk goats with
Claire. Persephone whistled to Tig, the black-and-white mountain
dog that she had raised from a puppy, signaling that he ought to
take up control of the milkgoats while Claire went to get the milk
pails from the hillside where they’d left them yesterday.
Persephone sat down in the tall grass as the goats came over to
see what she had in her pockets today - there was always a bit of
something she could steal out of the food wagons for the goats, and
it kept the milk goats from running off while she was working - and
she started to go through them one by one with her fingers, giving
them bits of off-cut vegetable tops and skins as she went through
their fur and their ears, looking in their noses and their eyes and
their mouths, pulling off ticks and pests as she found them, flicking
them away, but the goats were generally healthy animals, and they
groomed themselves and each other pretty well, when they weren’t
trying to fight each other off of any given rock around the valley.
Or the chicken hutches.
Claire returned and they set to work milking, shooing away the
goats that they’d finished with and leaving them to Tig to return
back to the main herd, until they had their normal six pails of milk
and no remaining goats.
Standing and stretching her back out again, Persephone left the
milk to Claire and walked down into the valley, through the rest of
the herd, Tig at her ankles, cutting this goat and that out and
holding them at a sharp point while Persephone looked them over.
She did their feet, now, too, which was a genuine trial with some of
the goats, but she managed it, finding a few hot spots on a couple
of the goats, and a much larger number of them who were due for a
trim. She had a hoof knife that she carried with her, but she’d only
used it when she’d found something that wasn’t going to wait a few
hours for Lance to be able to look at it, like when one of the goats
had come up fully lame with a bit of metal punctured through his
hoof.
She practiced with the knife on soft wood and on Bellthrush’s
hooves - the mare would stand for her all day long without
complaint, which made the practice much safer - but she hoped
soon that Lance would agree it was time for her to start the more
routine maintenance work on her own.
Something slammed into her side as she was working, Tig
barking and making nipping feints in her defense, but Jawbone just
jogged off again, unbothered. As far as Persephone could tell, the
old goat couldn’t feel anything in his legs anymore, which meant
that Tig had a harder time with him than most, dissuading him from
doing things like that. Persephone rubbed her thigh and went back
to what she was doing.
About midday, she finished with the herd and ordered Tig back to
his holding job, just keeping the goats in the valley with the other
dogs. She went up to the camp, finding Claire still at work
processing the milk, some for cooking, some for cream and yogurt,
and some for butter and cheese. With the cow milk, they did
everything in big batches, but they consumed almost all of the goat
milk as fast as they finished producing everything, so they would
split it up for daily usage.
They made a dozen different kinds of cow’s milk cheese, but the
goat’s milk, Persephone and Claire just made into a soft white
cheese every day that people would take with lunch and dinner and
there was rarely any left beyond a day later.
Persephone helped Claire with the rest of the milk, then went to
find something to eat, sitting with her mother on the short bench in
front of her parents’ tent.
“How many new kids this morning?” Jenny asked as Persephone
ate.
“Four,” Persephone answered. “Two of ours, one for Furrow and
one for Alan.”
“I’ll let them know,” Jenny said, brushing her hands off and
standing. “Going to start a new dough today, I think.”
“What are you starting off of?” Persephone asked, and Jenny
narrowed her eyes.
“I have a mind to mix some dark wheat with the warm gold from
my grandmother and see how those two flours work together.”
Persephone frowned, but had no comment to offer. Her sister,
Greta, was the only other girl, and she’d chosen to stay at the camp,
helping with cooking and maintenance of the camp itself, where
Persephone had chosen to work out with the animals in the fields.
The boys didn’t get to make that decision; they were all out with the
animals, keeping them safe and taking care of them, until Furrow
took one of them as an apprentice, but Furrow was the one who
chose them, and not the other way around, for toolwork.
Persephone was glad she’d had the choice, even if her father’s sense
of humor had led him to assign the entirety of the goats to her.
She got to be out in the fields with the breeze in her hair, rather
than cooped up in one of the cooking tents or - worse - on a wagon,
cooking all day.
Greta appeared to love it, though, and she would have certainly
had an opinion on Jenny’s bread dough plan. Somewhere in one of
the wagons, there were great balls of dough that they fed flour to
each and every day, splitting off portions to cook, but balls of dough
that had history and pedigree, and that traveled as heirlooms from
clan to clan at marriage.
If the new dough didn’t work, Jenny would just bake all of it and
try something else.
It was what she did.
They all had favorites, among the breads, and looked forward to
baking days for those breads, but new breads were fun, too.
Jenny went off to do whatever she had next to do, for the day,
likely something to do with dinner, and Edwin came to sit down next
to Jenny, cutting at a bit of wood with a knife.
Edwin was her youngest brother, and while he had
responsibilities in the camp like anyone else, he also had the most
ability to slip away and go do something on his own or with the
other younger boys as they liked, usually up into the woods nearby.
If there was a tree to climb, Edwin was going to see how high up
into it he could get. That was just his nature.
There were two other boys in the clan who were his age, and the
three of them often disappeared together, when it came to such
adventures.
“What are you up to, today?” Persephone asked.
“Mmh,” Edwin answered, brushing bits of wood off of the block
and continuing to work at it.
“Are you making something?” Persephone asked.
“Mmh,” he said, putting the knife down to pick at the wood with
his fingernails, then picking up the knife once more, using the point
to try to dig something out. Persephone winced away slightly,
knowing better than to use the point of a knife like that, but the
wood gave and Edwin went back to using the side of the blade again
without looking up.
“Did you eat?” Persephone asked.
Edwin looked up at her through a haphazard mop of dark brown
hair. He had their mother’s blue eyes, but that was Rock’s dark skin
and dark hair.
“Will you get it for me?” he asked.
“No,” Persephone said indignantly. “I’m going to go find Uncle
Lance and ask him to come down and look at the goats with me.”
Edwin wrinkled his nose at this.
He didn’t like the goats at all.
He preferred the horses.
They all preferred the horses, but Edwin would go and sit out by
the herd and watch them for hours at a time. Persephone knew it
because Marco told her, not because she often spotted him at it, but
Marco was the one who had to know where Edwin was, as they sat
watch, and it meant when he slipped away from the cows or the
sheep, Marco would go and track him down.
But when he found Edwin with the horses, Marco told her, he
would let him be, because to be hillfolk was to love Hill Chargers,
and there was nothing wrong with that.
Persephone thought that Marco would have been within his rights
to complain to Rock about it, that Edwin wasn’t where he was
supposed to be, on watch, but if Marco was willing to adapt to it,
Persephone saw no reason to say anything about it.
“Where is Marco?” she asked.
“Mmh,” Edwin said, turning his eyes back to his whittling again.
“Off sulking.”
Persephone snorted.
Marco was the last person in the whole clan that she would
accuse of sulking, and Rock never felt sorry for himself for anything,
but she did know what Edwin was talking about.
There was a sense of stagnation, when they’d been at camp for
too long, either during the birthing season or during stops for
planting, which would be coming up soon, and it just sapped a lot of
the interest in being out, doing things.
 Various members of the clan would go just bury in somewhere,
deep in the grass, and nap or stare, waiting for the next active work
that needed to be done, rather than seeking it out.
“He was the watch last night, wasn’t he?” Persephone asked.
There had been a disturbance, but she’d slept through it. Claire was
a lighter sleeper and had mentioned it.
“With me and Maple and Reed,” Edwin confirmed.
Alan’s twin boys, slightly older than Edwin.
“Then he’s not pouting,” Persephone said.
Edwin grunted.
They were allowed to sleep after they’d been on watch for a
night. No one begrudged them that. Usually, they would nap through
the early afternoon and then be awake through to dark so that they
could sleep the next night, but it depended on the person and how
they were feeling.
The men would alternate through the watch along with the older
boys, so most of them only did one night watch a week, but when
