They all shuddered as the horrible image loomed in their minds.
“They can’t be gone,” Verdad the colt said, dancing nervously from side to side. “I mean … I mean …” But his words dwindled off. The three stallions, Grullo, Bobtail, and Arriero, were wheezing and giving fretful whinnies.
Hold On understood their confusion. The idea of Estrella — the freest, wildest horse any of them had ever known — bound in ropes and chains was impossible to imagine, like trying to picture the night sky without stars.
No one spoke for a long time. Hold On stood trembling in the dusky light of a pine forest. Grullo, the steady old stallion, came up and began to run his muzzle across Hold On’s withers.
“They are gone, aren’t they?” Hold On whispered.
“Yes. They are gone but not forever. They will find their way home.”
“Forever for one as old as myself doesn’t matter, as my time is short now on this earth. But I don’t want to be on this earth without Estrella. I might as well be dead.”
“Don’t talk this way, Hold On.”
“I was running beside them, Grullo. I could not see the lassos fall, but I heard them. I felt them as though they were around my own neck.” Hold On gave a shiver. Yes, he could feel the rope. He could hear the shrill scream of his dear Estrella. Tijo’s guttural shriek as if his insides were being ripped out. He drooped his head mournfully. Would he never feel the comforting weight of the boy Tijo on his back, or hear the fleet hooves of Estrella next to him? He knew that filly so well. He knew the sound of her heart beating, the rhythm of her swift legs devouring distances.
“We have to go back,” Grullo nickered softly. “We must go back and look for them. They might be there still, and hurt, badly hurt.”
“Go back,” Angela replied. It was not a question but more an exhalation. “Yes, we must.”
But none of them moved. Instead, they bunched closer together for comfort.
There was a silence of several seconds. Then Hold On lifted his head and stretched out his neck as if hearing something.
“What’s that?” Verdad whinnied, and began to walk toward where he thought Hold On must have heard a sound. A small figure appeared in a thin slant of moonlight.
“It’s a coyote,” Grullo whispered nervously.
Hope approached the horses quietly, regarding them with wonder and envy. He could tell they were anxious, but there was still something so beautiful about the way they were trying to calm one another.
The horses froze and stiffened when they caught Hope’s scent. Yazz, who had been grooming Corazón, felt the old mare go rigid. They were about to flee. Fight or flight. But it could be neither.
“Please don’t go,” Hope said plaintively. “I wish you no harm. I am not like my father.”
Although Hold On could hardly see the small figure quivering before them, he could sense its anguish. Hold On could hear the beat of the small creature’s racing heart. His bones almost seemed to rattle. But not only that, the little fellow radiated an overwhelming loneliness of spirit. It was as if he were the most forsaken creature on earth.
A few of the horses tossed their heads nervously and prepared to gallop away from the little coyote, for he brought to them terrible memories.
“Don’t leave,” Hold On cautioned them in a fierce voice.
Hold On stepped forward and dropped his head, flaring his nostrils. He was experiencing a very peculiar sensation. “I smell your grief.”
He lowered his head and touched his muzzle to Hope’s head. This touch was so strange, Hope almost leapt to the side in surprise, but then a feeling of calm stole over him. I am being groomed, Hope thought. He had never been touched so in his life.
“I am Hope.” He looked up into Hold On’s sightless eyes. For some reason, when Hope looked up, he felt that the old gray stallion could see right through him and believed what he had said that Hope was not like his father.
“Es un milagro,” Corazón whispered.
The very word milagro, miracle, had an almost mystical effect on the horses. There was complete stillness. Even the crickets of this summer night ceased beating their wings. Each member of the first herd had one thought. There is still time for miracles. And they all gathered closer to the coyote called Hope.
“You … you are nothing like your father. We thought all coyotes were alike,” Grullo said.
“Can we help you?” Angela said, lowering her head for a closer look at the strange creature.
“I think I’m supposed to help you, but I’m not sure how. The owl told me I had a task to perform.” The horses exchanged surprised looks. They knew the owl had to be Haru.
