“I wouldn’t get my hopes up,” Diego said. “It’s been how many years now?”
“I dunno. Over ten. I was real little when they left.”
“I’d think in all that time they’d have found somebody to bring word back, knowing how worried everybody would be. Of course, if it was my mom,” he added, his tone turning wry, “she’d get so involved with her work she’d never notice she forgot to bring me with her, but you people aren’t like that.”
“Well, thanks a lot. But I prefer to hope, if it’s all the same to you. Or isn’t anybody else supposed to? You got your father back. I guess that’s all that matters.”
“I didn’t mean for you to take it that way, Bunny. I wouldn’t have got my dad back if it wasn’t for you and Clodagh and everybody, and sure I hope there’s people who will help your folks down under. I’d just hate to see you get all excited and be disappointed.”
“I’ll be excited if I want to,” she said tartly. “And I’ve been disappointed before.”
Diego didn’t say anything, and Bunny regretted being so sharp with him. He was probably just showing how much he cared about her, as Aisling would say. But he was only two years older than she was, and he shouldn’t treat her like a kid.
So after that, they rode in silence until they rounded the bend at the foot of the pass and were greeted by a roaring wind funneling through the cleft and almost blowing them back down to the Shannon.
Flattening themselves against the necks of the curlies, they trudged up the trail, which was some what less muddy than the flatlands. The air was also noticeably chillier. Dinah dropped behind the horses and padded along in the shelter of their sturdy bodies.
McGee’s Pass wasn’t very big. Not even as big as Kilcoole, Bunny thought with surprise as they rode between the first pair of houses. There were only about eight houses, situated fairly close together, lining the wide spot in the trail that passed for a road. The road was heavily churned up and tracked into ruts, ridges, and pockmarks lightly covered with a recent sprinkling of snow, making the footing extremely slippery and uneven.
The houses were unimproved original company issue, shored up with pieces of timber, stones, mud bricks, plascrete, hides, and whatever else was handy. As in Kilcoole, the ground was littered with the refuse of many long winters and warm seasons not quite warm enough to melt the snows.
“Everybody must be inside having lunch,” Bunny said of the deserted streets.
But that didn’t explain the quiet. She saw no dogs, no curlies, nothing except one lone marmalade cat trying to catch what warmth it could on a plascrete roof.
Dinah wandered from house to house, object to object, sniffing and whining, barking once or twice, and sniffing and whining some more. At one place, she paused to urinate near a doorstep.
The cat looked down at her as if considering jumping on her back for a ride. Dinah jumped up, pawing the house, and barked sharply. The cat rose and stretched itself, and jumped lightly down from the roof onto a barrel and then to the ground.
After a mutual sniff, the cat sauntered up the street, its tail describing arches in the air above its back, while Dinah struggled not to run over the creature in her haste to go wherever the cat was going.
Bunny and Diego followed the dog. The cat walked out of town, which wasn’t all that far to go, and up toward the pass, and then abruptly disappeared into a bush beside the trail.
Bunny and Diego dismounted. A voice came from behind the bush, then suddenly, many voices, and then the bush moved aside and a person appeared in what turned out to be the entrance to a cave.
The person, a man who looked a bit like Bunny’s uncle Adak, seemed startled to see them. “Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want? he demanded, blocking the entrance to the cave.
“Slainte,” Bunny said as normally as possible. After all, if these people were supporting the company instead of the planet, she wasn’t surprised that they might be a little defensive. “I was looking for the Connelly family. I thought they lived around here.”