they were settled in like this, it attracted problems, so they had the
younger boys sitting watch as well, two at a time, to help keep eyes
out and to react more quickly.
Edwin looked over at the food wagon, where Moira was laying
out more of the early-season fruits and the other produce from the
animals - boiled eggs and cheese and yogurt and strips of salted
meat - along with bread that would have baked that morning.
“You won’t get me food?” Edwin asked.
“No,” Persephone said again. “Get it yourself.”
He sighed and stood, leaving his block of wood and his knife to
go get himself lunch. Persephone picked up the carving to look at it,
but she couldn’t make any more out of it than she had when it was
in Edwin’s hands. He appeared to just be deconstructing the wood
for something to do.
“Are you going to make anything out of it?” she asked as Edwin
came and took it back from her as he sat down.
“I’m no good at it,” he said. “Not like Furrow.”
“You think he was good, to start?” Persephone asked. “No way of
getting good at it without trying.”
 Edwin sighed.
Persephone tussled his hair, which he had used to like, but now
he was getting surly about it, which made her do it more.
“What I will do is bring a plate to Marco,” she said. “Because he’ll
appreciate it.”
Edwin scowled at her, and Persephone grinned, going to get one
of the metal plates and loading it up with things she knew Marco
liked.
There was no telling where Marco had holed up, but she had a
few good guesses.
He wouldn’t want to get stepped on by one of the animals, by
accident, but he also wouldn’t want to be so far out that he would
miss an alarm signal from one of the men.
She started east, the great mountains off to her left as she went
through the tall grass around the camp.
The animals had trod down good portions of the grasses around
the camp, but they kept their distance, leaving a ring of waist-high
grasses that were just perennially there. Through the later spring,
green would come up through the gold, and then the whole of the
Wolfram Valley would be lush and beautifully green for a season,
and then it would turn gold again at the summer and start to
produce seed that would burst in the fall and last in decreasing
quantities through to spring again. Just now, the animals were tired
of dry grasses and they were hunting for the new shoots down at
the ground, but the grass wouldn’t really spring up until the rains
started in earnest again, another few weeks now.
Persephone got to the space that Paterack had cleared out for
the horse herd, north of the camp and east of the wooded area, and
the stallion lifted his head and whoofed at her, just letting her know
that he’d seen her. He was protective and distant with everyone but
Rock, and Persephone respected him. She had never met a more
powerful man or animal than that stallion, and it was likely she never
would.
She turned south, toward where they were keeping the cattle,
and started looking for signs of Lock, Marco’s dog.
 She whistled for him, and Lock’s ears popped up over the tall
grass to the east of the herd. Persephone sped up with a grin, going
out through the grass to find Marco laying there, his fingers woven
underneath his head, staring up at the sky.
She gave Lock a bit of the meat, then sat down next to Marco.
“Edwin says you’re sulking,” she said, and Marco laughed softly.
“If there was anything I could do to accelerate that boy through
to manhood, I would,” he answered. “It’s like he wants me to hit
him.”
“You sleeping?” she asked, and Marco shook his head, sitting up.
“Just resting.”
She handed him his plate and he leaned over it, shoveling food
into his mouth with his fingers.
“You forget breakfast again?” Persephone asked, and he laughed.
“Was trying to get everything settled again,” he said. “Sheep
everywhere, last night, after the wolves came through. Lance stayed
long enough to make sure that the wolves weren’t coming back
through and the bulk of the flock was accounted for, then left me
and Lock to hunt down the rest of them in their ones and twos.”
Persephone put her elbows on her knees, looking out across the
grasses as Lock’s ears worked.
“What am I going to do after you leave?” she asked, and Marco
paused, glancing at her.
“You don’t have to stay, either,” he said.
“I don’t want to go,” she said. “I’m just going to miss you.”
“I haven’t decided I’m leaving,” Marco told her.
“You have, too,” she said. “Ashley won’t leave the Windbears.”
“She might,” Marco said, and Persephone snorted.
She and Marco were twenty-eight months apart, in age, and
Ashley was less than two years older than Persephone. They hadn’t
spent a lot of time around each other, but the girls tended to group
by age, any time the clans came together, and Persephone had
spent perhaps a dozen evenings with her, across the years, and she
knew that the girl was profoundly tied to her mother.
“Any more than you’ll leave the Three Staffs,” Marco said. “But
you still might.”
 Persephone wrinkled her nose.
This would be her first season of-age in the great meet-ups, and
she knew that there were going to be boys who were specifically
interested in talking to her, because of it.
She didn’t want to talk to boys who were out looking for a wife.
She wasn’t ready to be a wife.
She looked at Marco with his wistful sighs and his constant
counting-down awareness to the next time he would see Ashley, and
she just didn’t understand.
There were boys that she enjoyed being around. A few who she
liked their laughs or their eyes or the way that they worked with
their horses. There were boys that she had been sitting with outside
of a tent with a cup of tea and a bowl of Veridan sweets at meetups
since she could even remember. She liked them.
She just couldn’t bear the thought of them looking at her
differently, now, with this idea that she was no longer the girl that
they sat with and talked with or went out hunting fruits with when
the work was done for the day.
She was a woman, and a potential wife, and she didn’t like it at
all.
She didn’t understand it.
“I don’t want to,” she said softly.
“Dad isn’t going to push you into it,” Marco said. “You know that.”
“I do,” she said. “I know. And he isn’t going to arrange anything
unless I ask him to.”
“Do you want to be a clan owl?” he asked.
She wrinkled her nose again.
“I want fourteen children,” she said. She’d teased at it for a long
time, telling people what she was going to do when she had children
of her own, but she didn’t think she’d ever said it out loud without
the cover of sarcasm or imagination. “I just… Who? Who would I
marry?”
Marco finished his plate and put it down on his feet.
“Dolly is going to calve today,” he said. “It’ll be the sixth new calf
today.”
 “Four kids so far today,” Persephone said. “I’ll count them again
when I go down to do hoof maintenance with Uncle Lance.”
“The animals are healthy,” Marco said. “I think we’ll have another
foal tonight or tomorrow.”
“Terro tell you how many sheep?” Persephone asked, and he
shook his head.
“Not sure they’re even trying to do a daily count. Too hard to
keep track of which ones are actually new.”
“It’s a good season,” Persephone agreed. They would inevitably
lose an adult or two through the next few weeks. That was just the
nature of the thing. And being stuck, they might lose a few more to
wolves. They came down out of the mountains or up off of the hills
and they’d hide out in the local stand of trees, waiting for dark, and
make a run at something. Things died, and that was the way of it,
but for a season a year, they got tiny, new, perfect animals who ran
around and played with such joy, a new crop of them to rejuvenate
the ones who were still there.
The herds were growing.
Marco drew a breath.
“I think Dad is more interested in getting you up into the
mountains than finding you a husband, anyway.”
Persephone looked at her hands and nodded.
“I know.”
“Paterack is getting old,” Marco said. “The other mountain-born
wildstones are, too. Patromn is sixteen, this year, did you know?”
“He told me it would be this summer,” Persephone said, and
Marco gave her a hard look, then nodded.
“He’s right.”
“I know.”
“Is he going to send Claire, too?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Marco drew a breath and sighed.
“He’s right.”
“I want to go,” Persephone said. “I’m just… I’m afraid I won’t
know what to do and I’ll get it wrong and… mess up the chance at
getting more mountain-born stallions. What if it was me, and I just
got it wrong?” She paused. “What if it isn’t me?”
“It probably isn’t,” Marco said. “You know that. You can’t… you
can’t imagine that it all relies on you, when it probably doesn’t at
all.”
“But you can’t prove it,” Persephone said. “It might just be that I
messed up.”
“The singers say that they just know,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Persephone asked, feeling the same rise
of fear she always did when she thought about going up into the
mountains on her own.
It was a dangerous thing to do, no matter who you were, but for
a hillfolk woman, there were a hundred things that could go wrong
that she wasn’t likely to survive. Rock would have a hard time
fighting off a pack of wolves on his own, to say nothing of how
Persephone would fare. And wolves weren’t the worst thing up
there.
Hillfolk women went up at their coming-of-age, if they and their
