of that I am certain, though if while I was the courier soldier or the barebacked jailbreaker or the drunkard jockey with the colic heart there is no telling. The horses could, if they could. You might have watched the fog downhill as carefully as a deafling for the gold flutter of buttons on a blue coat. You may have already known, but still overlooked, that you would almost certainly hear the horse first. You may have hidden in a treeline of pine or breathy cypress. You cut camp with a bowie knife. You had no pot for boiling snow; you had left your wool blanket for the fevering Georgian boy with six sisters; you damned yourself bitterly for both of these things. You shined the newborn leather of your suckling boots whenever movement was necessary. You crunched seeds of raw coffee, one at a time, with such desperate care and veneration that in your mouth they became an almost butter. You left the meal of them in the lining of your cheeks to ring them with feeling. Your fire was ailing and smokeless but warm enough for baking wild eggs in the ashes; this saved you; your hunger would have smothered your need for quiet to instead snipe overhead at fat squirrels or potshot careless foxes; you would never have found blackbird and jackdaw nests if your boyhood was not spent burgling orchards. I came to you at last, the third morning, with some message of some importance; your parchment skin and knobby meating of your spine had become witchdoctor's toys. You had polished holes into your boots. Your arm and the butt of your Whitworth struck no familiar harmonies; the wood of the rifle made no place for the cords of your shoulder; both croaked and rebelled from the cold.
I came to you with the senile blue frown of my cap pulled low to my nose and fogging from the mouth, the thoroughbred gutting uphill over branches and fogging from the mouth. You watched through your brass scope and it welded a ring of snow around your eye. Your knuckle curled around the tongue of the Whitworth while you breathed in the maybe pine or cypress; you curled low and light your quiet body like the pages of a burnt bible; your thumb snapped back the hammer and you saw the horse's ears twist around like lips with the sudden taste of medicine; you braced your aching arm for the rifle's coming kick; you squeezed and shut your eyes; you opened them and watched me claw and heave backwards, you watched me slither into snow, you saw the gold buttons flutter and scatter and spark like a smashed oil lantern. The horse gutted uphill, fogging from the mouth, and carried past you, without us.