“What do you know about the men who took our friends?” Angela asked. “Can you help us find them?”
“I’m not sure,” Hope said, looking from Angela to the rest of the herd. “I want to, but I don’t know how.”
“We should all rest,” Hold On said wearily. “Hope, you may stay with us, if you’d like.”
Hope blinked in disbelief. Was he really asking him to stay? To be part of something? He was torn. How he would love to join their sleeping circle! But he knew the time wasn’t right. Something was drawing him to return to that terrible field, the scene of the stampede. He turned his head and looked at them. “I wish I could stay, but there is something first I must do. I promise I’ll come back, and I hope I can help you.”
Hold On nodded. “Off you go, then. You are welcome to return whenever you’d like. If the owl chose you to help us, you must truly have a special destiny. Haru hasn’t been wrong yet.” He let out a sigh, thinking of the warning they had chosen not to heed.
As Hope proceeded, he could hardly see beyond his muzzle through the thickness of the fog. He knew that he was not being simply drawn but called. The words of the owl came back to him: “It means you might be called.” He was not sure what he must do to help the horses to bring back their leader, Estrella, and Tijo. But he was sure that his mission would be revealed on that plain. Something awaited him, something that would prepare him for his task. My task, he thought. My mission. My calling.
The world had become deeply mysterious to the coyote, spilling with perplexing secrets and unexplainable riddles. Hope was not sure how he was finding his way. But his feet seemed to take him forward as the mist swirled around him. He began to experience a strange lightness, as if he might be floating, caught on the current of a swiftly moving river with a secret destination. Ahead, he spotted a small glow of radiance. It grew larger, and then suddenly he knew that he had arrived.
“Here! I am here.”
“Yes,” a familiar voice replied.
“Grace?”
“Indeed.”
“Grace, I can smell flowers.” The coyote inhaled deeply.
“I told you I would see you again when the Gilia sinuata blooms.” At just that moment, Hope heard a shuddering hoot of an owl overhead. Then came a thumping like a huge beast.
“Don’t be afraid,” Grace said, and landed on Hope’s shoulder. A great white mass of a thunder creature was making its way slowly toward Hope, limping or was it staggering, its burden too heavy? What could be too heavy for such an enormous beast?
“What is happening?” Hope asked. Hope suddenly felt very strange. It was as if the edges of his being, the borders between his body and the rest of the world, were dissolving. Then the omo owl melted out of the mists. Two white creatures and one like a tiny rainbow faced Hope.
“Hope,” the omo owl began to speak. “We have all been called. We have all served.”
“You are next,” the thunder creature said softly.
“Next? Next to die?”
“No, not at all. You are my next spirit lodge.” It was the same voice that had flowed from the omo owl. “Haru cannot use me anymore. My lodge is too weary. To shift from such a small lodge to a very large one sometimes makes that new lodge wear thin faster. I stumbled, and alas Tijo and Estrella were caught. No, you must try as a spirit lodge for me.
Together we can try.”
“Try what?”
“To rescue Tijo and Estrella.”
The mists had started to clear, and Hope felt the press of moonlight against his face. He began to have the sensation of becoming lighter and lighter. It seemed as if his body were evaporating, and yet he had never felt more alive.
“What is happening to me?”
“You are growing. My spirit, the spirit of Haru, auntie-mother of Tijo, is filling you. I was allowed to return from the spirit camps even though I have worn out so many lodges, the lodge of omo owl, the lodge of a thunder creature. You will house me now. You are my lodge.”
The omo owl and the white thunder creature were now like wisps of vanishing fog. “You are the long spirits. You and Estrella and Tijo — long spirits stretching back in time to the very beginnings — the time before time. Go now. You have work to do.”
And then they were gone.
“Grace? Grace? Are you still here?”
There was a flickering of color.
“Yes, dear, but I must be off. I’ll see you when the Aurora salix blooms.”
“Aurora salix?”
“The dawn willow.”
