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Chapter 1—DIVIDE

The five of them had gone foxtrotting into the woods in search of horses every summer since they were cubs.

Originally it'd been the eight of them, but Lev was dead, Jesse had fallen off the face of Saskatchewan a few years thereafter, and in the aftermath Iris, their ever-fearless leader, had escaped westward with her foxy lesbian tits to do whatever foxy lesbians did in mountainous lesbian poetry collectives. Probably involved a lot of chicken-wrangling and moonstruck odes read in the original whatever. Concrete and achievable and down-to-Gaea—because at least half of them had to be some flavor of Wiccan—which was the diametric opposite of their current task: finding horses.

Bell knew horses were a myth. Or, well, to be more exact, horses had existed, probably, and no longer did. Evidently no one decided it was worth figuring out why or how, or if they had, they hadn't bothered to write any of it down. Or someone did write it down and someone else burned the writings, continue ad nauseum &c. &c., until you flash forward however many decades and/or centuries to when they were cubs and horse was a word Bell heard whenever the goat had to be terrorized by an authority figure into behaving. Which was often.

Don't talk back, or the horses will eat your tongue!

Don't wander alone, or the horses will steal you away on their backs!

Don't touch yourself there, or the horses will crush your horns beneath their hooves!

That sort of thing. If you unpacked it, it explained a lot of Bell's authority issues, but the past few years of deep-diving into the collegiate circuit and more queer campgrounds than most folk knew existed in Saskatchewan had finally started to make those authority issues rewarding, so the only unpacking the goat preferred lately involved tents and jockstraps. Psychoanalysis was best saved for blah blah, I'll tell you where you can anal-y that psychosis, et cetera.

The maudlin ennui could wait for when they were wine-drunk around a campfire. Or, better yet, they could handle all the sentimental sentiment parts. Bell could handle all the getting nailed on a soft and mossy and moonlit log parts. Iris in all likelihood knew at least three Greek poems describing that exact situation, and on the off-chance she didn't, Bell imagined she would've extemporized one. If she were there. The vixen had been a master of improvisation.

The first step of getting there, though, was everyone getting there, and thus far they were one for five.

Inexplicably, in some physics-defying fashion, the goat had won the race to the North Woods on a three-speed bicycle, with all of his gear strapped tight onto or packed deep into an old hiking pack like a leather daddy marten bent over a well-seasoned gay bar piss trough.

You had to clear a ranger checkpoint on a narrowing forest road to get to the hiking point, but the dirt-and-gravel lot by the trail sign hadn't any tree cover. This summer, like the past foreboding six in Saskatchewan, was unseasonably warm, and the ozone layer perilously thin, so Bell had ventured further to where thousand-eyed aspens provided refuge from the afternoon sun like a nuclear fallout shelter for the goat's easily-seared flesh. The woes of translucent salt-white fur. It took on light. Like a meteorological chameleon, Bell changed color with the weather.

It made for some pretty photos, and it was better than being the normal kind of chameleon, which changed color with its mood. Because if Bell had been that, after waiting an hour and a half for someone to show up—in an area with no cell reception, no less—Bell would've been the color of homicidal fury. He hazarded it was not unlike whatever un-color the sun scorched on your retinas.

Kristina and Allister tied for second place, but Bell was in no mood to present medals.

He heard the binturong's truck long before he saw it. It churned rancid butter up the slight incline before its tortured engine had one of its daily heart attacks and died in the lot. Kristina routinely undertook heroic measures to resuscitate it and, reluctantly, begrudgingly, the pickup hadn't yet fled over that rainbow bridge to live on the farm with the other pickups. At this point it probably had Stockholm syndrome. Bell sympathized.

To her credit, Kristina had the decency to look apologetic. It wasn't difficult. The binturong was tall and wide and well-muscled, but there was a heaviness to her brows and snout that sapped away any possible intimidation and replaced it with a plainly-earned world-weariness. Befitting an artist. She towered over Bell like Atlas, hunched by a great and somber weight that, annoyingly, she bore without complaint.

“No excuses," said Kristina, slow and bass-y, “but I promise you, the delay was worth it."

Saints preserve us. If she was going to nail herself to that cross, she could've at least performed a few miracles first.

“It's whatever," said Bell.

“Icebox!" called Allister, swinging open one of the back-cabin suicide doors. Veronica Vaughan Allister—V.V. for short—was a black-footed ferret who danced like a jester on said black feet, usually back and forth from the shit-eater's buffet. “Check it," they said, hauling a sweaty chest twice their width from the back seat. The ferret was lanky and about as tall as Bell if you counted the horns, which no one ever did. “You'll never believe how," they added, “so don't bother asking."

V.V. cracked the chest like a back-alley arms dealer, throwing suspicious glances wide. Inside, nestled among the chunks of cloudy gas-station ice, were a dozen dark bottles of unlabeled red wine.

Perhaps Kristina had performed a miracle after all.

“Help us haul all this shit into the shade, yeah?" said the ferret. “Before it melts. Are we—"

“Against all odds," said Bell, acrid, “no."

“How?"

“You can ask Riles and Sammy," said the goat. “After I'm done murdering them."

The plan had been simple. Or, well, no, it hadn't been, and Bell had conspired for two and a half months to get the five of them together, but that was beside the point. Most of them—everyone minus Bell, really—worked, although Sammy was part time and had every Friday off anyway. If they planned around the correct long weekend, they could bunk off work early (because everyone else was doing it) and make it to the hiking point by five, which would give them a solid four hours to reach the campsite Bell and Riles had scouted weeks earlier before it started getting dark.

Secluded, off the trail, and by a small but serviceable lake. Perfect for their needs.

They'd all burned a week of vacation at the goat's insistence. A week together would bring them to Saturday, and then they'd have two more days thereafter to decompress and re-acclimate to their normal lives like deep-sea salvage divers avoiding the bends. Although in this case, they were salvaging for horses, and the bends weren't bubbles of inert gas but instead of virulent capitalism, which was less evidently lethal when dissolved in the bloodstream but killed from accumulation all the same.

Another half-hour went by talking shit with Allister, and by then, the short cropping of shade that made up Bell's refuge had stretched its long shadow far enough to swallow up Kristina and the ferret along with him. The two of them made half-hearted attempts to pull the binturong into the conversation. Even as a cub, however, Kristina had enjoyed being near conversations more, as was apparent, than she enjoyed engaging in them.

For the most part, everyone respected that. Iris hadn't, but then again, she was the only one who Bell had ever seen pull visible passion out of Kristina. Feminist Pygmalion. Too bad the vixen was long gone.

Two minutes of pH 0 silence crawled by after Bell made a joke that V.V. hadn't got, and worse still hadn't found funny once he'd explained it. Happened a lot more these days.

The silence was granted a merciful and quick death by two familiar sounds. One, the distant unhinged cackle of a coyote, Riles. Two, the steady heartbeat-step of Sammy and his cane on loose gravel, one stride much longer than the other. Bell hadn't the sharpest hearing—that went to Riles by a far margin—but he could pick out Sammy's gait anywhere. The hyena always had a distinctness to everything about him.

“Our kingdom come!" called Riles. He threw both paws in the air, arms sharp and rigid. One clutched a narrow-neck bottle. There was a sway beyond his usual swagger in his hips. “At last!"

Allister played the cheering crowd at the end of a marathon, urging the two competitors to their finish line. Riles blew Sammy out of the water, of course, seeing as the latter had a limp and the former had either n or n plus one competitive bones in his body at any given time, where n was the number of bones in the coyote's skeleton, and plus one was the yada yada dick joke.

While only a hair taller than the ferret (unless you counted his enormous ears), Riles lifted them bodily off the ground with a twirl after his short sprint, tails flaring outward like a sundress. When he dipped them for a kiss, Bell rolled his eyes and met a resting Sammy near the foot of Kristina's truck.

“Evening, Bell," said the hyena.

“Evening, Sammy," said the goat.

“If I apologize for being late—"

“—no, I will afford you no mercy," said Bell, gaze narrowed. He was vaguely aware that it had a disconcerting effect. Something about the barbell irises unsettled folk. They couldn't tell exactly where you were looking, or, perhaps worse, they gave the effect of staring through and around you. Bell deployed it often and to great effect. “But, I will permit an explanation," he continued. “Also: where's your car?"

Sammy slid closer, hip bumping Bell's and short tail brushing up against the goat's denim. His brown-black muzzle parted to speak but closed shortly thereafter. Reconsidering. Bell caught a whiff of alcoholic grape.

