So shadows beyond the rock, a gentler slope, a drying wind, less snow . . .
A twisting trail, a corkscrew trail, an adit into warmth . . . Down, down, down the night, beneath the changing stars…
Far the snows of an hour ago, now scrubby plants and level plain . . . Far, and the night birds stagger into the air, wheeling above the carrion feast, shedding hoarse notes of protest as we pass . . .
Slow again, to the place where the grasses wave, stirred by the less cold breeze . . . The cough of a hunting cat . . . The shadowy flight of a bounding, deerlike beast . . . Stars sliding into place and feelings in my feet once more . ..
Star rearing, neighing, racing ahead from some unseen thing . . . A long time in the soothing then, and longer still till the shivers go . . .
Now icicles of a partial moon falling on distant treetops . . . Moist earth exhaling a luminescent mist . . . Moths dancing in the night light. . .
The ground momentarily buckling and swaying, as if mountains were shifting their feet . . . To every star its double . . . A halo round the dumbbell moon . . . The plain, the air above it, filled with fleeting shapes . . .
The earth, a wound-down clock, ticks and grows still . . . Stability . . . Inertia . . . The stars and the moon reunited with their spirits . . .
Skirting the growing fringe of trees, west . . . Impressions of a sleeping jungle: delirium of serpents under oil cloth . . .
West, west . . . Somewhere a river with broad, clean banks to ease my passage to the sea . . .
Thud of hoofs, shuttling of shadows . . . The night air upon my face . . . A glimpse of bright beings on high, dark walls, shining towers . . . The air is sweetened. . . Vision swims . . . Shadows . . .
We are merged, centaur-like. Star and I, under a single skin of sweat . . . We take the air and give it back in mutual explosions of exertion . . . Neck clothed in thunder, terrible the glory of the nostrils . . . Swallowing the ground . . .
Laughing, the smell of the waters upon us, the trees very near to our left . . .
Then among them . . . Sleek bark, hanging vines, broad leaves, droplets of moisture . . . Spider web in the moonlight, struggling shapes within . . . Spongy turf . . . Phosphorent fungus on fallen trees . . .
A clear space . . . Long grasses rustling . . .
More trees…
Again, the riversmell . . .
Sounds, later . . . Sounds . . . The grassy chuckling of water…
Closer, louder, beside it at last . . . The heavens buckling and bending in its belly, and the trees . . . Clean, with a cold, damp tang . . . Leftward beside it, pacing it now . . . Easy and flowing, we follow . . .
To drink . . . Splashing in its shallows, then hockhigh with head depressed, Star, in it, drinking like a pump, blasting spray from his nostrils . . . Upriver, it laps at my boots . . . Dripping from my hair, running down my arms . . . Star’s head turning, at the laughter . . .
Then downriver again, clean, slow, winding. . . Then straight, widening, slowing . . .
Trees thickening, then thinning . . .
Long, steady, slow . . .
A faint light in the east . ..
Sloping downward now, and fewer trees . . . Rockier, and the darkness made whole once again . ..
The first, dim hint of the sea, lost an odor later . . . Clicking on, on, in the nightsend chill . . . Again, an instant’s salt . . .
Rock, and an absence of trees. . . Hard, steep, bleak, down. . . Ever-increasing precipitonsness . . .