clans chose it, and a lot of them didn’t come back.
Among the ones who did come back, none of them had figured
out how to do whatever it was singers did to bring in the
mountainsires.
It wasn’t singing.
Persephone had had that strictly ruled out, when she was very
small. They said that they were called hillsingers because what they
did was most like singing, but it had nothing to do with sound at all.
All the little girls would talk about what they thought that meant
- was it humming? did you dance a specific way? certainly they
would call that dancing, not singing, wouldn’t they? did it have
anything to do with music, even? - but no one could answer.
Persephone had met Quen once, but she had been old even
when Persephone was very young, and she hadn’t had the physical
strength to go up into the mountains by herself in five years, at that
point. Patromn had been the last stallion foaled to one of the
mountainsires, and while the hillfolk had gone without a
mountainborn wildstone stallion for a human generation, before, the
lines diminished quickly after two generations of horse breeding, and
it took years of work to get them back to their previous strength.
They needed a hillsinger as quickly as possible, because even
having a hillsinger was no guarantee of getting a mountainborn
wildstone stallion. It took strategy and luck, and then half of the
foals were fillies.
There was a sense of urgency everywhere, and all of the girls
were whispering among themselves speculating who might be the
next hillsinger.
Part of the reason that Persephone had wanted to work with the
livestock rather than at the camp - apart from the fact that she
would have loathed doing camp work all day every day - was that
she thought it might make her more likely to be a hillsinger.
She was going to go.
But she was so devastated at the idea of coming back and
disappointing her father because she wasn’t it.
He’d never said it, and it was possible he hadn’t even thought it,
but he had great hope that it would be her.
And so did she.
But as much as she dreamed of being the next hillsinger, it paled
in comparison to how it would disappoint him.
She knew it.
“You don’t have to go,” Marco said, and Persephone put her
fingers under the flats of her feet, resting her chin on her knees.
“I just don’t want to find out that it isn’t me,” she said softly.
There was a grunt and then a shuffle as the cows reorganized
themselves for space. They were used to spending more time strung
out, and while they naturally grouped up when they came to the end
of a day’s walk, they weren’t accustomed to being clumped like that
all day. Particularly with cows calving, there was a lot of adjustment
to how they spaced themselves as they grazed.
“That’s Dolly,” Marco said, standing and pulling Persephone to her
feet.
Persephone picked her out of the herd and nodded.
“She’s in labor.”
“She is,” Marco said. “You want to stay?”
 “I’m going to go find Uncle Lance,” she said. “Want to get hooves
done this afternoon. Should I send Dad to help?”
Marco considered. This was Dolly’s first, so while they normally
left the livestock to their own devices, delivering, there was some
call to be extra vigilant, here.
“If you see him,” he said, waving behind himself as he went to go
nudge the cows away from Dolly and give her more space.
Persephone watched for a moment, then set off again back
toward camp carrying Marco’s plate. She put it away with the rest of
the dishes to be scrubbed with a cloth and stored for dinner, then
went looking for the men.
Rock was sitting with Lance at Furrow’s workshop, the three men
drinking coffee and talking about the crops that they were going to
plant this year and where they wanted to be, to do it.
Rock looked up at Persephone with clear, happy eyes.
“Yes, daughter?” he asked.
“Dolly is in labor,” she said. “Marco is with her, but he said to tell
you, if I saw you.”
“How far along?” Rock asked.
“Probably yet tonight, but after dark,” Persephone guessed, and
he nodded.
“I’ll be up along to check on her soon,” he said, settling back
onto his stool. Persephone turned to Lance.
“Are you ready to look at the goats with me?” she asked, and he
grinned.
“You have your predictions ready?” he asked.
“Told them to Claire already,” Persephone answered with a
matching smile. He slapped his knees and stood.
“Seems I’ve got real work to do, then,” he said, giving Rock a
quick little wave and setting off with Persephone.
Max, his blue-tick mountain dog, came trotting out from under
his wagon, waving his tail at Persephone and setting off like he
already knew where they were going.
“Any major problems I should know about?” Lance asked, and
she shook her head.
 “I’m about ready to butcher Jawbone myself,” she said, spotting
the goat over on the hillcrest ahead of them, and Lance laughed.
“Not sure there’s any meat there to eat,” he said. “But I
sympathize.”
Persephone took the whip down from her shoulder and cut away
from Lance, waving the flick of the whip through the grass beside
her so that Jawbone would hear it. He trotted along the ridge for a
bit, seeing if she was going to chase him, then she whistled and Tig
came running up circling around Jawbone on his belly and barking.
Jawbone lined up on him, but Tig was too savvy for that, and he
slid sideways again, not letting Jawbone get his head down to go
after him in a straight line.
Persephone cracked her whip at him and Jawbone jerked his
head up, then bucked and headed back down toward the fully
scattered flock.
The dogs were laying on their bellies in the grass, having given
up on keeping the goats in formation.
Persephone did a quick scan to ensure that there weren’t any
large groups of goats missing, then sent Tig around to get them
moving in toward the bottom of the valley again. The other dogs
took their cues from Tig, racing up and laying down on a hard point
at a cluster of goats, then shifting up or sideways, depending on
how the goats reacted. They’d bite them, if they had to, but it was
rarely necessary, even with goats.
“Oh, for wind’s sake,” Persephone said as a cluster of the larger
meat goats made a break for the horizon.
Tig was off after them, but they had a good lead, and they
trickled away from him, breaking up so that he couldn’t go after all
of them at once. Another dog came to help, but the group of goats
that he had been holding set off in a different direction.
“You’d think they didn’t like having their feet handled,” Lance
observed, and Persephone snorted.
As she looked back, Claire came over the horizon on her horse,
helping the dogs to keep the goats in line and then going after the
ones that had fully gotten loose with Tig.
 Persephone whistled at the rest of the dogs, getting them to hold
the goats still enough for her and Lance to start splitting them out.
Without Tig, it was a lot more of an adventure, and Persephone
kept getting her knees head-butted when she wasn’t watching close
enough, but they got through the first four goats before Claire came
back with Tig and the three rogue goats.
From there, Tig made things go much easier, and they even
managed to get Jawbone pinned down long enough to trim his
hooves down and for Persephone to go through his thick tufts of
hair, looking for pests.
She pulled a tick off of him as he thrashed like she was trying to
kill him, then Lance let him go, standing back up again.
“If you’re ready to do this on your own, I’ll endorse it to your
father,” he said. “You’ve got the right eye. Just a question of whether
you want to wrestle them alone.”
Persephone considered.
The hoofknives were some of the sharpest blades on the camp,
and she knew she could go through to the bone on a finger with one
if something slipped funny. That was why having someone to sit on
the goat while you worked on him - in the most ornery cases - was
such a help.
“I’m ready,” she said. “I’ll have one of the boys help me, though,
when I do it.”
Lance nodded.
“Then you’re on your own. Good work.”
He gave her another friendly grin and a little salute, and he
started back up the hill toward the camp.
Claire left Wink and came over to see her.
“He say you could do it on your own?” she asked, and
Persephone nodded.
Claire grinned.
“And you actually want to?” she asked, wiping her forehead.
“I want to be able to do what I want, when it’s time to do it, and
not wait on anyone else to be ready,” Persephone said, looking at
the scattering herd of goats once more.
 Without a doubt, tomorrow morning she would find two goats off
doing something they weren’t supposed to. She hated them almost
as much as she loved them.
But they were her responsibility - with Claire - without anyone
watching over her, and she really liked the feeling of that.
“Mama said she wanted me to see if we could talk Dad into
shearing a couple of the rams early so that we can get started on
cleaning and carding the wool,” Claire said.
“I bet we can talk Terro into helping,” Persephone said, and
Claire nodded.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
Persephone took another look around the field as the goats
fought each other over little mounding stones or settled in to graze
again, then put her hands in her skirt pockets and set off.
That, of course, was the moment Jawbone had been waiting for.

