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Chapter 52: Dawntrail
🕑 Added 2024-11-12 03:06:33 +0000 UTCChapter 52: Dawntrail
Harvey had gathered all of the drivers together, huddled shoulder to shoulder like a football team in the moments before the game started. As I approached, the two nearest to me parted slightly, allowing me to see the star of the show: a crude map one of the drivers had scratched into the dirt with a stick. At the centre, six boxes surrounded by stick figures, representing our encampment, with six horses scattered around it at various odd points. Two of them were close to each other, directly northeast of our position. The third was due east, the fourth south east, the fifth directly south, and the sixth and final horse seemed determined to play the contrarian, having separated from the herd to stand northwest of us. Simple enough, for even a toddler to read, which begged the question: how was this map drawn, when nobody had gone out last night?
“Nice mask,” Harvey said by way of greeting, his eyes barely drifting from the map on the floor.
“Thanks. So, how are we doing this?”
“Three of the archers will stay behind, to maintain a minimum perimeter and protect our belongings. The rest of us will travel in a single group, with the drivers using their Find Animal ability to guide us towards each group of horses.”
Well, that explained how the map worked.
“There’s eighteen in total to look for, although we don’t know how many are at each point, only that they’ve gathered in six places, since Find Animal can only guide us in a general direction, rather than providing fine detail. Each time we find a group, one pair, an archer and a driver, will split off to guide them back here, while the rest of us continue the search. Simple enough.”
The numbers lined up, so there was little for me to do except nod in assent, and then we were off. We advanced at a cautious pace, with all eyes on the distance, searching for the first hint of yet another ambush. It was morning, and thankfully cool as we advanced, the sun overhead not putting out too much heat just yet. Even so, it was slow going, as there were no roads to speak of, only uneven grassland beneath our feet. The drivers were gathered together, while the archers fanned out in every direction, with Harvey and I somewhere in the middle at any given moment. Pumpkin, on the other hand, had decided he wasn’t in the mood to walk, and sat on my shoulder the whole way, his eyes scanning the horizon for danger.
Every so often, the drivers collectively paused and closed their eyes, whereupon we would wait for them to resume moving, sometimes in the same direction as before, and other times with minute adjustments in direction. There were no visible signs of activation, but they were clearly using Find Animal to fine tune our search. We were all on edge, after the events of the last twenty four hours, but to my mild surprise, no attack proved forthcoming as we advanced. Admittedly, whichever driver had drawn the map wasn’t great at depicting scale, so what I’d expected to take minutes was closer to half an hour, but we still reached the first two groups without issue.
No less than half a dozen horses meandered about, grazing from the tall grass that grew abundant off of the beaten trail. I stood back, briefly wondering how the drivers were going to corral these errant steeds, but in the end it proved much simpler than I’d expected. One of the drivers stuck two fingers in his mouth, blowing a sharp whistle that made me wince, and the fur on Pumpkin’s back to rise. Almost immediately, the horses turned to him, and began to canter towards him. As this first find represented a full third of our horses, two drivers and two archers were assigned to escort them home, the drivers mounting two of them to take the lead, while the guards walked on either side of them, bows ready for trouble. So far, so good.
The ten of us that remained pivoted, going what I thought was South, thought I couldn’t be sure, as I’d never quite learned to navigate by the Sun; there had never been any need, in the age of Google Maps. Still, it was an undeniable good start, which only made me more paranoid as we searched for the remaining twelve horses. The next bunch were thankfully a bit closer than the first, relatively speaking, and after what I pegged at less than ten minutes of walking, we found the next group. The good news? Our search method thus far had proven completely reliable. The bad news? The horses were dead.
“More wolves,” Harvey remarked, kneeling down to examine the pile of bloody bones that was all that remained of one horse. “A decent sized pack at least, to bring down a horse and then clean it out like this.”
He didn’t bother examining the other two piles, having seen enough; I couldn’t blame him, as I found the smell to be rather unpleasant, even standing further away from them than Harvey. I took a second look around, but saw no sign of any predators; which didn’t mean much, as they’d had a whole night to eat their fill, so they could be anywhere by now. The atmosphere was slightly more subdued as our search continued, though not overly much; the possibility of losses had been on everyone’s minds, after all, it was precisely due to the potential danger that we’d deferred our search until the daylight hours. If anything, this latest outcome only validated our caution, because I certainly didn’t fancy the idea of facing a pack of wolves at night; I wasn’t Pumpkin, my eyes didn’t work so well in the dark. Shaking my head at the mere thought of it, I raised a hand to Pumpkin’s ears to give him a scratch, as we continued ever onward.