For a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath. The wind grew still and the stars grew brighter. Something rare, something vast and hugely complicated seemed to be happening within him. Hope whispered into the night, “I have a friend … I have a spirit … Life has become more than I ever thought. Life is miraculous!”
It had been only a short time since Hope had gone through the odd transformation of becoming a spirit lodge. He did not feel all that different although he knew he was larger and his yellowish pelt had turned a silvery shade of gray. When he returned to the first herd as the sun was rising, they did not shy away as he had expected them to. The horses could tell that he was still Hope, just somehow slightly altered. Hold On’s nostrils flared, and he inhaled deeply. Then he cocked his head from side to side as if searching for that old familiar scent.
“I know it’s you,” Hold On said.
“Yes, just a little different.”
The spirit of Haru was an amicable presence within him. Although he was sheltering her spirit, Hope felt sheltered himself. Perhaps it was because Haru had been a mother. He had never really known what a mother was like. But now he felt the warmth, the nurturing warmth of a female flowing through him. He was aware of an extraordinary tenderness combined with a fierceness that was strange and compelling. It was as if he had become a container of all things, a world for all things. I am truly a spirit lodge!
Hold On walked up very close to him and lowered his head so his muzzle was nearly touching Hope’s. With his clouded eyes, he peered deeply into Hope’s clear green eyes. The blind one sees all, Hope thought.
Now finally the words came to Hope. “I am going to help Estrella and Tijo.”
“But, dear,” Angela said softly. “How can you help? You are small and young. These Ibers are vicious.”
Without taking his eyes from Hope, the old stallion began to speak. “Hope is right. He has one skill that his father had. You see, Hope, the time has come for you to slip into other creatures’ minds.”
Hope was aghast. “Time for me to become the dream stealer? The fantastic concealer? Never!”
“¡Calma, calma!” Hold On soothed him in the language of the Ibers. “You are not becoming this. It is a pretense. To conceal, to be deceitful is not your true nature. It will never be.”
“But …”
“You can do this, Hope. To rescue Estrella and Tijo, you can do this. Did your father ever do anything with good intentions?” Hope shook his head. “I am not asking that you trick Estrella or Tijo, but El Miedo, who is as terrible an Iber as ever crossed the ocean from the Old Land to this New Land. And although your father used this skill in malice, you shall use it in love and redeem the evils of your father, make right all that was wrong, make goodness out of depravity. For you are a long spirit. I feel that spirit within you.”
Hold On paused and emitted a deep sigh, a weary sigh. “To deceive a deceiver — is that so bad?”
“No. Not at all,” Hope replied. His voice was strong and resolute. This, he thought, is Haru speaking. And in truth, it did infuse him with a kind of courage he never suspected he possessed.
I can slip into others’ minds. How strange, Hope thought. What will it feel like? How will I know what to do? But then he realized that it would not be just him who would slip into their minds but Haru as well. And this gave him great comfort. She is with me, he thought.
Of course I am, a voice seemed to resonate in his head. I believe as Hold On said that you are a long spirit like Estrella, like Tijo.
He thought about all of this as he made his way toward the growing encampment of El Miedo.
Now as the coyote drew closer, he sensed precisely where Estrella and Tijo were. Estrella was certainly not kept in the corral that had been erected, nor was Pego. They had been put in a newly built stable with only two stalls. Tijo was jailed in a separate smaller enclosure a good distance from the stable.
A guard with a musket was posted on each side of the large corral. They are guarding against wolves, thought Hope. Soft cluckings came from a low roofed structure. The chicken house. How his father had loved raiding the chicken houses of the Ibers. Across from the corral, he heard the clink of metal. He soon realized the sound came from chains. In the dusky light, he saw Chitzen moving about slowly inside another enclosure. There were the cries of children and the low mumble of several adults. They were all tethered in one way or another to posts. The tethers were long but not long enough. They could only walk a short distance from a scattering of tents and a brush arbor that had been hastily built to protect them from the sun during the day or the rare rain at this time of year.
