After Oil 3: The Years of Rebirth by John Michael Greer (Ed.)

Author:John Michael Greer (Ed.) [Greer, John Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Founders House Publishing LLC
Published: 2015-04-21T22:00:00+00:00

Dispatches

By Wylie Harris

By the second night her pursuer’s dustcloud had yet to dwindle. Closer, if anything. Humpback, then. No horse could match that pace without watering.

Next morning after she’d made bivouack the wisp was still there in the dawnlight. That settled it. No horse could carry on in that furnace heat.

She’d headed back down from Tulsa on just her lone mount, breaking camp at dusk and traveling until the slivered moon washed out in the dawnglow. Every day southward saw the sorghum headed farther out, within hedgerows that switched imperceptibly from bodark to mesquite as the territory rolled past, and she pushed the beast a little, angling to reach the stead before the equinox opened summer’s scorching maw.

Even as near in time as her girlhood it were nowise wise, as Grananna would say—had said— for her to be outbound alone, woman and twenty, with such valued stock in train. Little improvement on that wisdom with the slugs of St. Lou silver she’d got in exchange weighting her packs on the return.

But lately the Rusas had pretty well impressed upon both RepTex and Catusas the staying power of their claim on that country, and camelback she could go long enough between waterings to steer a course well clear of the towns and old highways and any residual banditry that might accrue.

With her grief still wilding her so freshly she might well have gone it alone even in the old unsettled days, and in the end Grananna had seen and bent to that, misgivings strangled. When Aunt Al had kept after her about it, Grananna had snapped that if the daughter was at stake as well, then better the risk of death than the guarantee of madness.

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