Bunny thought it was the most ill assorted rescue party imaginable, but, what with all the injured being tended at Kilcoole, these five had been the only ones available. Sinead would have gone by herself, if no one else had accompanied her to rescue Yana, hoping to find her brother, too. No sooner had Bunny told Clodagh what Adak had said about Yana being in trouble and the shuttle crashing than Sinead had barged into the cabin, muttering that Yana was in trouble and she had to go help.
“Sean send for you?” Clodagh had asked, her gaze unusually piercing.
“Not just Sean,” Sinead had answered, biting her words off. She glanced about, measuring the occupants for suitability to her need. “This is it, Clodagh!”
Clodagh had nodded once and brought her meat cleaver down so hard that it quivered, stuck, in the board. “I go with you!”
“You?” Bunny couldn’t believe her ears, but Clodagh was already taking off her apron, striding to the litter of parkas and boots by the door, and searching through them for her own gear.
Her statement had galvanized the others. Nothing would have kept Bunny from following Clodagh, though her insistence astounded Steve. But he repeated his assertion that he had to make observations of the phenomenon. When Diego vacillated, obviously distressed, wanting to go, yet unwilling to leave his father, Aisling had volunteered to look after Francisco.
As they went outside to select curly-coats from the herd Sinead had rounded up, another volunteer made it plain that he was coming along: Nanook. A quick smile lit Sinead’s anxious face, and she laid her hand in a brief gesture of gratitude on the animal’s black and white head.
Dinah joined them, too, using drastic measures to get her way. Seeing them ride out of the village, she had howled so piteously and continued to yelp at such an earsplitting volume that Herbie must have given in and ordered Liam to let her loose. She came charging up to Diego just as they dipped down in the valley northwest of the town, and she maintained a position beside his mount throughout the trek.
Nanook had taken it as his right to lead the expedition and ranged way beyond Sinead, now and then padding back to them as if hoping he could speed up their progress. But the slush and mud made the going slow, and even the clever curly-coats got trapped now and then in melting drifts.
On the first day, when the ground shook again, Clodagh lifted her hand to signal a halt. Laboriously she dismounted and slowly lay down, arranging herself flat on her belly, her right cheek pressed onto the snow-packed ground. After a long time, she rose, wiping her face clean before she pointed west. “That way.”
Clodagh also had other means of communication and Bunny watched, fascinated, as she employed them. She sang. Using tone-like sonar, she sang to the birds and the rocks and the plants:
“Friends, have you seen our friend, Yanaba? ”
She met the enemy and was taken into battle with him.
See that she comes to no harm.”
If the addressee was a raven, it promptly flew away; if it was an animal, it ran purposefully off; a stream, it kept about ill business, but Bunny swore that the ripples changed pitch; and if it was the ground beneath the hooves of the horses, it simply absorbed the songs, listening. Clodagh listened, too, and then she would alter their direction a compass point or two. They would continue for a while on the new course until she found something else to sing to.
In this way, despite Margolies’s demanding explanations of this quixotic form of directions, they traveled for two days and two nights and half a day again. They got what sleep they could in their makeshift saddles, stopping only to feed the horses, and for ten minutes in every two hours to rest their mounts’ backs. The horses kept moving tirelessly, mostly at a walk but occasionally, where the terrain had been swept free of snow, breaking into their smooth little canter.
Very early on the rescuers had to cover their mouths with pieces of cotton cloth that rapidly became clogged with dust and ash and had to be shaken often. Even the food they ate during their brief halts tasted like more of the same. Soon everyone’s eyes went from stinging to being red and swollen. When they could dig down to clean snow during the rest halts, they bathed their faces, trying to relieve the irritation.