They backed twenty yards down the trail into the lee of a roofless stone weigh-house where the wind couldn’t carry the clink of their gear. Lilt crouched against the back wall with her wings folded tight, her dark eyes tracking every crow that wheeled across the gray sky above.
“In the old days, mule skinners carried bags of cheap iron horseshoe nails through here,” Chaska said, crouching by her pack. “Throw two handfuls into the rocks a hundred yards off, and the flock dives for the nails while you run the bridge. We have four spare harness buckles and a tin kettle. That won’t hold three hundred birds for ten seconds.”
“And even if we had a barrel of nails on this bank, the nestlings in the middle baskets can’t fly here to reach them,” Ysabet said, looking back toward the bridge. Through the gap in the weigh-house wall, she could see one of the young birds in the center cradle slump sideways against the wire mesh, its beak still open and panting as blue static crawled over its throat. “If we try to crawl past those baskets, the parents will tear us apart to protect them, and half that clutch won’t last the afternoon anyway.”