E dwin sat up in his tree, watching the sun set.

His knees were scraped from the fall out of the other tree, and
he had a tear in his shirt that his mom was going to be mad about,
when she saw it, but it was just like all the other tears in his shirt,
and she would stitch it up and it would be fine.
He’d hit a dead bough that he hadn’t noticed, and it had broken
out from under him while he’d been trying to reach one of the
higher branches. His nose had bled for a while, but he’d managed
not to get blood on his shirt, so that didn’t matter.
He sat up in the high branches of the tree, watching the
mountains.
They told stories about those mountains, around a fire at night,
when there was a celebration and they built a fire. The men of the
Clan of Three Staffs talked about fights up in the mountains,
between the hill folk and the stone elves, or just trying to survive
through ice storms and no food.
That was where magic came from.
 All of the fae lived up there, save the little ones running around
in the hills, the ones that found rabbit warrens and ran out the
rabbits, and who climbed up into the wagons to filch things. The big
fae, the important fae, they lived up there, up high in the cold where
the magic lived, and Edwin wasn’t allowed to go.
Maybe someday, his dad said every time he brought it up.
Maybe someday.
Terro told him that he was going to go, just to see what was up
there, because it had to be better than more grass.
Terro was sick of grass.
He’d said so, a few months ago, on a night when they were
camped out with everybody else at one of the big meetups, and
Terro had had too much pella and was saying things that he
wouldn’t remember the next day.
Edwin was supposed to be in bed, but he’d sneaked out to listen
to Terro and Marco and Sebastian with the other older boys. Marco
had been asleep on the ground, but Terro and Sebastian had talked
with two other boys for hours past Edwin’s bedtime, talking about
seeing the world. They all wanted to see the mountains, because
everyone wanted to see the mountains. Sebastian had said that he
was going to go up into the mountains with the Veridan reds to fight
the stones, but Terro had laughed at him and said he was dumb for
wanting to follow around another group of bossy men, doing
whatever they told him.
Terro wanted to go exploring.
He was the one who disappeared when they were at the stone
giant city, sometimes even after dark, going to meet giantesses.
He came back with wild stories that Edwin had long learned not
to entirely believe, but he didn’t entirely disbelieve them, either.
Terro wanted to go to Verida and the ocean and get on a ship
and keep going.
The other boys didn’t want to go past Verida, but Terro wanted
to go without anyone ever stopping him.
Edwin felt like that, sometimes.
But mostly he wanted a colt of his own, one that he could raise
up from birth, that would know him and eat out of his hand and
come when he whistled, and he wanted to take that colt up into the
mountains and just see everything that was, up there.
Robert and Yap were off somewhere nearby, throwing rocks at
each other from behind trees and turning giant stones over to see
what was underneath, and all three of them were going to be in
trouble for how dirty they were going to come home, today, but
Edwin would go and find the other two boys later.
Right now, he was pretending that he could see all the way to
the mountains, could open up his arms like a hawk and just reach
for them, fly over top of them in two big wingbeats, and no one
could stop him. They would shout up at him from the ground, hey,
come down, you can’t do that. You can’t be up there. You’re just a
little boy.
And he would laugh, and he would fly higher, because no one
could stop him.
And Terro would say, hey, take me with you, I want to go to
Verida and see pretty girls, and Edwin would ignore him, because he
was too high to hear him.
And he would see the mountains and he would land high, high,
high up on the tallest trees and he would watch, and the creatures
down below would scurry away because they’d never seen an Edwin
before, and he looked awfully scary, up there on his tree.
But then he would get hungry.
And while the other big hawks would dive down and snatch up
mice and rabbits to eat, Edwin didn’t like to eat mice, and he didn’t
mind rabbit, but only if his mom was the one to cook it, and so he
would turn around and fly home.
And his mom would be so happy to see him that she would
forget to be angry, and maybe Dad wouldn’t have noticed he was
gone, because he was so busy with the horses, and Edwin would eat
and eat and eat, and look up at the mountains and say: next time,
mountains. Next time.
T he mares dropped six healthy foals.
There were twenty new calves and thirty goats. Almost fifty
sheep.
The mountain wolves were around, Paterack made sure Rock
knew that, but they didn’t make another attempt on the camp.
Two weeks after the final foal dropped, they packed up the
wagons and set off to the south.
The mares had come into their foal heat and were rebred, but
this was the first major horse-trade of the year, right after foaling
season, where the clans would come together and trade new
stallions and unbred mares, along with sons and daughters and all
manner of gossip.
Rock had big plans, and he loved the meetup seasons. They
tended to stretch for a few weeks, clans coming and going from one
of the known spots, one of the sacred spots, their stay defined by
the season of their herds and the temperament of their families, but
you knew when the people you most wanted to see were typically
there, and you would bend your time, riding a bit harder or lingering
a bit longer, to try to make sure that you got to see them.
Rock’s parents would be there, and so would Jenny’s.
There was a good chance that the Windbears would be there,
with Marco’s Ashley, though they had a more significant meet-up
planned at the end of the summer to finalize their marriage
ceremonies. Ashley had had a very spare opinion of which she
wanted to do, and so they had only had one the previous summer
and one over the winter, which would lead to the final marriage
ceremony this summer.
Rock had four mares that he wanted to trade that he had
intentionally not bred last year so that they would be ready after
weaning, and a weaned filly. He hadn’t found the right swap in the
fall for the mares, but there were five or six different meet-ups in
the fall that a lot of the clans skipped. He was much more likely to
find a good trade for the mares this season.
There were also likely to be Veridan traders about, because this
was one of the places that the hillfolk were known to congregate,
and the ones who could afford to buy horses in more than ones or
twos would definitely be there. The Clan of Three Staffs didn’t need
much that had to be bought with coins, but this was where Rock
always made sure to fill up his purse, because while traders were a
consistent feature of the hills, they were unreliable. He could go a
year or two without finding a trader who had the spare currency to
buy horses, outside of the major meet-ups. The younger ones were
always delighted to find a clan on their way up to trade with the
pixies, and they would spend a lot with them, buying food and drink
and leather goods, sometimes some of the livestock, and then they
would go on their way again, thinking that they’d made a good
contact among the clans for buying a horse later, when their
fortunes improved further.
And they weren’t wrong.
Rock only sold to men that he knew were going to care for the
horses correctly, but mostly he ensured that by charging more for
them than a Veridan laborer was likely to see in a year.
There were other clans that made their income by felling trees in
the thick forests near the river as it got close to the mountains. They
would tag them and send them downriver, taking money for the
collected tags from the sawmills at the northern edge of Verida.
Everyone knew the millers cheated the hillfolk loggers, but when the
count of tags that came back was enough smaller than the count
that had been sent, the hillfolk would stop sending them for a
season, and then things would go right again for a while.
Not every clan had a mountainborn stallion to breed, though
almost all of them had a first-generation Hill Charger stallion that
they could use to sire second-generation colts and fillies, but there
was no such thing as a third-generation Hill Charger.
At the third generation, there was a steep slope in the potency of
the mountain blood, and you didn’t get a Hill Charger; you got a
Mountain Horse. And Mountain Horses were nice little animals,
plucky and sturdy and capable of surviving the high mountains -
there was any number of them actually living wild, up in the
mountains, at any given time - but they weren’t Hill Chargers, and
they dropped in value and utility to almost nothing compared to the
first- and second-generation animals.
 And not every clan had a man who was suited to horse breeding.
So come clans felled trees.
Others spent their energies at weaving and clothing-making, or
leatherworking, or woodworking. Anything that got them the metal
tools that they needed to continue life on the hills, plus enough extra
to buy some of the things their particular clan didn’t specialize in.
For the Clan of Three Staffs, they only wove what fabric they
actually needed, and they preferred to buy their clothes from other
clans or from the hill giant city. They spun a lot of wool, and they
produced a very respectable quantity of leather every year, but they
only wove coarse fabrics that would be used for things like tents and
bags and the like.
The nicer fabric and the actual good clothing, Rock just bought
from traders, when they had something worth considering, and
mostly the hill giant city, where people spent a lifetime developing
the skills to make good clothing, and then they made it in a size that
would fit hillfolk.
Jenny came to ride alongside him, and Rock smiled.
It was a reflexive thing.
He always smiled when she was around.
“Your son,” Jenny said, and Rock laughed.
“Which one?”
“Edwin,” she said. “The child is going to find himself hogtied in
the back of a wagon, if he is not careful.”
“He asked me if he could claim one of the foals,” Rock answered,
and Jenny grunted.
“Of course he did. He asked last year, too, if I recall.”
“For a month straight,” Rock agreed.
“Are you considering it?” Jenny asked.
“Told him if he keeps wandering off, like he does, I can’t trust
him to care for it and handle it right, which means I have to wait
another year before I think about it.”
“Ah,” Jenny said. “Extortion. And what did he say of that?”
“He assures me that he would spend every waking hour, tending
to any foal I saw fit to assign him,” Rock said. “That he would spend
all day with the herd, when it was in, and that he would be ready to
take the foal as a camp horse the day it weaned.”
“I believe him,” Jenny said, and Rock nodded.
“So do I.”
“Are you considering it?” Jenny asked again, and Rock sighed,
looking over at the mountains.
“I spent a lot of time up there, Jenny,” he said.
“Well I know it,” she answered. “Only reason you and Lance were