“Ah."

“It's not like that," added Sammy, quick. “Riles got off early—"

“—did he now."

Sammy winced. “We were ready by noon, but Riles was bored, and—well, you know how he can be." He wobbled in place, anchoring a wide paw on Bell's shoulder for mild support. Mild, of course, because Sammy had about nine inches on the goat. “Lord, I haven't walked that far since uni."

“You walked here?"

“Hitch-hiked, actually," said the hyena. He stretched, both arms out and rounded ears flaring wide, cane hooked on the rim of the truckbed. “Riles' idea, of course. I was in no condition to drive." Pause. “Am."

“Saints," said Bell. They could've been murdered. “You could've been murdered," he continued, helpful.

“They dropped us at the ranger station. I think they were a ranger, actually. Also, Riles assured me that he knew how to tuck and roll out of a moving vehicle, so at the very least someone would've found my body."

“Oh, never mind, then. Reservations withdrawn."

A coyote-whoop came at them from the trail. Riles had acquired a thick aspen branch that rose as high as his neck. A walking stick. Beside Bell, Sammy fumbled for his cane.

“Yo, pilgrims, daylight's burning!" called the coyote. “Let's get a move on."

The hypocrisy ached.

“Let's," said Bell.

“Onward to glory," said Riles. He did an about-face, then craned his woodchip-colored muzzle over his shoulder, snout cocked to the side. Tail slightly arched. “By the bye," added the coyote “you all hereby have permission to stare at my ass as I lead the way. It's very good, I know."

It was.

It was less so when it got dark and they were lost.

***

Wings catching wind. The distant trills of ground-nesting nightjars and deep wizened hoots of owls. The rapid, ratcheting clack of beetles. And, to Allister's insistence, distant hoofbeats.

“Tell me I'm crazy," said the ferret.

“You're crazy," said Bell. It was crazy. They were crazy. Even Kristina, the statuesque picture of stoicism, was probably approaching her limit. “It's a loose monitor. Or a river," he added, dubious. “Or any number of other things moving through bushes in the dark."

“Or," said Riles, cheerful, “A loose monitor in a river that runs through the bushes."

“Not helpful."

“Can monitors even survive this far up north?" asked Sammy. Always the academic. Bell aimed their flashlight back just in case the hyena was falling behind, but it doubled as an opportunity to glare. “I imagine," Sammy continued, huffing with effort, “the water would be far too cold. Not hospitable."

“Maybe they migrate."

“Maybe."

“May-be," called their leading coyote, sing-song, “you're in denial."

“There," said Allister. “Listen!"

The five stopped and fell silent. Another nightjar trilled. Sammy continued chasing after his breath, and, seizing the rare moment of respite, Kristina set down the majority of their camping gear. They'd hung one lantern from the binturong in lieu of burning all their flashlights early.

Without their shuffling and crunching, there was a distant drumming noise. Maybe. If you flared your ears and were a coyote, which, mind you, V.V. wasn't and Riles was, which added another tally to the “not a horse" category. It was counted beside the million other identical tallies, collected from whichever million sources routinely assured folk from cub-to-eighteen that horses were not (or, perhaps, no longer) real.

The only tallies in the opposite column were scratched in by fearfully-dragged claws. Sunset had come and gone, and with it all assurances that they weren't lost.

Which they definitely were.

“Don't say it," said Riles.

“I didn't—"

“—you were thinking it," said the coyote. He tapped a paw to the side of his muzzle, brushing invisible whiskers. “Just 'cuz you went to some fancy school—"

“Oh, wonderful," said Sammy, eyes audibly rolling. “Here we go again."

“Tell me you weren't."

“I was not," said Sammy. It was probably true. Probably.

“I wasn't," said Bell. Definite lie.

“Please," said Allister, fanning peacekeeper paws out between them, “put the dicks away. I've lost count of how many times we've backtracked, but—"

“Six."

“Thank you, Kristina. Six times. So, Riles, seeing as you and Bell scouted the spot, can you please finish the foreplay and figure out where we went wrong?" The ferret's gaze was uneven, split between them. Serious leadership fit the ferret like a thrifted tuxedo. “And by we," they continued, fumbling the landing, “I mean you two."

A moment's pause. Another hoot and the shifting of shrubbery.

Kristina blinked once at Bell.

“Okay, okay," said the goat, shuffling forward to head the pack alongside Riles. “I'm sorry for being pompous and elitist."

“I'm sorry," replied the coyote, “that you were pompous and elitist."

The tension hadn't always been there. It hung like a noose fit with a guillotine over them, now, but it was artificial. Introduced. An invasive kind of mollusk that choked the life-sustaining algae of their platonic waterways. Four of them had gone off to university—although they had fuck-all to show for it, and thus an even greater need to display it at every given opportunity—and four of them hadn't the opportunity to even decline. It was hard to measure their bitterness against one another, which only made them attempt the contests more until the waterways spilled over and left new scars in the earth. The dam was never not giving way. Lev. Jesse. Iris.

Iris would've held them together. Jesse too. Though the otter had always been more of a right paw to Lev's imposing presence, he'd lead the charge when the latter disappeared, and that was more than could be said for the rest of them.

Riles had slid reluctantly into position as the third-alternate leader and simply secondary coyote, the underprepared understudy-to-the-understudy-to-the-understudy. Luckless and emancipated from his little brother role. You couldn't be the daredevil anymore if it meant leading other folk into danger with you.

Riles had retrieved one of a few maps from Kristina's endless pockets and pouches while Bell did his best to retrace their route. Ostensibly it made no sense that they were lost. They'd followed the trail-blazes and, months earlier, daubed new light-reflecting paint where old was fading or scratched away. Bell was useless at spotting them in the dark—his eyes were ill-equipped—but Riles could spot the things at two-hundred paces.

Still, they'd spent as much time backtracking on a three-way fork as they'd done hiking forward, which placed them squarely at about midnight with a dangling half-hour of hiking left to go.

Both Bell and Riles agreed that the right-way fork should've lead to two clear landmarks, a ridge and a gargantuan cedar tree, but they hadn't come upon the ridge fast enough and began second-guessing themselves, hence the first double-back. Forward lead to endless deteriorating trail-blazes, and left lead to a ridge quite quickly, but it terminated in a burbling gully which was a) not there when Riles and Bell scouted the spot and b) a quick way to get someone's ankle broken on day zero of the trip.

They could've set up camp where they were. They should've. Any reasonable leader would've told them to do so. But, as it was, the goat was no leader, the aspens clustered uncomfortably close, and Riles, evidently, had too much to prove.

“Let's go right again," said the coyote. His ears cupped and swiveled as if with a mind of their own. Tail stiff. Maybe he was hearing something.

“But—"

“—no V.V. you cannot just ask us to work together," interrupted Bell, “and then immediately undermine our authority moments thereafter."

“You did this," said the coyote.

“I did this," said the ferret.

They went right. It took half an hour—Sammy was not built for endurance hikes, or, well, had been, but then the hyena's back and knee gave out, and in any case all of them needed frequent breaks given they'd been hiking for the better part of six hours—but they found the ridge.

One of the trees, tall and pale and thousand-eyed as all cloned freak aspens were, had been toppled over. Toppled being the operative word in that it hadn't died and fallen or been felled with an axeblade, no. Something had pushed the tree bodily until its roots were torn from the earth and the forty-footer had cleaved through several dozen branches on its way down the steep-angled topography. It bore on its speckled trunk their missing trail blaze.

The aspen probably wasn't even dead yet. It would be, eventually, but with its bark intact and some amount of root still clawing at the ground, the tree would slowly starve to death over the course of, what, days? Weeks? Months even? It was a cruelty undeserved by any living thing, and yet by the time they reached their campsite, no part of Bell could be compelled to feel compassion for it.

It was nearly three in the morning when they got their tents and latrines set up and gear safely stashed. Quiet—true forest quiet, silencing even crepuscular creatures—fell fast upon them.

The torrid heat of the summer had withered in the wee hours until the goat shivered from lake-chills and hunger and exhaustion, but Riles had stolen Sammy away into his own tent for warmth, and V.V. had called dibs on the living temperature modulator that was Kristina. Which left Bell alone. It suited him. Sleep came almost instantly.

But when the screaming ache of neck and back and shoulder and thigh and everything else-muscle finally woke the goat, alone in that same forest quiet was how he found himself.

