Ysabet took her time rolling up her wool blanket in the cold dawn light, using her left hand and her knee to fold the heavy cloth so she didn’t have to twist her bruised left ribs.
Beside the boulder, Pip had already let the original field mouse climb from its warm chest pouch back into the scrubbed wooden boot-nail box for their walk down the chimney. Instead of picking up the wooden beetle guide or trotting toward the trailhead as it usually did when camp was struck, Pip stayed seated on the frost-whitened shale six feet from Ysabet.
Its two amber eyes—the larger right one and the smaller left one below the forked white door-mark—were fixed on the empty granite overhang where Oru and the manticore cubs had slept.
After a moment, Pip walked over to Ysabet’s boots. It lifted its right forefoot, scraped two short lines in the rime frost, and pointed a narrow toe up toward the empty den. Then it turned its head, touched the edge of Ysabet’s coat sleeve with its sideways jaw, and worked its scarred tongue painfully against its blunt mineral tooth plates.
“Old?” Pip rasped, the single low syllable scraping out like dry slate on slate. It paused, swallowed against the stiffness in its throat, and tapped her sleeve a second time. “Pip?”
