ODTAA: A novel

by John Masefield

Presently the horse cocked his ears at something and challenged. Hi halted, expecting and fearing to see some wild beast, but in a few seconds he saw that there was a horse in front of him, standing still among the tree trunks, watching him, some fifty yards ahead. He was almost invisible at first, for a horse will fade into any background or dimness; as he became distinct, Hi saw that he was saddled and bridled, though not mounted.

“That is it,” he thought, “the brute has headed me off. This is the murderer. He has slipped off his horse there, and is somewhere among the trees waiting to pot me. Even if I dodge him, there’ll still be Mrs. Now my only chance is to dodge.”

He was about to dodge, knowing the futility of dodging, when the horse strode out of his covert into view. He was a darker horse than the two big sorrels tethered near the shack. He had a running cut on his side and a saddle twisted underneath him. He came ramping from his place, full of power and alarm. “By George, it’s the dead man’s horse,” Hi cried, “and what a beauty. I’ll have him.” However, the horse had been terrified once that day; Hi’s coming set him off again full tilt into the wilderness, with his stirrups flying from flank to foreleg or swinging back to clank under his belly. Presently, the girth buckle broke, the saddle fell and made him stumble, but he recovered, shook it clear and strode off into the woods.

Soon after his stridings had ceased to beat in the ears, the air above began to sigh with the homings of countless birds which settled on the trees with cryings and shriekings. Then suddenly there came a darkening all over the forest, as though the light had been turned off at a tap. Hi knew what this meant. His father had often told him that when the sun went behind Mount Melchior the light went off, so that you couldn’t see to shoot. “Now here I am with the day gone,” he thought. “It will soon be dark, and I have not yet started for Anselmo. Buck up, old horse, and get me out of the forest.”

The horse seemed to be bound for somewhere; but after another hour of going, when it was beginning to be dark, he was still in the forest. He could see no gleam of open country nor hear anywhere any noise of men. When he halted to shout, he had no answer, except the sudden silence of birds and beasts. He was there in the depths, out of the reach of his kind, as alone as a man can be.

Perhaps in the past the horse had had some happiness in that part of the forest, which led him thither now. When it was almost too dark to go further, he bore his rider into a space where Indians had made a cassava patch by burning off the trees. Indians and cassava shrubs were long since gone, but the space was still clear of forest. In that patch of ground, some eighty by fifty yards across, there was tall grass of a bright yellow colour between two and three feet high. About this, the trees grew to less than their usual size, being (as it seemed) bowed down by the weight of the creepers. Over the patch was the dome or depth of violet sky in which there were already stars.

The horse thrust into the patch and fell to eating greedily. Hi dismounted to look about him; he found that there was water at one edge of the patch.

“I’d better stay here for the night,” he thought, “because I’m lost. In the morning perhaps I may be able to find a way out. If I could only see the sun or Polaris I would be out in no time.”

He unsaddled his horse, rubbed him well down with grass, and having haltered him, hitched him to a tree. He gathered him some armsfull of the grass, and talked to him, as he ate, for comfort.

All through his ride he had not tasted food, because of something he had said to himself at breakfast, “I hope my next meal may be at Anselmo.” Now, when he saw plainly that he could not reach Anselmo for many hours to come, he drew his food from his bags. The rain had made a paste of the bread, but he scraped some of the paste together and ate it with some sausage; he drank of the water of the pan, which smacked of the marsh. He reckoned that he still had one tolerable meal of paste left in his bag, and one good feed of oats for the horse. These things he resolved to keep in reserve. Under the paste of the bread he found five silver pesetas, which Anton or the girl had hidden for him.