Bleary-eyed and sweltering in the summer heat, he cracked his tent—Saints, it must've been past noon already—and was met with silence. His white fur was grey-damp with sweat and yet Bell knew that there wasn't an ounce of moisture within his body. He badly needed a piss.

Someone, probably Kristina, had brought them deliverance in the form of a set-up water station. Bell sipped, steady, until death seeped out of him and urgency seeped in. Still no sign of anyone. Dull throbbing echoed in his ears, strongest around the base of his horns, but Riles and Allister were loud in every sense of the word. He ought to have heard them by now.

Bell jogged off a safe and sanitary distance. Looked down to aim, and to blink the sleep from his eyes. As he did, however, a shape caught in his peripheral vision. An advantage of those barbell irises.

Laying in wait between a high-angled stone wall and the cave mouth that threatened to devour it was a sculpture of sorts, woven from dried cedar branches.

Pale, imposing, and wider in girth than Bell was tall, the effigy of a horse stared back at the goat with a placid wicker face and great gaping gouges where ought to be its eyes.

***

Panic was the enemy, yet Bell conspired with it. A double agent against himself.

The goat fled, wild-eyed and hooves thundering through the forbidding underbrush. Loose aspen branches whipped at his snout while barbed shrubbery caught in his fur like a trapper's snare. Overgrown mats of juniper—impossible to leap over or wade through without snapping an ankle—coerced Bell toward the remnants of a widening, hard-soil trail. Blood pounded in his ears and throbbed the base of his horns like a resounding drum. They kept time with his urgent hoofbeats.

It was moronic. Some part of Bell knew this was how people died: not from axe-murderers or horses, but instead mobility injuries and exposure. Adrenaline and cortisol overwrote that rationale, however, because adrenaline and cortisol had been directly confronted by a missing camp crew and fucking horse effigy. Not running from that shit was moronic.

In the approaching distance, he heard Riles' familiar whoop, followed shortly thereafter by a waning coyote shriek. Screaming bloody murder. Growing further away despite the thinning woods.

Splash.

Breaching the forest's edge was like a record player skipping tracks on an album that only made tonal sense when listened to in its entirety.

The sudden wall of humid air stopped him bodily, as it was much cooler than at camp, and easier too on Bell's academic lungs. The serene (if wrinkled) lake surface, a deep and mysterious azure, had never moved with urgency, not even once, in its entire existence. And the small host of frolicking folk—binturong sketching fidgety ferret at the water's edge, and daredevil coyote paddling at the foot of a cliffjump—showed no indication that they knew they were missing.

Bell wanted to call to them, to shake them awake and let them know they were in a horror movie, but all the goat managed was a throaty croak.

Yo, Be!" called the coyote. Muffled in his ears by distance, lake, and blood. Then, less playful: “Oh shit—Kristina!"

Bell doubled over, paws on his knees, and tried not to black out. Adrenaline made its Irish goodbye and left behind only cortisol and lactate and smoldering embarrassment. Saints, he couldn't remember the last time he'd ran anywhere.

There was a small, knobby slope that Bell had managed not to tumble over. He sat on it and wished that he had. Unconsciousness would've been bliss. Instead, he was painfully awake for every hard swallow of water Kristina fed him, like an overaged cub who still needed a sippy cup, or Riles after half a bottle of rum.

It turned out—as V.V. explained to him, scarcely bothering to conceal their shit-eating grin, which was probably stolen IP anyway—that it was about half-past three o'clock and the goat had slept for twelve hours or thereabouts. The others hadn't wanted to wake him.

“Or, well, Sammy wanted to," said the ferret, “but I think he talked himself out of it. Or Riles did. Honestly, maybe a bit of both. I wasn't really paying much attention."

Amazing. “Amazing," said the goat.

“Not my job to keep tabs on your not-boyfriends."

“What about the—"

“—oh yeah that's super uncanny, right?" They ran a smooth paw along Bell's sweat-soaked back. Soothing didn't fit Allister either, but the attempt was nevertheless noted. “We figured that you and Riles had set it up, y'know, given the whole premise of the trip," they continued, “but after ten minutes of him swearing up and down that you hadn't, Kristina said, 'Stop,' and so we dropped the whole thing. Then we ate breakfast-slash-lunch, set up everything properly, relaxed, and that brings us to…here."

Pause.

“So, did—"

“—no we did not set up a fucking horse effigy."

“Noted," said the ferret. They patted Bell on the back—twice, sturdy, like sharp knock on a door—and then scooted forward to stand, black tail swaying out the snap-lock of their cutoffs. Bell averted his eyes. “Now, as much as I'd like to be your sweat towel, you did interrupt Kristina's portrait with your dramatic entrance." They shot a knowing glance over their shoulder, snout and brow arched in taunting. “Not that I'm complaining. Points for style, really. Kristina?"

Beside Bell, the binturong rose, dark and looming and slightly precious, like a monolith in a sundress.

“I brought your canteen," whispered Kristina. “Sammy is on the bluff."

“Thank you."

Pause.

“Can I take a look at your sketch when you're done?"

“Perhaps."

Kristina blinked once, then lumbered forward after V.V., who was re-nesting themselves in the lakeside stones and among the reeds. There was an easel and everything. They must've been working for at least an hour already.

Bell's eyes skated from the lake, to the cliffjump, to the folk hidden atop it. His stomach gurgled. His lungs still stung. Some fold of his brain dedicated itself to remembering that Riles was still swimming around in the lake, unbothered. The campsite was only minutes away.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, Bell was still hungry but had otherwise recovered. He'd dried off much of the sweat, replaced his trail gear with a tank and tiny, tiny denim shorts, and settled into camp before returning to the foot of the bluff.

V.V.'s muzzle swiveled to follow him up. Muzzle furrowed. Not their job, but not not their job either, apparently.

Either by natural good fortune or a collaborative effort by long-passed campers, there was a sturdy and aged log at the top of the cliffjump, wedged between two squat boulders. It was bereft of shade. No tree could grow so close to the edge, and, though it wasn't nearly high enough to catch wind above the tall aspens around them, it also wasn't nearly wide enough to allow both a sun umbrella and unhindered leaping.

Sammy lay back on the log, eyes closed toward the sky and whiskers rocking, gentle, in the breeze. The hyena wore an open flannel shirt and, in his usual unusual fashion, an asymmetric pant that terminated above the knee on the right, but at the ankle on the left. Both exposed fields of sun-soaked sandy fur, all variegated with a pattern of chaotic, smokey spots. You could almost take him for happy, if it weren't for the brooding ghost of a frown creasing his snout.

One rounded ear twitched at the sound of Bell's hooves.

“I'm appreciating the view," said the goat.

“So am I," said the hyena.

His eyes were still closed. “Your eyes are still closed."

“Your point?"

“Ow."

“I didn't intend to wound," said Sammy. “You know I always think you look very nice. However," he continued, wrinkling his snout as he often did in thought, “you should know better than anyone else that enjoying one particular view does not mean I can't also enjoy other ones."

“Point taken," said Bell. “Permission to lounge?"

The hyena raised a lofty paw and, near-imperceptibly, curled it inward. Granted.

Bell nestled in beside the hyena. The log was that wide. It lacked the softness of forest-cover moss, sure, but it was rapidly becoming a more probable candidate for Bell's sex log needs. If you angled it right, the view from the overlook would be spectacular. Still, Bell shut his eyes.

“So," he started, twining a leg around Sammy's own, “what view, then, are we appreciating right now?"

“The void."

“Ominous."

“Not so," said Sammy. “The void offers many freedoms, you know."

“If nothing matters…"

“Anything can matter!" called Sammy, voice careening off the edge of the cliff.

A moment later, there came a reply. A distant coyote making Oo-oOo-oO noises. Haunted philosophy.

“Yet, I think I somehow keep investing myself in things that I nevertheless don't think matter."

“Abstract," said Bell. This was a familiar pattern. He shifted, turning on his side to face the hyena. Eyes still shut. “Can we make it concrete?"

Sammy huffed. “This place is beautiful."

“It is."

“You and Riles did an excellent job."

“Mm."

“I feel like the others hate us—me in particular."

“Why is that?"

“Point: Riles called me an ideological and philosophical coward this morning."

“Counterpoint: if the others hated us," said the goat, “why would they go on a week-long trip with us?"

“Counter-counterpoint: you know well that people tolerate miserable circumstances because they've, for example, grown used to them—or worse, in fact, are more afraid of the circumstances that exist without their misery."

