The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [175]
She stopped and turned Rosabone. When she stopped, so did the distant rider. “Do you know who he is?” she asked.
I couldn’t see him well enough to recognize him or even to know for sure that he was one of Snow’s deputies. “No, but I reckon he’s one of the law,” I said.
“We’ll have to lose him,” she declared. “Where can we go to shake him off?”
“That way,” I directed her, not pointing but just nodding my head slightly in the direction of a byroad that diverged from the Chisms’ lane and dropped down toward Butterchurn Holler. We rode Rosabone along the Butterchurn Holler trail for a mile, with the deputy still coming along behind us, hanging back but definitely following us. I knew there was a sharp bend ahead in the trail, and I told Viridis, “When we reach that big hickory up ahead, right past it let’s cut quick into the woods.”
She spoke over her shoulder: “I’m afraid I don’t know a hickory from an elm. You’ll have to say when.”
I told her when. We left the road and plunged into the deep woods that rose up the north side of Butterchurn Holler. The climb was steep, and we both dismounted and led Rosabone up to the top of the ridge, where we paused and waited for fifteen or twenty minutes to see if the deputy had discovered which way we had gone. But there was no further sign of him. He must have followed the Butterchurn Holler trail onward. We remounted Rosabone and rode across the ridge until we could double back and regain the Chism lane and cross it into Nail’s sheep pastures. As we rode across the pasture, I watched carefully in every direction for signs of any other deputy or spy.
The pasture rose, rolling, through the high weeds and brush that had taken over the place since Nail’s sheep had died. The Chisms ought to have bought a few sheep or goats just to graze it and keep it from going back to the wild, or at least they should have mowed it for hay. “What is all this ferny stuff?” Viridis asked, and I explained that it was yarrow, which Nail had planted for his sheep to supplement their diet; but it had grown tall and its leaves, a grayish shade of green, were rank. “Yarrow’s a pretty name for a plant,” she said, and I told her that some women and girls used yarrow as the main ingredient in a love medicine. “Love medicine?” Viridis laughed, and I had to explain to her how you could concoct beverages that had the power to influence the man of your choice.
She didn’t take me very seriously. Then as we went on she asked me to identify other weeds and grasses, and I told her the names of all the pretty ones: chicory and butterfly weed, coreopsis and oldfield toadflax. “Really? Is it really called oldfield toadflax?” she asked, and I said that was what I’d always known it to be called.
Then we were drawn into that uppermost corner of the field, where it nestles against the side of the mountain, lined on two sides by thick, close hardwoods that seem to make a cul-de-sac in the corner but actually open into an old trail. But I didn’t direct Viridis toward that trail opening, just yet. “Let’s wait here a bit,” I suggested, and dismounted from Rosabone. “You just sit there on her for a while, and I’m gonna check to make sure nobody’s watching you.”
Viridis did as I told her, and I crept over behind the tree line at the edge of the field and followed it for a good ways back along the slope of the pasture, with Rouser at my heels. I moved from tree to tree, keeping myself hidden and looking out across the field to catch sight of anyone else. But there was no one. We were alone up there. “Smell anybody?” I asked Rouser, and he planted himself and raised his nose into the air as if he understood my question. I wouldn’t have