The wooden porch outside Hobb’s kitchen was the warmest spot on the hill between the third bell after noon and the setting of the sun behind the western crags.
Noll Vey leaned his square limestone shoulders against the heavy cedar upright, watching the dust motes drift across the sunny floorboards. Beside his stone boot, Bristle lay curled in a tight grey coil upon a braided wool mat, his three paws twitching in the middle of an afternoon hunt. The dog’s ears suddenly pricked forward; his black nose lifted into the breeze, sampling the rich, smoky air drifting from the smokehouse chimney thirty paces across the grass.
A dried pine branch snapped in the spruce coppice beyond the lower ditch.
Bristle did not bark. He rose to his feet with an economical scramble—thump-thump-click—and took up his station at the edge of the porch boards, his neck hackles stiffened into a bristling grey ruff. He surveyed the tree line with the sharp, unblinking suspicion of an old garrison sentry who knew that mountain foxes possessed a deplorable disregard for municipal boundary charters.
“There’s nothing out there, dog,” Hobb called from the kitchen window, leaning over the sill with an iron flour-sifter in his hand. The cook’s white apron was dusted with yellow cornmeal, and his round, red face was beaded with sweat from the great stone ovens. “The foxes are down in the alder bottoms looking for water-rats. The only thing you’re guarding against is the smell of my spiced ginger biscuits.”