“Counter-counter-counter—oh, look, we both know that this isn't about philosophy."

“Counterpoint," said the hyena, “we both know that we know nothing."

“Ha."

Sammy tapped his paw against Bell's. “Continue."

“Why did Riles call you a coward?"

“I would like to specify for the record," said Sammy, drumming his claws on the log beneath them, “he did not call me a coward. He called me an ideological and philosophical coward. I am, however, the former," he continued, “because he asked me if I wanted to jump off a cliff with him, and I said, 'Maybe later.'"

“But why?"

“Well," he started, “my mother had this whole thing about friends jumping off cliffs…"

“Ha." The breeze brought pollen to Bell's snout. He sneezed.

“I didn't ask."

From below came another ghostly coyote call. Oo-oOo-oO.

Bell cracked open an eye. In his periphery, he saw two things stashed behind the log, nearer the lip of the jump. The stashed cane made sense. The discarded pair of jeans, less so.

“They're Riles'," said the hyena, deflating. “Do you think he's correct?"

“I don't think I know enough—"

“—yes yes—"

“—but if you really want to know what I think—"

“—I do, yes, verily—"

“—you should probably talk to Riles."

“Coward," said the hyena. He huffed again. “I probably should."

“How do you think he's going to get his pants back?"

“I don't think Riles tends to ask that question," said Sammy. Bell traced a paw on Sammy's soft chest, running his pads through loose bellyfur. “I think that's why I like having him around, if I'm honest."

“Mm. Mood," said the goat. “That, and—"

“—that ass is incredible, yes," said the hyena. He stretched his arms wide and scooted backward a few inches, exposing more spotted, sandy fur and guiding the goat's paw lower. Folded his paws behind his round ears. “And his muzzle? My, my."

With a practiced paw, Bell unhooked Sammy's belt and unzipped his fly. Some would've found the hyena's monologuing and dry manner off-putting, particularly in bed, but Bell had learned years ago that it was authentic, and authenticity was a major turn-on.

“Do you think I should have?" said Sammy, abrupt. His pants and briefs were bunched at the thigh and Bell's muzzle was an inch away from having his dick in his mouth.

“Should've what?" asked the goat. He gave a furtive lick.

“Should've jumped off the cliff with him," he said. He sat up, pensive. The erect thinker. “Maybe it was a test."

Bell paused. He contemplated just blowing Sammy while he mulled—the thought was tempting, and it worked more often than you'd think—but the last thing he needed was the hyena going soft in his mouth because he suddenly realized oral sex was incompatible with nihilism or whatever and then getting weird for the whole weekend.

“Oo-oOo-oO," called Riles, distant.

A thought.

“Regardless of whether it was a test," started the goat, “maybe you're overthinking it." Bell guided the hyena up with only a slight wobble, peeling off his flannel and the last of his uneven-cut pants until all of his spots glowed like embers in the sunlight.

“You're right," said the hyena, chastened. With Bell turned around, back flat to the hyena's soft chest, Sammy's paws followed a familiar pattern. He unsnapped the buttons, back and front, on the goat's tiny shorts and pulled Bell's tank over his head. “I'm ruining this moment, aren't I?" he asked, and, as an afterthought to sliding off Bell's jock, added, “also, I think everyone can see us stood up like this."

“And?"

Sammy considered it. He let out a low shudder, grinding forward against the goat's ass. His paw closed around Bell's short scut tail.

“We could stand to get a little bit closer," said the hyena.

“My thoughts exactly."

Bell lead him by the paw—turning around to face him again, ignoring the hyena's low, needy whine—to the cliffjump's edge and pulled his snout lower for a kiss. Sammy grinded against Bell's belly in short but thorough thrusts, satisfied for only a moment. His wide paws closed around the goat's horns to force his muzzle lower.

Bell seized the moment, closing both arms around Sammy's waist, then sprung both knees backward, carrying them bodily off the edge of the bluff.

Wind tore at Bell's ears.

Sammy screamed bloody murder.

He heard a smothered coyote-whoop, proud this time.

They impacted the water one half-second later, hooves and feetpaws first, breaching then bypassing the sun-warmed layer of the lake and entering instead its perilous and icy depths. For a moment, Bell was on fire.

A moment later, he started to kick. Sammy took a beat longer but followed suit, and a few seconds after they parted, they broke surface together.

“Yo, holy shit," said Riles, eyes wide and muzzle slacked with amazement. “I never thought—"

“Oh," started Sammy, sputtering, “my God!" He blinked lake water from his eyes and spoke with a nasal tone. “We could have died! We could have actually died!"

“Well—"

“That was fucking fantastic!" continued the hyena, now howling with unhinged laughter. He threw an arm over each of their shoulders. On the distant shore, Allister was cheering at them. “We must do that again."

“We must?" asked Bell.

“We must," said Riles.

“We must," said Sammy, “and I'm fucking both of you later."

It took some figuring out. Bell and Riles had to ferry the hyena's cane up and down the cliffjump, but the sound Sammy made when he leapt—half a battlecry, half a terrorized yelp—more than made up for the effort. Eight jumps, two with Bell, two with Riles, two with the three of them, and two alone went by before Sammy started to lose steam. At which point they decided they had better uses for Sammy's steam and retrieved their clothes, although with the afternoon heat and exertion and general horniness, they neglected to actually wear their pants.

Before they departed back to camp, Bell recalled his earlier question and extracted his paws from Sammy's briefs as well as Riles' paw from his jock.

“Kristina!" called the goat, jogging over to the binturong's impromptu art studio, which she was currently packing away. V.V. had left somewhere around jump five. “How did the portrait go?"

She considered this.

“Favorably," she said, then gestured to a large sketchpad beside a folded wooden easel. “Would you like to see?"

Bell wasn't an art critic. He lacked the vocabulary and artistic taste level to judge things beyond prettiness or what strong emotion they evoked for the goat. Still, Kristina's hard work was evident on the page. She had captured V.V.'s unbridled and restless energy, as well as—and it might've been the residual horniness talking—the ferret's roguish fuckability in expert pencil shading. You could almost feel their fur through the paper.

There were even three small shadows leaping off a cliff. She'd added them in the small detail, completing a family photo of sorts.

Yet, there was a sinister undertone to the portrait. Not in the blackfoot's image, no, but in the background around them. The eroded stone at the lake's edge made a wide muscled body, an aging skull on a thick neck of reeds, and a vast green mane of moss. You couldn't see it unless you knew what to look for, but to the trained and paranoid eye, it looked as if a horse made from the lake had curled its four broken legs like talons around the ferret.

---

#

Chapter 2—OVERLOOK

“Fuck," said Allister. It came out whiny, fu-u-uck, with a breathy, needing edge to it. “Fuck, fuck," they continued, pitch ascending. The ferret had a dirty fucking mouth.

“I'm getting close," said Sammy, panting, “but are you—"

“Fuck!"

Bell had no right to judge, of course. A few minutes ago Riles had been hammering his knot against the goat's hole, and if that slick sound hadn't carried across the campsite, the coyote's yips and Bell's own moans definitely had. Sammy and Allister were just following their lead. Or, well, it was part dance, part competition, and with a strange sense of frustration, Bell couldn't figure if he'd won or lost.

“Fuck," said Allister. “Fuck!"

Riles hadn't knotted him. They got close—deliciously close—but between the wine and weed and whatever other, more eclectic substances Kristina had offered and the coyote had possibly taken, he'd lost his restraint and came first in and shortly thereafter on the goat's ass. Not a bad start to a long night, but, as it was, the coyote had something to prove, so he hadn't finished Bell off yet. Crammed his sheath back into his jeans and went off to refill their water, which was desperately needed.

Even with the flap ajar to let in the cool night air, Bell's tent was a sauna. Beads of sweat accumulated on his brow, near the base of his horns, as well as the thin nylon walls around him, dribbling down and pooling on the floor in slow, sensual rivulets. Bell related.

“Jesus—fuck."

Saints. Their storage jugs were, what, thirty seconds from the tent?

Allister's cursing grew muffled—Sammy was probably stuffing his tongue in their snout—and yet Bell's relief was short-lived, because it meant the goat could only better pick out the muted thump of the hyena's hips against the ferret's. Their tails were probably looped together. Sammy was the romantic sort.

Bell's scut betrayed him and twitched.

