Blizzard: Colorado, 1886 by Kathleen Duey and Karen A. Bale Read Free Book Online

tracks again. The wind had blurred them and the snow had dusted out the nail patterns. Still, Maggie thought they looked a little newer than the ones she had followed up the hill. Maybe Hadyn had holed up for the night in the rocks. She hoped so. They would have sheltered him from the wind at least.
    Maggie stared at the jumble of tracks. Hadyn had paced a few steps one way, then another. “He was probably trying to figure out which way to go,” Maggie said to Rusty, who tossed his head and sidled, trying to turn back. Maggie tightened the reins. “Not until we find Hadyn, Rusty.” She looked back down at the ground.
    After four or five false starts, Hadyn had set out in a beeline. The tracks headed downwind, but up a slope so steep that Maggie couldn’t imagine why he would have chosen to climb it at all, much less in weather like this. To make matters worse, the hill was covered with thick stands of Engelmann spruce and lodgepole pine.
    Ignoring Rusty’s grunts and resistance, Maggie rode on. The ground beneath the snow was rocky. Maggie dismounted and led Rusty. The farther they went, the more puzzled Maggie became. This was terrible terrain. There were places where Hadyn had fallen, sprawling over snow-buried logs. Rusty plodded solidly along behind her, and Maggie was glad she hadn’t brought her father’s mare.
    At last they were free of the trees. Maggie blinked snowflakes from her eyelashes and tried to see where the tracks led. For a minute, she couldn’t make sense out of what she was seeing. There were three deep paths that went uphill from where she was standing.
    She worked Rusty closer, then stood looking down, shaking her head in disbelief. The hoof-prints were cloven, like two fat half-moons facing each other. Cows. What were cows doing up this high?They had to be strays, looking for yellowed grass uncovered by the wind. One of them was considerably smaller than the others—maybe a fall calf that was still with its mother.
    â€œBut why is Hadyn following them?” Maggie wondered aloud. She looked up the slope, then back down through the aspens. She lifted her gaze to the horizon. Mummy Mountain and Ypsilon Peak were invisible today because of the storm—so she would have to find another way to mark her direction.
    Maggie faced the wind. Coming down the road it had been on her left, out of the east as usual. Hadyn had walked in a mile-wide curve. He was moving north now, toward the high country. Maggie pulled off her glove and got a biscuit from her knapsack. She ate, stamping her feet. Rusty nuzzled her arm, begging for a piece of her food, but she patted him instead. There was no way to know how long the food she had brought was going to have to last.
    Setting off again, Maggie realized that Hadyn had walked in the broken snow left where one of the cows had passed. She did the same. It made traveling easier on her, and on Rusty. The wind was getting higher and it would only get worse farther upslope.Maggie stopped a moment and checked her cinch and the ties that held her father’s bedroll to the back of her saddle. Maybe Hadyn would decide to start back down soon, or already had. She could only hope that he would realize that he was heading into even more danger.
    The cow tracks took a sudden turn and Maggie stopped to examine them. As she straightened, the icy wind biting at her face, she saw another set off to one side. Curious, she led Rusty toward them. The ground was criss-crossed with fallen logs, almost impossible to climb over. Rusty balked, snorting, his eyes ringed in white. Maggie tied his reins to a stout log, then went to take a look.
    In an instant, Maggie understood what Hadyn had been afraid of and why the cattle were running uphill in a snowstorm. The paw prints were soft-edged and huge. It was a mountain lion.
    Maggie stared at the tracks. The wind whistled through the bare aspen branches behind her. As she looked back up the hill, she