Outland

by Mary Austin

By the ridge between Deep Fern and Deer Lake Hollow the women with young children turned off toward some safe, secret center, there to wait word from their men. Evarra and the more active women kept on to the Ledge. I went with them, not being wanted very much, but because in the hurry of Council no other provision had been made for me.

To understand all that went on in the next few weeks, it is necessary to be precise. Deep Fern is as far from Broken Tree as a strong man can walk in twelve or fourteen hours, walking steadily, and the Ledge is ten hours from Deep Fern. It runs, a great dyke of porphyry, with the contour of the hills, at the upper limit of tall trees and makes a boundary between Outland and the Far-Folk. Beginning and end of it I never saw, but from a place called Windy Cover to River Ward I knew it very well. In this place it passes over shallow, stony soil, in which nothing grows more than knee height, except on the lee side of one strong hill where a triangular space of lilac and toyon reaches quite up to the rocky wall. The chaparral is tall enough for a man or a deer to walk in it upright. Certain small winds forever straying and whirling here, ruffling the tops of the scrub and stirring the branches, make it possible for such a passage to take place unobserved. The stir of a man moving through it, indistinguishable from the running movements of the wind, gives the place its name of Windy Covers.

From here the Ledge goes East, high and impassable, following the hills until it reaches the gap where the river comes through. There it leaves off for a crow’s flight, and the river continues that boundary until it touches the Ledge again. The whole of this space being thickly wooded and the river running shallowly at seasons, it was here the Far-Folk trespassed most. Here past the end of the Dyke the filchers of the King’s Desire had come. The whole region was known as River Ward, and Mancha kept watch over it. Beyond its second point of contact with the dyke, called Broken Head, the Ledge went on south a very great distance. I never heard how far, though from something that I heard at Windy Covers I gathered that the Outliers possessed all the district south as far as the Sur. Just beyond Broken Head the river widens and makes a turn where there is easy passing, called from the sound of it going over the smooth stones, Singing Ford. All the other places I have named lay north of the river between it and the Ledge.

We came to Windy Covers a little after midday. I should have said, looking up its green steep, level grown as a mown field, that all the Outliers were there before us. The tops of the scrub were all ashake; the lilacs tossed, the buckthorn turned and whitened. Lines of wavering showed in it like the stir of a meadow when rabbits run in the grass. But it turned out to be only the wind walking for we were hours ahead of the men.

“Ah, I told you it was good cover,” said Evarra, as we came in by the green tunnels that the deer had made.

I had gathered from the talk of the women that we were to lie there, guarding the pass, and keeping out of River Ward. Mancha was occupying that section now, hoping not to excite the Far-Folk by too active pursuit. It was not known yet if the lifters of the Treasure had passed beyond River Ward or if Ravenutzi had joined them, if indeed he might not yet be on our side the Ledge with the Ward. There were some other points in this connection on which I wished to satisfy myself. So when I saw Lianth mousing along under the wall, I crept after him, unsuspected. We came into a little bay of bitten scrub and a well-trodden track that led up along the stony, broken back of the Ledge. This way the bucks had gone when at the end of the mating season they ranged afar and fed on the high ridges. This way they came down to seek the does, and along this trail I saw Lianth pawing breathlessly, nose to the thick mosses like a snuffling hound.

“They must have come this way,” he said.

“Yes,” I assented, thinking of the deer.

“If they have crossed, there should be some trace of them. They must have come in the night and could not have gone so carefully.” He scrutinized little heaps of leaf litter in the crevices, and squinted along the ground. “And the trackers have not been here either. They cannot have crossed at all.”

All at once I understood that he was talking about Ravenutzi and the Ward.