He reasoned afterward that there was nothing unusual in that. A man came across a riderless horse and followed it to find the rider, and that was simply what a decent person did. But the truth, he turned over many times in the months that followed, was that he had felt something in the quality of the paint's attention, a specific human quality, like being looked at by someone who already knew your answer before you gave it. The paint led him off the road at the third bend, up a draw, cutting northeast into the higher country. Snow was deep enough that Pocket's legs sank past the knee with every step.
The trees closed in until the sky was a gray stripe above them, no wider than a wagon road. They climbed for 30 minutes. The temperature dropped. Levi pulled his collar up and watched the paints hindquarters moving steadily before him, never looking back, never hurrying. He found Shenoa at the top of the draw.
She was in a shallow depression behind a shelf of granite where the wind had scooped the snow out and left a natural alcove. lying on her side, knees drawn toward her chest, her riding coat, long tanned elkhide stitched at the collar with a red and black geometric pattern pulled tight around her. Blood on the coat's left shoulder, dark and dry. Fresh blood at her hairline from a cut above her ear that had frozen before it finished bleeding. She was breathing. That was the first thing he checked. short and shallow, the kind that comes from a body that has stopped fighting and started negotiating.
She was also young, early 20s, maybe younger. Her face angular and fine boned, her skin the color of river clay in summer, hair loose, tangled with pine needles and snow. Her right hand was curled around a flat leather parcel about the size of a small Bible tied with a cord of twisted sinew pressed hard against her ribs even in unconsciousness. He built a fire from dead wood pulled from under the granite shelf where the snow hadn't reached it. Working fast, moving through the steps without deliberation, tinder, kindling the larger pieces, the flint from the kid in his saddle bag.
When it caught, he moved her closer, carefully, talking to her softly the whole time in the low, even voice he used with pocket when the gelding was spooked. She didn't wake. He cut the shoulder seam of the elkhide coat, and looked at the wound beneath. A crease from a rifle ball, not a through and through. It had scored across the top of her shoulder and kept going, taking a strip of skin and muscle with it, but missing the bone.
The wound was 3 days old from the look of the healing edges infected at the margins. He cleaned it with canteen water, packed it with strips from his spare shirt, and bound it as tightly as he dared. He sat beside her while the fire burned and build it up again. The paint horse had come close and stood at the edge of the fire light, not tethered, not going anywhere. She woke near dark.