There was another small unfinished building that housed neither animals nor people. It, too, had a brush roof supported by four poles but no walls. Beneath it was a raised platform with a statue of a pretty lady. A man knelt in front of her, murmuring words. Hope slinked through the gathering shadows of the night. He knew that he had lost his scent entirely. Moving undetected was easy. Even his paws did not seem to leave a track. Perhaps this was all part of serving a spirit — becoming a lodge for another soul. No one noticed him: not the Chitzen, not the musket-bearing guards, not the padre who knelt mumbling in front of the pretty wooden lady.
He had not gone far, his silvery pelt blending in perfectly with the night. Then he heard the snores from what was obviously El Miedo’s tent, for it flew the red flag with the crown of the Iber monarchy. Hope crept past the guard, who was luckily sleeping, to a back corner of the tent and slipped under the canvas. The canvas smelled of salt, and although Hope had never seen the ocean, he seemed instinctively to know that the canvas had been made from the sails that had brought these strange humans to the New Land. He settled himself beneath the cot of El Miedo and felt a dark shadow flow from him. It looked so much like his own father, yet he was not afraid.
The shadow settled just above El Miedo’s head, and the man stirred in his sleep. He turned over onto his back. His mouth gaped. He began to mumble some sort of incantation or prayer. The Ibers did a lot of praying, but El Miedo seemed to be swallowing the shadow. Then he murmured, “Gracias, viejo amigo. ¡Volviste!” Thank you, old friend. You have come back! He feels, Hope realized, that my father has come back to help him. But this time the dream that swirled in El Miedo’s mind was slightly different. Before, he had dreamed of power and the magnificent dark horse of destiny. He now dreamed of a shining nugget of gold. Pure gold. And Big Coyote would help him find it.
Tijo sat with his knees pulled to his chest in the small shelter. There was a stake in the ground with a chain, and that chain was attached to a metal cuff on Tijo’s ankle. In the three days he had been a prisoner of El Miedo, he had examined every link of that chain, trying to figure out how to escape. There was one opening in the shed but it, too, had metal on it. Metal bars
. A prison guard came in now and drove the stake farther into the ground and checked the lock. Tijo observed him carefully. The man’s sly eyes crawled over him.
“You think you can get loose, boy? Well, you can’t … Oooh, and I have a nice little surprise for you.” Tijo did not understand a word he said. He saw the man go over to the door and pick up a yoke. “Now try this on for size.” He placed it over Tijo’s head so it set on his shoulders. “Perfect fit!” He brought his face close to Tijo’s. “You’re going to work the jerkline. You’re no more Horse Boy. You’re a mule boy!”
When the guard left, Tijo dropped his head to his knees. The rough wood of the yoke scraped his shoulders, and he let out a low cry. Until now, his capture had seemed like a nightmare from which he’d surely awake, but now there was no denying the terrible truth. He’d lost the herd, the only home he’d ever known. But although he knew only pain and despair awaited him, he worried more for Estrella than for himself. He knew what it was like to be alone. After Haru died, there’d been no one in the world who cared what happened to him. But Estrella had never been parted from her herd, never been subjected to the cruelty of humans.
He was trying to adjust the yoke when he spied the skulking shadow of a coyote outside. A silvery gray shadow nimbly slipped through the bars. Tijo’s despair melted away. He did not even feel the weight of the yoke. Joy flooded through him. He knew that Haru was with him.
“You have found a new spirit lodge,” he said with a smile.
“Yes, the coyote Hope. And he is your Hope in more than name.” Her voice blew through like a soft breeze. The coyote crept close to him, and Tijo felt a radiance issuing from her. It was love. Her eyes blinked and shimmered with tears as the coyote nuzzled his cheek, just as Haru used to do.
“Now listen and obey.” There was a quaver in her voice that he had never heard before. The coyote raised his paw. It was almost exactly like the times Haru raised her finger to scold him when he was naughty as a child. “Remember you are Horse Boy. You, like Estrella, are a long spirit.” And in that moment, Tijo saw the sparkly little horse hovering just above the coyote’s ears. The prison suddenly seemed crowded with good spirits.