Once, they'd been shy and reserved when it came to sex. The more they'd settled into their identities as adults, however, the more their confidence grew, and the less, they realized, they ought to be embarrassed. Most everyone had fucked at least one other friend in the group, and—if memory served—everyone had seen everyone in the process of fucking at least once. Lev still held the record, even posthumously.

Usually, it was hilarious. You'd be at a Hallowe'en party, pop off to the kitchen, and find Riles bent over the sink by one or more canines. If the mood was right (or there were enough substances involved that the mood didn't quite matter anymore), you'd join them. It was how Bell ended up fuzzy-handcuffed to a bolted-down bar stool with Riles and Jesse, the infrequent otter top, on either side of him.

Bell could ask. It was gauche, sure, given they both sounded close, and yes, he still felt some reticent discomfort toward Allister. Something about the ferret set him on edge. Maybe it was their constant need to make everything a joke. Maybe it was their remarkable flexibility and similar preference for bottoming. Maybe it was who they were fucking.

Sammy's thrusting grew frantic and uneven, like an arrhythmic heartbeat waiting for a climactic defibrillator, and Bell was fully hard again. He closed his eyes and a paw around his dick. They broke apart—the goat quite literally heard them gasp—and for once in the ferret's life, they were quiet, rocked by whatever mystical and superior orgasm they managed to draw out of Sammy. With some amount of vindictive jealousy, he hoped Sammy wouldn't cum. Not yet. The hyena's urgent hips rocked the whole tent with an unmistakable nylon sound.

What could be mistaken were the hoofbeats.

Bell's dick was like an antenna tuning in to the familiar song of Sammy's body. The static, that being every possible rational, non-horny thought, was filtered out, but the signals were still being sent somewhere. His ear flicked on reflex. His horns itched, mixing tension into his voyeuristic guilt, and when the hyena slowed, recognition flowed into Bell's bones. Not for the sound of distant, pounding hooves, but for their absence.

A branch snapped, and something overturned a clattering stack of cookpots.

The shadow blotted the smoldering embers of the fire pit, falling on Bell's tent. The goat froze in place. Held his breath. It was a deep, flat-angled skull, thickset and emerging from a long, stout neck. Bell's eyes darted away toward the open flap.

The shadow passed. A mercy, in that the horse was sparing him, but Bell felt no relief watching its impossibly-tall body and spindly, gnarled-knob legs paint themselves across the nylon wall. It made no sound as it moved, gliding, ethereal, and its body let through fine cracks of firelight that gave the shadow an intangible quality.

Bell couldn't imagine what it must look like. That was a mercy.

Sammy whispered then whimpered, while Allister started a low ululating noise that rose in volume like a mournful dirge. The shadow of the horse must've been right on top of them. Bell crawled forward, pace glacial, inching toward the open flap.

Nylon scuffled. Uneven, heavy thumps impacted the forest floor. Allister screamed an unintelligible battle-cry—followed a moment later by Sammy's own—and Riles fell into an unparalleled fit of laughter.

Cackling. Utterly pleased with himself.

Dread iced over into embarrassment, then hardened into an unimaginable permafrost fury as Bell crawled out to confront the coyote. Riles and Kristina awaited them all, the former still doubled over, the latter placid like the lake's surface. Slightly wrinkled. Beside the pair was the cedar-woven effigy of a horse, which was evidently light enough for the binturong to haul despite its prodigious size.

V.V. stood, trembling, paws folded in irritation, but there was a twitch of a smile hidden on their snout. In the firelight, the twin scars on the ferret's chest looked almost silver. They closed the distance to the coyote and socked him lightly on the shoulder.

“Not funny," they said, tapping him again and harder. “Super not funny."

“A little bit funny," said Riles.

“The antithesis of hilarity, actually," said Sammy. The hyena was hunched. To catch his breath, maybe, or stop his heart racing, or both. Probably both. He wobbled. Bell crossed to help him lean and remind the others that, yes, the goat still existed, thank you very much.

The three of them were still fully down to fur.

Sammy anchored an arm around Bell's shoulder and let the goat bear most of his weight. The hyena's crotch rubbed up against his thigh, and a distant, frustrated, and horny part of Bell's brain tried to reactivate itself. It was met with mild resistance. Not revolution-worthy.

“You ought to know better," said Bell.

“Oh, come on—" started Riles.

“No," said the goat, “not you." He turned his barbell eyes on V.V. and Sammy, with the ferret catching the brunt of Bell's attention. “Really? You thought a horse was out to get you?"

“What?" said Allister. “Wait, you're mad at us?"

“I didn't say I was mad. I said you ought to know better."

“Tell me you weren't afraid."

“Which one of us insisted they heard hoofbeats on the hike over here?"

“We don't have to fight about this—" started the hyena.

“—who's fighting?" asked Bell. He shrugged—difficult to show while bearing someone's weight, but Sammy probably felt it anyway. “Anyway," he continued, tone pointed, “if I'd known the theme of this trip would unsettle you all so much, I would've picked a different one."

Allister rolled their eyes and cocked their muzzle to the side.

“Stop," said Kristina.

They stopped.

Sammy shuddered. The air was cool and humid due to the lake's proximity, he'd had a small heart attack, and his spotted sandy fur was drenched in sweat.

“I will put the sculpture back," said Kristina. “You will all make up before I return."

With a single great heft, she lifted the cedar horse and departed, invisible, into the night.

Riles, swaying and still obviously stoned, watched Bell with unhinged expectation.

“I refilled your water bottle," he said, and produced it. He was being all weird and high again.

“Thank you," said the goat. “Abject terror makes me thirsty."

“We can see that," said Allister. The ferret gestured with a paw to Bell's crotch. He blamed Sammy's weight. He was distinctly aware that the hyena still had a condom on.

“See something you like, V.V.?"

“Try me, bitch."

“Ah, hate-fucking," said Riles, to no one, actually, “the great mender of divides."

“Unlikely," said the ferret. “Bell? Top?"

“He has his moments."

Riles lolled his tongue out and the mood switched again. A radio changing stations. Allister regarded the goat, appraising, as if Bell were a painting one passed daily in a corridor—one you had never before stopped to appreciate—while Sammy snuffled at the side of the goat's neck.

“Maybe another night," said Bell, noncommittal. “I'm going to help Sammy down before he collapses. But, of course, V.V.," he continued, with a gentle departing gesture at Riles, “you're more than welcome to my sloppy seconds."

“Fuck you."

“Another night!" called the goat. Bell felt both pairs of eyes on his back, then the small of his back, then his ass, and then under his messy tail when he lowered Sammy through the flap of his tent. Which he left wide open.

Embarrassment and fury were left outside with the hyena's discarded condom. The game was back on, and whatever the rules were, and whether the others knew they were playing, Bell was winning.

He shouted Sammy's name to the night forest as he rode the hyena, and let him flip the goat onto his stomach for the finish, where the hyena leveraged Bell's horns to fuck him onto his dick.

After that, there were only nightjars and crickets and the sounds of a coyote's snoring.

In the morning-noon, there were deep hoofprints embedded in the dirt around all their tents at odd countervailing angles, and no one would confess to making them.

***

“Yo, wait," said Riles, through a mouthful of oatmeal. “You said horses were a myth."

“Are a myth," said Sammy.

“What's the difference?"

“If they were a myth," said the hyena, “they could no longer be a myth. Or, less perturbingly, it could also imply that their existence had been disproven—e.g., whatever supernatural or paranormal occurrence has been attributed to their myth has been instead explained another way."

“What's the difference between supernatural and paranormal—"

“But only answer that," interrupted Allister, “if it's important."

“It is not."

“Next question: what actually is the myth?" asked the ferret. They frowned, fanning themselves with a paw. Although shielded from the sun as they were, their cookfire did little to ease the summer heat. “I've heard so many—"

“Yo, I got this one!" said the coyote, excitement visible in his tail. Riles spilled a dollop of oatmeal on his jeans, scooped it up with a claw, and then licked it clean. Suggestively. “Okay, so, y'all know how they always told us as cubs that horses could read our minds? That's 'cuz horses are telepathic—don't do that with your muzzle, Sammy, it'll stay that way—but not in the weird woo-woo science fiction way. They can't lift shit with their minds, and, yeah, I know that that's called telekinesis, yo. Shut up.

“Their brains were like mycelium. The shit that's the root for some kinds of mushrooms. Different, separate parts, but still connected together, and capable of tapping into other thinking things, too. Sort of like Bluetooth.

