The wind seemed to be dying, and the waves lessening. Ramsay kept his hold on the little horse's mane. He saw a floating object pass and tried to catch it, but when he did so he almost lost his hold on the horse. Kicking hard to catch up, he twined both hands in the horse's mane and tightened them there.
Then he felt a rebirth of confidence. Already they had been in the lake for a long, long time and he had been able to hold his own. It was impossible to get much colder, or more numb, than he already was and he could still hang on. Besides, the horse seemed to know where he was going.
He swam strongly, and apparently he was swimming straight. At any rate, there was no evidence that he was traveling in circles or choosing an erratic course. Ramsay had been told that animals have an instinct compared to which the most sensitive human's is coarse and blunted and maybe that was true. Maybe the horse did know where it was going.
Now that the waves were not rising so high, the horse swam faster. The wind died almost completely, so that the lake's surface was merely ruffled, and Ramsay felt a mounting confidence in his ability to live through this. In the overcast a gull cried, and things had started going wrong with the Holter when the gulls left it. Now they were back. Probably they, too, had known of the approaching storm and had flown to safety off the lake.
The swimmers broke out of the mist and Ramsay saw the beach.
It was about a hundred yards away, a sand beach behind which a rocky cliff rose. This wore a crest of evergreens, and its face was spotted here and there with smaller trees. A cloud of white gulls screamed into the air as Ramsay and the horse approached.
They reached the shallows, and the little horse's back emerged from the water like that of some suddenly appearing sea monster. Ramsay let go his hold on the animal's mane and swam. Then, coming to waist-high water in which he could wade, he splashed toward the beach.
The wind had died, but waves still pounded the beach and it was very cold. The near borders of this wild lake, Ramsay decided, probably never warmed up. With an immense body of cold water lapping them, they were perpetually chilled.
While the little horse looked gravely on, Ramsay stripped his clothing off, wrung it out, and put the wet garments back on. The horse crowded very close, as though he were afraid to go away. He nibbled Ramsay with his lips. As soon as the boy moved, he moved with him.
He stayed very near as Ramsay walked up the beach, a stretch of driftwood-spotted sand that varied from sixty to two hundred feet in width and reached clear back to the rising bluff. A belt of wet sand showed where the lake had crawled up onto the beach and fallen back.