fit to start a clan.”
“It makes a man a harder creature, doing the things that he
does. Nothing wrong with keeping after him to get the rest of his
work done, but…”
“He’s like you,” Jenny said.
“Marco is going to be a fine husband and a fine clansman,” Rock
said.
“But he won’t see the traits that make a horse worth breeding,”
Jenny said.
He couldn’t, and they both knew it. They all knew it.
Marco helped with the cattle lines, which were much less delicate
than the horse lines were, and he just saw size and milk. A bigger
cow was a better cow, and one that gave more milk was worth
more, so he would trace the bulls that threw bigger cows and that
threw more productive cows, and he’d breed them on the cows
themselves.
Which was a strategy.
But Rock wanted cows who moved right. Who ran with the herd
and saw to their calves and who had healthy hooves and straight
backs and who menaced wolves at the right moment, and retreated
behind a bull at the right moment. He wanted smart cows and cows
that were consistently fertile and cows whose horns grew straight.
He couldn’t prove that the horns mattered, but he also couldn’t
prove that they didn’t.
It meant that the cattle he bred didn’t get as big as the ones
Marco would have bred, nor did they produce as much milk, but they
were hardier, and the herd didn’t just grow in productivity, but in
health, which meant it grew better.
 He thought.
He’d been doing this for twenty-three years, on his own, and he
liked to think that his results spoke for themselves, but he also knew
that every decision he made had a hundred alternatives that he
would never be able to see their outcomes, and there was no way to
be sure he’d done the best thing.
But the herd was bigger and it was healthy and he was happy
with that result.
Marco just didn’t see the nuance to it.
And that was before you took into account the characters of the
Hill Chargers.
Edwin, though.
And Persephone, for that matter.
They had an eye for it.
Persephone was working her heart out to prove that she could
manage the goat herd, alongside Furrow’s daughter, Claire. At rest,
the herds grouped in for safety and for the men to go through and
look at them, as time allowed, but when they were traveling
regularly, the dogs kept the herds split out by family, because it kept
the bulls from fighting each other and it kept the breeding lines clear
among the sheep. It also made better use of the foraging time,
because the grass was less trampled as they went through. The
older boys kept the cattle, their size being important to being able to
handle the animals when it was critical, and the younger boys in
their larger numbers took shifts with the sheep.
And Persephone had the entirety of the goats on her own, with
just Claire and an abundance of dogs to help.
It was funny to watch.
Rock genuinely enjoyed it, because it was never supposed to be
anything short of a disaster.
But it was also profound, the enduring skill she had at it. At a
task that no one was supposed to thrive under.
He loved to watch his daughter thrive, like that.
Edwin was a different challenge.
The boy had an eye for it.
 If Rock had let him take his pick of the unbroken horses, he
would choose the self-same one that Rock intended to raise up as a
replacement for Nadalit or Tarawan. He would keep Paterack until
the wildstone stallion was fit for nothing more than the earth
ceremony, but Nadalit and Tarawan he would eventually trade away
because they’d bred too much of the herd and Rock could stand for
a new set of traits to mix in with the ones that he already had to
work with.
He lacked greathearts, and he thought that his wildstone colts
could stand for a bit more greatheart in them.
But there was a colt, Smarty’s colt from last year, that he had an
eye on as a breeding stallion, and he knew that Edwin fancied him,
as well.
And the problem with that was that, while Paterack had a full-
time job at managing the herd, and so Rock took Highness as his
mount, Lance and Alan rode stallions. And if Rock was going to trade
away one of the stallions, he would be expected to replace that
mount with the new stallion.
Rock had no reservations, taking a mare as his mount. Highness
was a handful well beyond what any of the geldings had in mind,
and she was strong and courageous and only half a hand shorter
than Paterack himself. She was a bit of an outsider, to the herd,
because Paterack loved Smarty and she was the lead mare, and
Highness didn’t take to being told what to do by anyone, much less
the mare that Paterack had chosen for himself instead of Highness,
so she was a good choice as a camp horse. But he could have
handed her over to Jenny and it would have been entirely expected.
Jenny had a good, firm hand at the reins, and to take the runner up
in the power wars within the herd as his wife’s horse was… again,
expected.
But Rock didn’t care about that.
Highness, like all of the Hill Chargers, was smart enough to
appreciate that, if she wasn’t going to belong with Paterack,
belonging with Rock was the second-highest honor in the clan, and
she stood up under that with great pride and with enormous
expectation of what it meant.
 She was a great mount.
And he genuinely liked her.
Smarty was a nice horse. One of the best. One of the best of the
best.
But he liked Highness’s sense of humor better. And while she was
a handful, she didn’t challenge him all the time the way Tarawan and
Nadalit did with the other men.
Furrow took a gelding as his mount, because he was just looking
for a work animal and not a life-challenge. And Rock very much saw
the wisdom in that.
But the one thing he absolutely could not do was give away the
next stallion to his younger son.
Nor could he consider allowing Edwin to break him and ride him,
and then expect the boy to give him up and start over again when
Rock made the decision to trade away a stallion.
The hillfolk had the capacity to bond to a horse for life, but that
was rarely a pragmatic solution, when it came to breeding stock. The
economics and the trait-management of breeding came before life
bonds, and everyone understood it.
Everyone accepted it.
But it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t crush Edwin to have such a
thing stolen away from him.
The new crop of foals, there were a couple that had the potential
to be stand-outs. There were, every year. Rock thought that Edwin
was going to have a hard time not having his head turned by the
black-and-white filly, because everyone agreed she was about the
prettiest filly the clan had ever produced, but she was a lightfoot,
and it meant that she wasn’t going to be great at anything.
And that was a terrible choice for Edwin.
None of the others were really great choices, either, and that was
what kept Rock hesitating the most.
Yes, his son was liable to disappear in the midst of anything that
wasn’t mortally important, and he often fell behind far enough that
he was tracking them in through darkness after they’d been at camp
for hours - which Jenny pointedly and loudly did not like, with the
wolfpacks that the arrival of great herds tended to stir up - but he
had a mind and he had eyes, and he was going to amount to
something quite important, Rock thought.
Marco had all but raised himself. He knew the type of man that
he wanted to be from a young age, and he had grown himself into
just that man. Rock was proud enough that you could bounce stones
off his chest and they wouldn’t even hurt. But Edwin had no concept
of what he was, nor what he was capable of, and Rock spent a lot of
his thoughtful hours pondering how to shape that child into the man
that he was capable of being, and simultaneously into one who was
as happy with his life as Rock was.
Jenny fretted over him breaking something badly enough that he
might never be sound, as an adult, but Rock knew what he had
been like as a boy, the things he had done that his mother and his
sisters had never known about, and he worried much less about that
than that he would make the wrong decision about what horse
Edwin grew up with.
Because that mattered.
“The other boys are going to resent it,” Jenny said. “The things
he gets away with.”
“They’re not wrong to,” Rock said. “I’m just not sure what useful
thing I can do about it.”
“Because he’s exactly like you,” Jenny said, and Rock grinned.
“He’s more stubborn than I am,” he said. “More like… you.”
Jenny hit him again, but this time she laughed, facing forward.
“Had to be, if I was ever going to get through to you, didn’t I?”
she asked.
“I had big plans,” Rock said. “Knew the right girl would catch
wind of them and come along eventually. And I was right, wasn’t I?”
Jenny laughed.
“It’s been a good life,” she said. “I don’t regret anything about it.
But if I could tell the girl I was the things that I’ve seen and I’ve
done…”
“You’d have just made her all the more stubborn,” Rock said, and
they both smiled.
“What are you going to do about him?” Jenny asked.
 “I’ll talk to him,” Rock said. “After we get settled in to camp
tonight. If he wants his own mount, like that, he’s going to have to
take on more with the animals and the camp. It means he’s a man
and he’s part of the clan, not just a boy being taken care of by it.”
Jenny nodded.
“He’s young for that.”
“He’s undisciplined, for his age,” Rock countered.
“And whose fault is that?” Jenny asked with dark humor, and
Rock grinned.
“Maybe we’ll get a summer foal who is more a fit to him,” he
said. There were still two mares that he’d bred later in the year who
hadn’t foaled, and neither of them were that critical to his breeding
plans. Could always turn out differently - Rock never crossed a mare
without some anticipation that this could be a major element of his
future breeding plans - but these were low-probability lightfoots,
both of them.
Nice riding horses, but smaller in stature and with an increasingly
peculiar gait that wasn’t suited either to pulling or to distance. They
tired quickly, compared to the others, at anything above an easy
pace, but they weren’t intended to be pursuit horses.
Nice riding horses, but nothing more, unless something
unexpected happened.
The traders liked the lightfoots well enough, but the military
preferred greathearts and earthgaits. Neither was a uniform source
of demand; Rock charged too much for his culls, same as the rest of
the hillfolk, for any one person to buy more than one or two at any
given time. He’d had military suppliers come to him and ask to strike
a bargain where they could buy twenty or forty horses a year at a
deep discount, and Rock had sent them away.
Maybe they’d find another clan that would sell like that, but Rock
was still growing his herd, still looking for surprises, still making sure
that he had all of the qualities and the skills that the clan needed, as
the children grew up and - someday soon - started to marry girls
into the clan and have babies and wagons and tents of their own.
“I’m going to tell Ursal that we want Ashley and Marco to stay
with us,” he said after a few minutes.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of When the moon
fell
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: When the moon fell