“Anyway, it's how they kept in touch with other herds across far distances. They could be halfway across the world from one another, but they were still in touch. Empathetically, I mean. Not physically. Not like telekinesis. A community that spanned the globe. Which is cool and I guess kinda useless," he added, a frown splitting his eagerness like a fresh log, “but it got real bad when folk started keeping horses as tools. They didn't talk like we did, and they were big and strong and stuff, so folk started keeping them the way we keep monitors. Or chickens.

“I guess for a while folk hired them, but colonizers gonna colonize, and then they—I mean, folks wanted more horses, and the horses that weren't captive must've been overwhelmed with these waves of empathy. Can't imagine what that's like. What it must've been like. Sucks. And so I guess one day, or probably after a lot of years or whatever of careful telepathic deliberation, they decided that they would end it. I mean, it figures, right? If you can read the minds of the folk around you, you know what their plans are, and you know there's no way to change their minds. So it's gotta end.

“Which is what they did. They willed it to happen. At pretty much the same time, they just all—gave up isn't the right word. They stopped. And it didn't matter how hard they punished any one horse, 'cuz there were a million others who could bear that pain for them, and a few months later, they were all gone.

“Nothing could hold 'em together," continued the coyote. “Not even their bones. Not in the poetic fairy dust way, but they just, degraded faster and nothing could preserve them. That's how strong their wills were. They went back to the land."

A somber pause. The firepit crackled. Riles' tail had long since stilled.

“Heavy," said Allister, as if it were a joke, but the ferret wasn't smiling. They looked off in the direction Kristina had travelled with the effigy the night before, glassy-eyed and slack-snouted. Weary, although that might've been the hangover. Riles was the only one of them who seemed immune, these days.

“Heavy indeed," said Sammy. Pensive. Academic as always. “Heavy," added the hyena,

“but perhaps implausible."

“Oh yeah?" asked Allister. A derisive edge, sharpening their usual wry, shit-eating fork-and-knife. Maybe they were still upset about before. “Okay then, professor. What actually happened to the horses?"

“I believe all academic evidence points to horses having existed during our folk's lifetimes."

“So not like dinosaurs," said Riles.

“Not like dinosaurs," said Sammy. He wrinkled his snout and adjusted his bad knee, folding the good one over it and swirling his footpaw in slow, rhythmic circles. “There are a few competing theories."

“You're stalling," said the ferret.

“He's stalling," said Bell.

“I am stalling," said the hyena, ducking his snout slightly to affirm.

“Because you don't know which one you fully believe."

“Correct," he said. “I think I favor the simplest one, but the simplest one is the saddest one, and I also do not wish to ruin the rest of the trip for everyone."

“Well," said Allister, “now you have to tell us."

Another pause. Riles jabbed at a squat, quartered log with the fire poker.

“Please?"

“All right," said Sammy. “Riles had many of the broad strokes correct—no, Riles, I am not confirming that horses were telepathic, although, limiting myself strictly to the available facts, neither can I confirm that they were not telepathic. Their telepathic capabilities notwithstanding, however, I believe that the tale of the horses follows the usual pattern of any institutionalized form of exploitation.

“As Riles explained, we folk—'we' being inclusive of me and other settlers, I suppose, but not our entire present company—engaged in a mass captivity program of horses, although the many have argued that, seeing as their intellectual and spiritual depth was underexamined in favor of their physical potential, the more appropriate word in this circumstance is enslavement."

“Little official written record exists of this sort of program, yet there are too many images, stories, songs, and other similar forms of information for, at least, the idea of horses to not have been prolific during our early history. With mechanization and industrialization, however, their practical use wavered. This was an unfortunate turn of events for the horses. Still, many moguls and other leaders of industry—those in particular who were not so quick to embrace emerging technologies, or, less charitably, to forgo their biocapital—were invested, and thus incentivized to keep horses relevant. And so they did. For a time."

A log snapped in the pit. Kristina blinked.

“In blunt terms: they bred horses to, well enhance them." Sammy pronounced the words with a detached and mild disgust, as though he were talking about gum stuck in his fur, not a eugenical program designed at sentient creatures. “I believe the results in the short-term were moderately impactful. But in the long-term, the combined effects of fertility issues, abuse, and declining interest in horses were devastating. They began to die out in larger numbers than could be replaced, and, perhaps realizing the gravity of their errors, the grand obfuscation began.

“Documents were destroyed. Facilities too. Probably a lot of folk as well. I have to imagine that not everyone was in on it—how else would we still be finding new information to this day?" said Sammy. He'd tilted his snout to the sky. Wistful. “Some of them must have had a conscience."

“Some conscience," said Riles. He spat, wrinkling his muzzle. “Cowards."

“But—" started Allister, hesitant. “Okay, but in that scenario, why aren't there any other horses left?"

Sammy shrugged. “Perhaps there are," said the hyena. “I hope no one ever finds them, if so. I hope they live peacefully and uncontacted and need never be bothered again."

“I'm sensing a 'but', here."

“It's entirely possible that they went extinct due to the sheer scale of depopulation. We have no idea how many there were before captivity, or during for that matter."

“But—"

“Sometimes," he continued, intercepting, “we discover a species is alive years after it has been deemed extinct. Generally, however, it's a fish that resembles another fish, or an insect, or a bird, all with close relatives."

“And there's nothing still alive," said Bell, quiet, “that's anywhere close to a horse."

“Correct."

“What about the bones?" said Riles. Paws folded under his snout, elbows on his knees, he was hunched over in his camping chair, staring intently. Shirtless, as he'd been since getting there, showing off his coat. Tan, white, grey, and black, all blended together, beautiful and ephemeral, like a blurry polaroid salvaged from a fire. “How is there no bones? How do you cover something like that—"

“—actually," said the goat, “I may have an explanation for that."

“You do?" asked the ferret.

“Of course he does," said the hyena. “This better not be the—"

“Shh. Saints, did I spoil your story?"

“Point taken. Continue."

“As you can tell," started Bell, “this perspective is ridiculed by some scholars. Or—if Sammy wants to quibble with my usage of the word 'ridiculed', which I can see he desperately does—we can say that it isn't favored. Why?" he asked, pausing for rhetorical effect. Probably because accredited scholars love nothing more than stripping the soul out of everything. “Probably," continued the goat, “because it combines the cruel elements of our actions with the grim optimism of Riles' theory."

“Hold up—"

“—no, still not telepathic."

“Yeah. Okay. Fine."

“While they were being held prisoner, the horses nevertheless spread horse-word of a plan of rebellion. A last act of defiance. It must've taken decades for it to be communicated widely enough to be accomplished. From farm to quarry to camp to city to et cetera et cetera. Each cell of prisoners probably knew their local geography well enough by that point, or else were aided by some form of sympathizer who was in on the plan. Which you might assume sounds like a set-up for me to say that the horses escaped and are likely still out there," said the goat, “but sadly I have to assure you that that is not the case.

“One by one, the horses broke free and fled for the nearest deep body of water. For many of them, this was the coast. Pacific or Atlantic or wherever, I suppose. They galloped until they could not gallop, cantered until they could not canter, and trotted until their heads were just above the water's surface, and then below it, and they kept going. Oceans, lakes, rivers, and even ponds—the horses walked into the sea rather than remain prisoner to us folk."

A kingfisher flew overhead and perched on an aspen branch not far from Allister. It held in its beak a small fish. Minnow, maybe. Bell's eyes glazed over.

“Calcium reuptake in the ocean is high. Many creatures use it. Useful for shells, yes, but also deep, deep below, it's an essential component for bioluminescence. Which is why," continued the goat, “we find very little physical remains of horses. The ocean is very large, after all, and wastes very little. Most of them would've been gone in a few months. The bones in a few years, maybe. Although, maybe there's an unbelievably large yet sterile brine pool somewhere on the ocean floor with an entire preserved horse in it. There'd be poetry to that.

“Now, you might ask, 'Well, Bell, what about the lakes and ponds?' and the answer is, anticlimactically, that there's probably no funding to dredge the lake bottoms. Not that the money doesn't exist. It does. But what academic or government system is going to actively invest in uncovering its own genocidal practices?

“I think that the theory is so disparaged for a number of reasons." Bell took the fire poker from Riles and jabbed at the pit like a fencer. The flames were dying out. “One: yes, it would probably be difficult to plot a rebellion of that scale while being held prisoner. Two: yes, it would probably be unlikely that every single group was able to escape and make it to the water. But, there's a third reason, and it's the one I believe that matters most: I don't think scholars and the like want horses to have walked into the sea."

