Two hours north of the weighing station, the open upland pasture died away with startling abruptness.
The gray limestone marl and yellowed scrub grass vanished beneath their boots, replaced by a deep, springy carpet of dark reddish-brown pine needles, fallen spruce cones, and dense cushions of damp green feather-moss that gave off a wet, spongy hiss with every step. Above their heads, the open sky was swallowed by the huge, linked crowns of seventy-foot resin pines.
They had crossed the southern boundary of Hushwood.
To Kezra’s damaged left ear. It walked into the forest was like stepping into a huge, vaulted cathedral whose walls were hung with heavy woolen draperies. The wide, open whistle of the upland wind died instantly to a faint, rhythmic sigh high in the boughs eighty feet above. What replaced it on her right side was a strange, wet, tiny world of sound. The slow, sticky plink of warm amber pitch dripping from bark wounds into the moss, the sharp crack of a dry spruce twig snapping under a squirrel’s weight forty paces away, and the heavy, humid whisper of the pack mule breathing through its fleece-muffled nostrils.
The air was dense, cool, and sharp with the bitter, healing tang of turpentine and boiled pine rosin.