Author: Morrison Colladay

Illustrator: Frank R. Paul

Release date: February 8, 2024 [eBook #72907]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Stellar Publishing Corporation,

1929

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHEN THE

MOON FELL ***
 WHEN THE MOON FELL

BY MORRISON COLLADAY

Science Fiction Series No. 6

Published By
STELLAR PUBLISHING CORPORATION
96-98 PARK PLACE
NEW YORK

©1929 By Gernsback Publications, Inc.

(Printed in U. S. A.)

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any

evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was
renewed.]
 CHAPTER I
A Changed World
Now that we who survived have reconstructed a civilization on a
rational basis, we want to preserve for future generations as many
accounts as possible by the actual witnesses of the catastrophe that
overtook the world.
In 1929 certain curious aberrations in the motion of the moon were
noticed by astronomers, and attempts to explain them were made by
suggesting that the solar system had been invaded by an unknown
visitor which had not yet been discovered. It is still believed that this
is the most likely explanation of what occurred. When this invader
approached the earth, it probably passed between it and the moon.
Its velocity must have been so great that it continued on its course in
spite of the attraction of the earth. However, it disturbed the balance
of forces sufficiently to draw the moon from its orbit and start its
headlong progress toward us.
I was away in Labrador when all this occurred, and it is due to that
fact that I am alive today. The things that happened in the densely
inhabited portions of the globe will be recounted by survivors who
were eye witnesses. It is sufficient to say that when the news of the
impending catastrophe became known a universal apathy seemed to
settle over humanity. It was apparently overwhelmed by the
hopelessness of any effort to escape. The religious people of the
period regarded the coming event as fulfillment of a prophecy of the
destruction of the world in the Last Day. People who had never
before been religious became so in an hour.

First Intimations
It is well that I begin on my personal experiences:
As I said before I was in Labrador when the moon first showed an
aberration in its motion. It will be remembered that in April, 1928,
three aviators, two Germans and one Irish, started on a flight across
the ocean from Ballycombe, Ireland, to New York. They succeeded
in crossing the ocean from east to west, a feat which had not been
accomplished before, but owing to fog and storms they lost their
way, and landed on a little island off the coast of Labrador.
The locality was absolutely inaccessible except by air. The aviators
had damaged their plane in landing, and it was necessary to get to
them with spare parts. The Associated Press, as well as some of the
larger dailies, thought it was equally important that their stories
should reach the world. There was a wireless station on the
mainland fifteen miles away, but for some reason the operator did
not get the sort of news the papers wanted. The Canadian
Government started a steamer toward the island, but it was soon
caught fast in the ice.
I had been a flyer during the war and continued to fly a plane for the
pleasure it gave me. In that world which now seems so distant, I had
some reputation as a writer. The Associated Press suggested that I
fly to Greenly Island and get the stories of the marooned aviators.
Perhaps I am spending more time on this episode than it deserves. It
is sufficient to say that I got the stories and got them back to New
York.
If that had been all there was to the adventure, there is a strong
probability that I would have perished some months later with most
of the other inhabitants of the United States. It happened, however,
that there were other flyers planning east-to-west hops. It occurred to
the powers who decided such things, that it might be a good idea to
have me fly back to Labrador and make it my headquarters and
establish an observation post while transatlantic flights were being
attempted.
Accordingly, I flew back to Labrador whenever a transatlantic flight
was rumored, and made my headquarters at Point Amour on the
mainland. The wireless station was here, and about a hundred
people. Little Greenly Island was some fifteen miles across Belle Isle
Strait. I was getting rather bored waiting for something to happen,
when one night Jim Daley, the wireless operator, came running to
the cottage where I stayed, too excited to wait until nine o'clock,
when I always strolled over to the wireless station for a game of
chess.
I stared at him in astonishment. "What's all the excitement about?" I
inquired.
He had been running so fast that for a moment he could not get his
breath to talk.
"You wait until you hear," he gasped. "I bet you'll be as excited as I
am. The world's coming to an end next week!"
I laughed.
"No, I mean it," he said. "It's not a joke. Here's a bulletin issued by
the Smithsonian. I copied it as it came in." He handed me a sheet of
paper.