Riles was silent.

“Why not?" asked Allister.

“Because it gives them agency," said Sammy. The hyena wasn't looking at Bell—his eyes were distant, and his whiskers still. “The implications are too dire for them to comprehend. Or too—well, I don't know if I know the word for it."

“Still not following."

“Maybe it's cynical," started the goat, “but when you read about it, sometimes it feels like some of the scholars take pride in us having killed off the horses."

“So if the horses walked into the sea," Riles said, realization dawning, “it takes away their accomplishment."

“Correct," said Sammy.

“That's fucked up."

“But why didn't they just—" started the ferret. They cut themselves off, tongue bitten.

“Why didn't they just fight back?" asked Sammy, gentle.

“Sorry. That sounds super judgy."

“I guess I kinda understand," said Riles. Sammy's snout swiveled to watch him, muzzle furrowed, and the coyote continued, “If you think about it, they could have fought back, but what was that gonna do? They'd been stolen from their homes and their bodies, yeah? What're they supposed to do, go to war? Kick folk to death? At least the ocean was gonna carry them somewhere."

The kingfisher took flight again.

“The one I heard sounds stupid," said Allister, “compared to all of these ones. Like a story you tell a cub. Which is when I heard it, so it makes sense, but still. Stupid."

“We could use some levity," said Sammy. The hyena acquiesced with an incline of his head. Slight. Maybe he was feeling apologetic. He usually did when hungover.

“As a cub folks usually skip over the heavy parts, but we always got the idea that something bad was happening with the horses, right? Things weren't ideal. But before it got bad—as bad as you were all saying—they banded together and started looking for a way out. Not out of the situation, not like a metaphor, but like a literal, physical way out. Sanctuary. One of those little hidden-away places you hear about in the stories. The underside of the Lake of Avalon, the mountains that lead to Arcadia—that genre of place. What else was there to do?

“So they looked. They went places and looked, and when there was nothing, they went to the places they had heard about when they were foals and looked, and when there was nothing and they were fewer, they went to the places that their elders had forbidden them to travel and looked, and when they were almost none, they found it. A portal to another world. Except there was a problem. The portal had a gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper had rules."

The ferret kicked their legs, absent, mind elsewhere, charcoal paws rising and falling. Not unlike a cub themselves.

“The door was for horses, but in all their travels and with all their losses, they didn't know if they were that anymore. Horses. I used to think about that as the whole hero's journey thing—y'know, the one who starts the quest isn't the same as the one who can complete it—but nowadays I'm less sure. Anywho," they continued, “the gatekeeper was all, 'Only horses may pass through this door, for it was only horses who whence came,' or whatever, and the horses were like, 'Then let us pass—and if we are not horses, then surely we shall not pass through the door.'

“The gatekeeper accepted this, which makes it a kinda shitty gatekeeper IMO because what's the point of it, y'know? The door gatekeeps itself. It moved aside and let the herd attempt to pass through, and—this is the really shitty part—I don't even remember how the story ends."

“Yo!" said Riles, incredulous. “You can't do that!"

“I thought I remembered!"

“I must side with Riles here," said Sammy, sage. Levity indeed. “You can't actually do that."

“What do you want me to do?" asked Allister. “Make something up?"

“Yes."

“Yeah."

“Correct."

The ferret thought about it. Scanned their surroundings, as if the secret to the horse fable might spring forth from the dark eyes of the aspens or the low squat bushes or the dying embers of a cookfire.

“The gatekeeper wasn't shitty," said Allister. “The gatekeeper was a reminder. Actually, fuck it. The gatekeeper was a horse. The horse. The OG horse, if you will. Because while anything could run and hide and find refuge in a new, frightening world, it took something more to retain a sense of self—or, more important than that, to go through as much as the horses did," they said, nodding, conviction growing, “to question your sense of self and understand that you've changed forever, but are still a part of the same continuity. Very Ship of Theseus."

“Did the horses make it through?" asked Riles.

“Some of them did," they replied. “Some of them were horses on the other end. For others, horse no longer fit, and so they came through the door on the other side as another kind of creature entirely. Maybe some stayed there," added the ferret, growing cryptic, “knowing that that that door, too, would one day be in need of a gatekeeper."

“I think," said the hyena, “I prefer that version to all the other ones."

“It has a certain whimsy," said the goat.

“Yo. My version was plenty whimsical."

“Do not argue," said Kristina. Four snouts swiveled to watch her. Bell had forgotten she was there. The binturong stared with dark and ominous eyes, although she looked past all of them. After a pause like a heavy breath, she continued, “I think you are all correct. If I were a psychic creature, if I knew the fate intended for me, and if my collective were imperiled, I would make it stop. But I think you are all wrong," she said, a stoic crease forming across her snout. “The horses did not die when they walked into the sea. They did not leave this world when they fled to another. They are still here and hiding in plain sight.

“If I were a horse, I would make the folk who loved to hate me think I was gone. I would let them remember what I was and become something different. They would spend their lives looking for horses with hooves and long legs and build statues and tell tales of what I was like," said Kristina, quiet, “but few folk would ever recognize me—and those who saw me for what I was would never be believed."

The cookfire flickered out. Their afternoon breakfast had long since grown cold.

“Kristina?" asked Sammy. Hesitation, too, flickered on the hyena's tongue. “Are you saying—"

“—I have seen a horse. Yes. I do not care if you do not believe me."

The four of them had, at some point, leaned collectively forward in their seats.

“It had Lev's eyes," said Kristina. She rose and collected their bowls. “Okay. I will wash the dishes."

***

Two days later they were still arguing about the hoofprints. Bell was prime suspect, given the goat was the only one with hooves, but they were—as he'd argued many times—far too big to be his own, and moreover all of them had by that point been implicated in some form of horse shenanigan, so they ought all be considered prime suspects. V.V. and Sammy had sprung their revenge on Riles by sneaking the effigy into his tent in the early hours of the morning, which greeted the still-drunk, half-woken coyote with empty and haunting eyes. He in turn had taken to whickering and/or whinnying whenever he snuck up on Sammy, never minding if it was dark or if the hyena was in a precarious position, such as perched on the cliffjump or wrapping their muzzle around Bell's dick. From there, the war had only escalated.

Bell was calling a ceasefire.

A discomfort nipped at the goat's scut. Itched his horns. It could be that one of them was far too committed to the joke, but there was a second unsettling option that weighed heavy on Bell's chest at night, squeezing the breath from him like a nightmarish anaconda. Could it be, he'd put forward, that they were being followed—not by a horse, but by some other hoofed folk in the woods?

The effect was immediate. Although it was unlikely—folk tended to travel south, not north, for camping, and it was the middle of a weekday moreover—it united them as a group against a paranoid possibility. They adopted the buddy system and hovered close to it like a helicopter parent, overprotective and unyielding.

Which meant that when Bell asked Sammy if he'd like to go on a clothing-optional hike to a nearby overlook point, Riles called third wheel immediately and Allister, ever-unfortunate, was left to be Kristina's buddy. As the goat understood it, she'd had some idea to use chalk and ribbon to decorate the large cedar tree you could see from camp.

“I do," said the hyena, huffing, “feel bad. Even if it is," he continued, “for safety."

Sammy lead them up the ridge. Partly, it let him set the group's pace such that he wouldn't be left behind. The other part, though, the greater in truth, was that Sammy had a fine ass—his sandy fur had three beautiful dark spots on either cheek—and they relished the opportunity to stare at it for a few hours. It was hypnotic.

“Yeah," said the coyote, absentminded. “Feel real bad."

“Naughty, even," added the goat.

“Real naughty."

“You two are hopeless," said the hyena. He stopped and hiked his good leg up on a higher flat stone, stretching out his muscles.

Saints, Bell wanted to stop the hike then and there and eat him out. Show-off. A sidelong glance at Riles revealed he was probably thinking similarly. The coyote's tongue was lolling out of his muzzle and, lower, he was peeking out of his tawny sheath already.

“Hm. I think," continued the hyena, “we're almost there. Oh! However, before I forget—"

—saints—

“—I've been meaning to ask, Riles," he said. Evidently having caught his breath, he pushed off of the flat stone and continued his ascent, cane digging into the packed earth for purchase. “What did you mean when you called me a philosophical and ideological coward?"

