Before anyone went near the quarry or the bridge cables, Ysabet knelt beside Pip in the back corner of the weigh-house and tapped the rim of its warm side-fold.
“Mouse out first,” she said, holding the half-covered wooden travel box against Pip’s flank with her left hand.
Pip loosened the muscular lip of its heated pouch. The little brown mouse poked its head out, sniffed the dry wool lining inside the wooden box, and hopped across with its crooked left hind leg tucked slightly under its hip. Ysabet dropped three hulled pumpkin seeds and a twist of damp moss into the box, slid the ventilated wooden lid shut, and stowed the box deep inside Chaska’s padded courier pack behind the spare blankets, leaving it safely under the weigh-house eaves with Suth’s wooden beetle set on top as a sentinel.
Down in the bottom of the quarry bowl, Ashaun had been right about the collapsed tool shed. Beneath six feet of fallen roof slates and rotted cedar shingles, they pried out two rusted iron ore-cart rims, half a dozen snapped iron pry-bars, a dented bucket of rust-crusted rail spikes, and four ten-foot pine rafters that had stayed dry under the tarred felt of the fallen roof.