The News Comes Out

As far as I know, this bulletin was the first intimation of the coming
catastrophe sent out over the radio. I assume that every effort was
made to keep the matter quiet, until it became evident that no
escape was possible.
Consequently up there in Labrador we had heard none of the rumors
that had spread over the civilized world, and had seen no references
to the strange lunar phenomenon which in a sense had prepared
most people for the announcement of some unusual event.
At this time there had been no change in the moon's course or size
visible to the naked eye. In the parts of the world where newspapers
were printed and read, there had been the usual few lines on a back
page that were given to any astronomical phenomenon, such as the
birth of a Nova or the discovery of a telescopic comet.
Some days before, astronomers in Colorado and South Africa had
simultaneously announced the aberration in the moon's motion.
There were occasional facetious references to the moon's
skittishness—emanating from the pens of bored columnists. The
next day there was nothing new from the astronomers, but the third
day there was an announcement that caused faint stirrings of anxiety
among those who read between the lines.
It was on the fourth day that announcements were made in England
and America on the joint authority of the Smithsonian Institution and
the British Royal Society, that some unknown force had displaced
the moon from its orbit, and that it was feared, though calculations
were not yet complete, that it would collide with or at least brush the
earth, resulting in a disaster of the first magnitude.
The formal announcement of the two scientific societies was
broadcast that night, and I was reading the part of it that Jim had
written down.
I still have that piece of paper. Even as I look at it to copy it here, I
get again that thrill of horror, that for a moment paralyzed me that
night.
OFFICIAL BULLETIN: Issued by the Smithsonian
Institution of Washington, D. C., and the British Royal
Society. Broadcast by all means possible. Recent
aberrations of motion of the moon have been caused
by its being thrown from its orbit by some unknown
force. Incomplete calculations indicate that it will collide
with the earth somewhere in the central Pacific region,
on Thursday between eleven and twelve at night. It is
believed that the disaster will be complete and there is
no possible way of escape. Further bulletins will be
issued every few hours and will be broadcast
immediately. There is always the possibility that some
force similar to the one which threw the moon from its
orbit may again change its course. It is urged that all
persons meet the crisis as calmly as possible.
"Well?" asked Jim eagerly, when I had finished reading it.
"If it's not a hoax, I guess it means we're done for," I said slowly.
"Suppose we go over to the station and see what more comes in."
When we left the house I looked up at the moon, hanging full in the
sky, and Jim's apprehensive glance followed mine. I imagined it was
distinctly larger than usual and that it shone with a sinister orange-
colored glow instead of its usual silvery light. It was probably not
imagination, for people all over the world reported the same thing
that night.
We entered the wireless house and Jim sat down with the receivers
clamped to his ears. He began to take down a message which was
coming in and when he had finished, handed it to me.
BULLETIN: Tidal wave in the Pacific overwhelmed
many low-lying islands with great loss of life. All
communications with Hawaii cut off. Smithsonian
announces that tidal waves following course of moon
will within the next twenty-four hours sweep far inland.
Jim was taking down another message. I read it over his shoulder.
BULLETIN: There is possibility that life near the poles
may survive. It will probably be possible to use
airplanes for the next twenty-four hours; after that,
constantly increasing gales reaching hitherto unheard
of force, will make travel of any kind impossible. Any
survivors of the catastrophe should endeavor to
preserve a record of the phenomena that occur
immediately before the impact of the moon and
immediately thereafter.

CHAPTER II

A Start for Safety

Everyone knows now how that group of scientists scattered over the
world, knowing there was no escape for them, calmly continued their
observations and calculations and announced them over the radio.
They were undoubtedly the real heroes of the catastrophe. Our new
world honors their memory as scientists were never honored in those
days.
Jim watched me as I read the last bulletin. When I had finished he
asked, "Well, what do we do? Stay here and take what's coming, or
make a try for the north?"
I thought for a few minutes. "In the first place, I don't believe it is
worth while alarming the natives," I said. "They can't do anything for
themselves, and we can't do anything for them. As for us, I think
we'd better load as much gasoline and food in the plane as she can
carry, and make for the interior."
"Not go farther north? We might be safer on the ice than on land."
"How long do you suppose the ice will last? Even if we survive the
collision, the heat generated will melt all ice, even up here."
Jim looked at me a little helplessly. "Don't forget that Labrador has
water on three sides. If we go into the interior, I don't believe we'll
escape the tidal waves they're predicting."
"Probably not," I rejoined cheerfully, "but the chances are a thousand
to one we'll be snuffed out one way or another before the collision
occurs, so what difference does it make?"
There was another message coming in and Jim turned to take it.
"Don't waste time doing that," I said. "Hear that wind rising now?
Let's load up and start."
Doing that was quite simple. The hangar contained all the fuel we
could carry. When we rolled the machine out I looked over the little
village, rather conscience-stricken for a moment at leaving them in
ignorance of what was coming. They couldn't reach the interior in
time, I reflected, even if we did tell them, and they might as well
remain happy as long as they could.
"Where are we headed for?" asked Jim.
I pointed to the Laurentian Mountains which extend along the
Labrador coast. "Anywhere the other side of those."
Jim whirled the propeller and kicked the blocks from in front of the
wheels. Then he climbed on board. We should have had skids on
the undercarriage instead of wheels, to land on the snow, but we
would have to do the best we could with what we had. The roar of
the motor brought some of the inhabitants out-of-doors, and they
watched us, wonderingly, as we took off into the night with that
sinister orange moon gazing down at us.
The mountains are not high and we crossed them without difficulty.
Presently the sky became gray in the east, and the moon, still in the
sky, looked menacing. By the time the sun rose over the horizon we
were almost cheerful.
I had been looking for a place to land, and decided to take a chance
on the broad plateau at the top of the northern end of the mountain
chain. Here the rocks were not old Laurentian but sandstone. The
place we came down on was as flat as a table top and had been
blown clear of snow by the wind, which had become high enough to
make landing difficult. There was no shelter on the plateau, and we
had to hang on to the wings of the plane to steady it.
Finally we reached a little rocky valley. It was really only a
depression in the surface of the mountain, but it was deep enough to
shelter the plane and us from the increasing fury of the wind. We
anchored the plane as well as we could, and then made a breakfast
on canned beans.
"What next?" asked Jim when we had finished. "Maybe you'd better
try to get some sleep while I watch."
I shook my head. "We'll both try to sleep now. There's nothing to
watch for, and tonight we'll probably both want to be awake."
We crawled into our sleeping bags and the last thing I remember
was the thought that the increasingly shrill screeching of the wind
was an improvement on the noise made by the sirens of the New
York Fire Department.
I do not know what wakened me. I instinctively looked at my watch
and saw it was three o'clock. At first I was not sure whether I was
awake or whether I was in the middle of one of the half-waking
nightmares we sometimes have. Lying in the depression in the
mountain, I could see neither horizon but only the sky overhead. I
rubbed my eyes and looked again.

Nearer and Nearer

Instead of the usual blue, the sky was a burnished copper. The wind
was blowing a hurricane with a steady intensity from east to west. All
aviators are able to judge wind velocities pretty accurately, but this
was something entirely beyond my experience. I had felt a hundred-
and-fifty mile an hour gale during the Miami hurricane, but this was
vastly greater.
I could see flickering shadows overhead and it took me some time to
realize that they were solid objects carried by the wind. In addition to
the shrieking wind like an enormous siren, there was now a steady
roar like thunder in the mountains. I crawled out of my sleeping bag
and shivered to the intense cold. When we went to sleep the
thermometer I judge was about twenty above. Now I knew it must be
away below zero.
Jim was still sleeping when I bent over and shook his shoulder. He
slowly opened his eyes. I put my mouth close to his ear to make him
hear in the uproar of the wind.
"Better get up," I said. "Something's happening."
He glanced at the copper sky and scrambled out of his sleeping bag.
"Brrrr, it's cold!" he said, shivering. "What does it all mean?"
"I imagine it means the moon is rising over the horizon and is pretty
close to us."
"How are we going to keep from freezing?"
"Get into the cabin, I guess. If the wind doesn't reach the plane we'll
be just as safe as we are here, and if it does it will tear us to pieces
wherever we are."
We had worked the plane into the deepest part of the depression
between the sandstone ridges and it looked safe enough, unless the
mountain itself should be demolished. We gathered up our sleeping
bags and scrambled through the little door.
It was soon after we got inside that the moon appeared overhead.
Jim and I have never been able to agree as to how big it actually
looked that second night. I suppose we thought it was bigger than it
really was, because it had increased so much in size since the
previous night. It came over the sandstone ridge, a great scarlet
globe mottled with black.
"Gad, it's right on top of us!" exclaimed Jim.
"No it isn't," I replied, "but it probably will be tomorrow."
"Do you suppose we'll be alive then?" asked Jim, gazing in awe at
the great sphere, with its mountains and valleys, now floating almost
above our heads.
"It doesn't look like it now," I replied, "but still you never can tell."
It was that night that the headlong plunge toward the earth was
arrested, and the next day saw the scarlet sphere no larger when it
appeared. We immediately became hopeful that we might escape.
We had grown used to the sound of the wind and we had slept under
the plane. We had the cabin so full of gasoline cans and food that
there was no room for us to stretch out.
The sky had retained its burnished copper hue, but after the moon
had passed over the western ridge, the wind and changed sky were
the only things to remind us of what was happening. Then, as I said,
when we found the next morning that the moon was no larger, we
were distinctly encouraged.
It took only fifteen hours to encircle the earth, that time.
"I believe I can calculate how near us it is," I said.
I figured for a few minutes on a scrap of paper and decided that the
moon and the earth were at that moment ninety thousand miles
apart. It seems that I was ten thousand miles out of the way, but as
my result was based on a purely mathematical calculation, without
any help from observation other than the moon's time of revolution
around the earth, my error was excusable.

Waiting for the End

There was no slackening of the wind after the moon had
disappeared beneath the western cliff which was our horizon. It was
then eleven o'clock in the morning. The sky kept its burnished
copper tint and the sun was not visible. In fact, we did not see the
sun during this entire period. Day was a little brighter than night, but
there was nothing that corresponded to ordinary daylight.
"Now if the moon doesn't come up for fifteen hours," I said to Jim,
"we'll know that the worst is not going to happen."
"Why?"
"It will mean that the force that flung it in the direction of the earth
has been neutralized in some way, and that it will continue to revolve
around the earth about 90,000 miles away instead of 240,000."
Jim looked cheerful for the first time in two days.
"We'll know by two o'clock tomorrow morning, then?"
"If the news is bad, we'll know it before that."
There was no possibility of our venturing out of the depression
between the two sandstone cliffs where we were sheltered from the
wind. There was nothing to do except wait. As the half light, that we
called day, faded, Jim and I began to watch the eastern cliff. Six
o'clock, seven o'clock, eight o'clock passed.
Jim turned to me with a half grin. "Seems funny to be watching for
the moon and frightened to death for fear we'll see it."
"Well I guess we're safe if we don't see it for the next six hours."
I climbed into the cabin of the plane and began going over the
engine. Suddenly I heard a shout from Jim. I jumped out of the door
to the ground and saw him pointing to the eastern cliff.
There was a line of molten gold above it, too dazzling to look at.
It was at that moment that we had our first earthquake. There had
been many earlier ones in other parts of the world. I was thrown
violently to the ground and the sideways motion was so strong that I
tried to find something on the bare rocky surface to hang on to. By
the time I was able to raise myself to a sitting posture, a great
blinding segment of a sphere had appeared in the sky.
 A great blinding segment of a sphere appeared in the sky. I
realized that it was the moon travelling toward the earth at a
terrific velocity.

Of course I realized immediately that it was the moon, which must

now be approaching the earth at a terrific velocity. Why the reflected
light from it was so dazzling I have never been able to determine. As
far as I know, in other parts of the world persons advantageously
placed were able to observe it without difficulty, almost to the
moment of impact. The only possible explanation seems to be that
there was a vast amount of light reflected from the snow-covered
surface of the ground, and even that explanation is not quite
satisfactory. The fact remains that neither Jim nor I was able to
observe the surface of the moon as it passed above us. It would
have been as easy to look at the sun.
From the moment of this first earthquake, time in the ordinary sense
of the word had no meaning for us. We stayed as close to each other
and the plane as we could. There was now no distinction between
night and day. The sky was a burnished copper color, when it was
not being traversed by the brilliantly blazing moon, and, each time
the moon appeared over our rocky horizon, it nearly filled the
heavens.
I think we ate from time to time. I know we became extra-ordinarily
thirsty and were continually drinking. I assume that the wind
exhausted all the moisture in the air around us, and the air
exhausted it from our bodies. I do not even know whether that is a
possible explanation, but I give it for what it is worth. I am not quite
sure what we would have done for water if there had not been an
abundance of snow in our rocky valley. We knew enough not to try to
eat it, but we melted it over our little primus stove.
We could tell when the moon was going to appear by the increasing
intensity of the earthquakes. They became nearly continuous, and
we adjusted ourselves to them as people do to the motion of a ship.
We would not have been able to accept them so philosophically if we
had not been on top of a mountain where there was nothing to fall on
us.
The intervals between the moon's appearances became shorter and
shorter.

CHAPTER III
The Moon "Falls"
There came, finally, the thing I had been dreading, and if we had
been even a few feet nearer the sea level, we should have perished.
The moon filled the sky above us and we felt moisture falling on us.
"Rain!" exclaimed Jim. "No, it can't be. It's salt!"
"Tidal wave," I said, "and it's reached almost to the tops of the
mountains. We'll get more of it the next time the moon comes
around."
A few hours later there was a new sound added to the roaring and
screeching of the wind. We looked at each other.
"It's come," I said. "Let's get inside the cabin. We'll be as safe there
as anywhere."
We had barely scrambled in and closed the door when
simultaneously with the first golden line of the moon over our eastern
horizon there appeared a white wall of turbulent water. It seemed
higher because we were looking up at it, but I believe now it was not
more than six feet. It poured down toward us while we wondered
what it would do to us. As it happened, it did nothing of
consequence. It swept around the lower part of the plane and came
up over the cabin floor. Then it swept on, following the rapidly
moving moon toward the west.
"Next time it's going to get us," I remarked to Jim.
But there was no next time. We had seen the moon for the last time,
though of course we did not then know it.
It was about four hours later that the moon and the earth collided.
Fortunately for us, we were lying flat on the rocks in our sleeping
bags. It was our only way of keeping warm, and besides, we had
thought it better to get what rest we could before the moon appeared
again with its accompanying tidal wave. As I said, we had got so
used to earthquakes that we did not notice them.
Then it happened....
When I recovered consciousness, at first, I could not think where I
was. I looked around in bewilderment and at the same moment
realized that a warm rain was drenching me. My bones ached
terribly. A few feet away Jim lay as if he were dead.
I crawled out of my sleeping bag and went over and shook him. He
opened his eyes and looked at me blankly for a moment. Then he
groaned and tried to grin. "So we're not dead after all?"
"We'll be drowned if we stay here." I said wearily. "Let's try to get
inside the cabin. My, it's hot!"
"Hot?" questioned Jim, trying to rise. "So it is. I think all my bones
are broken."
After half rising and half crawling we made our way to the plane.
There was not a trace of ice or snow. The sky was covered with
heavy low-lying clouds from which the rain was pouring, but the
burnished copper glow had entirely disappeared. It was a perfectly
normal sky, or would have been in the tropics. It was daylight, but
there was no sun to be seen.
We had neither of us any clothes except those we wore. We stripped
off our dripping outer things and let them lie where they fell. There
was nothing else to do with them until the rain stopped. We found
that heavy woolen under-clothing was not much more comfortable
than furs in that temperature. We settled down in the cabin and
proceeded to make the best of things, quite content to be alive.
It was evident that the moon and the earth had met, and that the
earth had come out of the encounter with less damage than anyone
had anticipated. The rise in temperature had been expected.
Undoubtedly it was much greater elsewhere than in the Arctic.

Two Survivors

Jim and I compared notes as to our actual experiences at the

moment of the collision. We both remembered the terrible shock and
then had known nothing further. We agreed that except for the
shaking up we felt no bad effects from the spell of unconsciousness.
Scientists have since assumed that in addition to the shock there
was the result of the sudden displacement of the fluids in the inner