Bell heard the horny gears in the coyote's skull churn to a sudden halt, having been fed cruel, quasi-confrontational fodder instead of hyena ass. Riles turned an accusatory glare at Bell, to which the goat played dumb.

“Do you really wanna get into this—"

“—correct!" said Sammy, cheerful. “I do."

“Why."

“I want to be a better communicator. As a matter of fact," said the hyena, “Bell suggested it."

Saints!

“Did he?"

“I'll make it up to you later," said the goat.

“You will. Twice," said Riles, who then turned his snout back to the hiking path ahead. “Do you remember the conversation we were having?"

“If I recall," said Sammy, “we were talking about the impending apocalypse. As well as the many apocalypses that have happened already."

“Plus the ones that are currently ongoing."

“Correct." Sammy started panting again. He was doing better than the initial hike in, at least. “I suggested that we might as well make of the world what we can, and that there was no wrong answer."

“'Cuz if—"

“Nothing matters!" called Sammy, voice clear and loud and carrying off the far side of the ridge. There was no echo— Riles' ears swiveled on reflex to try and catch it—because there was nothing for the sound to hit and return. Only dense-packed aspens and sturdy cedars and other absorptive underbrush below.

“Then anything can matter," finished Bell.

“Which is a coward's position," said Riles. “Oh—oh shit, huh, we're already here."

Sammy summitted the overlook not unlike the portraits of colonial explorers, although with much less murder in his heart and significantly fewer clothes. His cane could've been a half-snapped flagpole. Riles quickly took one of the hyena's arms and threw it over his own shoulder, while Bell unpacked a clean roughspun blanket.

The overlook was wider than the lake bluff. One end terminated in a series of tall boulders interspersed with bushes and shrubbery and some kind of definitely-invasive kudzu. There were a few trees, white spruce, younger, less than a hundred but probably more than fifty years old, with branches low enough that even the smaller goat could reach. Near the crown of the crag was another boulder, slightly-sloped and weather-worn and covered with a deep green moss. Very fuck-worthy. Bell laid out the blanket a few feet from the edge and weighed down each corner with loose rocks.

They couldn't see prairie like this—the overlook faced the wrong way—but with the mid-afternoon sun behind them and the sprawling orange brush labyrinth of aspens before them, Bell felt the scale of the world.

They weren't even that high up—two dozen feet above the taller treetops, maybe—but the woods continued until they were swallowed by the horizon.

Bell shivered. Riles helped Sammy down, then wriggled between them, curling a leg around each of theirs and knocking their collective heads together with his paws, one on each of their muzzles. The coyote blew between his teeth as if expelling all the effort of the hike at once.

“If you have to say that nothing matters before you can pick something to matter," he said, picking up from a thought as distant as the horizon, “you're a coward. 'Cuz you've decided that before you can make a move, you have to be sure it's the correct one."

With a practiced yet casual indifference, he let go of their jaws and started working between their legs with a gentle, coaxing rhythm. Bell let his eyes fall shut and leaned back on his elbows as he tuned into the gentle whine of the hyena. Static clearing.

“It doesn't matter if it's the pessimistic nihilism or the optimistic one," continued the coyote, still lecturing as he stroked. “You take the value out of everything, and you say you put it back into something, but you didn't. If nothing matters, nothing matters." The coyote rolled his neck sideways, rubbing up against Bell's snout and neck, soft tawny fur on damp grey-white. He smelled of sweat and coyote and lake and oats. “But if you put yourself into something—doesn't matter how much, really, just that you've done it—without any guarantee that it matters, knowing there's a chance it could be the wrong thing, then I think that's courage. That's how you make it matter."

Riles stopped brushing up against Bell but kept his paw working.

“An interesting philosophical position," Bell heard Sammy say. He felt the coyote lean further over. Muzzle parting. Tongue lolling. “I'll have to— ah."

Then Riles' paw gripped firm the goat's horn, lowering him until the coyote was hilted in Bell's muzzle, tongue sliding down and across the swelling base of his knot, held in place by paw on horn. Spit trailed into Riles' crotchfur and along his sheath. The coyote rocked his hips, gentle yet unyielding, grinding his dick against Bell's willing tongue.

The goat was clay.

Soon the coyote straddled Bell's muzzle, tail hiked and paws still wrapped back around his horns, while the hyena hooked his paws under the goat's knees to lift and line himself up. But a moment after Sammy bottomed out with a slow, steady thrust, Bell's sense of gravity and balance inverted, and his throat was parched and dry and devoid of delicious coyote ass.

He blinked the moisture back into his eyes. It was getting dark—sunset was happening over the opposite side of the ridge—and he was standing upright. His paws were bound with loose, vaguely sexy rope, and the sex rope itself looped over a low branch of one of the spruce trees. His scut was sticky with cum and his hole sore with the familiar feeling of a knotted stretch.

The roughspun blanket was still there, but their packs had been overturned and spilled across the overlook. Hoofprints spiraled around the spruce, winding outward in deep, hard-packed gouges, like ripping fur free from a snarl of barbed wire.

Bell called out. No one answered.

Alone.

He shimmied free of the branch, straining his sore thighs for the necessary height. Maybe he could've snapped the branch. The goat needed his paws free as fast as possible, however, and he wasn't strong, nor quick, nor particularly flexible. He'd learned from his mistakes. He wouldn't panic.

You were supposed to shelter in place in these situations, but Bell wasn't lost. The others were. They needed to stay put, and he would find them. Moreover, he didn't fancy his chances climbing down from the overlook after sunset, and there was precious little daylight left. There would be no more repeat errors.

Though the goat spooked at every noise—the crepuscular birds waking and chirping, the scuttling of whatever small insects being hunted by larger and merciless reptiles—he did not charge. He held his calm. Muttered to himself under his breath and tried to recall the path down, step by step, and then the snaking trail back toward camp. The latter, interspersed with patches of hoofprints, but they were dusty and light and grass-covered and it was getting dark, so he couldn't be sure if they were his own from earlier in the day. Because the alternative was crazy.

Take your time. Don't run. Don't panic.

Mild hunger churned in his stomach next to dread and he was thirsty, but not overly so. His skin stung under his pale fur, but on one side only. They were clues. He'd dangled in the sun like desiccating meat for only a few hours.

A two hour's hike stretched into three and light was fading fast. Camp was near. The humid breeze came like a soothing balm or refrigerated dick on his burned pelt, and Bell scented the lake on the wind and the remnants of smoke. Water, food, clothing, shelter. Safety. Salvation. Their kingdom awaited.

When he sighted the clearing, however, breath left him.

Their makeshift tables were overturned, supplies scattered in the dirt and grass, and their tents had been trampled flat over. Wide, unmistakable prints stained the thin nylon with soil and wove across the campsite with wild abandon. There could have been one source or two or twenty. The hoofprints split and doubled back, a terrifying tango, then ascended, impossibly, from the foot of the grand cedar tree along its trunk and many thick branches, all decorated from bottom upward with technicolor chalk and pastel ribbons blowing, gentle, in the breeze.

In the treetop, the effigy of the horse sat, precarious, balanced on thin branches like an ill-fitting and bloody crown.

---

Chapter 3—SUMMIT

Bell waited two days. No one came for the goat.

Every grouse, lizard, and otherwise unexplained sound was like a defibrillator discharging against his chest. Sleep was infrequent, stolen by his dimming hope and growing fear, then stolen back by the overwhelming fatigue of hypervigilance. Both nights were spent in neurochemically-fueled fits of shivering. And in the mornings, and whenever he woke from naps, and most other times as well, the goat's eyes were drawn to the looming effigy of the horse high up in the decorated cedar tree.

Bell saw it in his daymares. He saw its silhouette projected on the wall when he hid in his tent, as though millimeters of nylon could protect him, and he saw its shadow for half the day outdoors when the sun was behind it. When he lit the fire to feed his nonexistent appetite and because he'd burned through his lantern batteries keeping watch, he saw it in the embers and the smoke, so he kicked out the fire with his hooves and poured water on it and screamed everyone's names bloody murder until his throat was raw and metallic and when he could no longer scream, he sobbed, and then passed out.

There were hoofprints preserved like fossils in the dampened ashes when he woke.

Stupid fucking effigy. Stupid trip. Stupid hike. The goat knew he could try hiking back to the forest ranger post, but a stubborn resolve had collected inside him like dripping rainwater, sputtering the slow-kindled dread beneath it. He'd never make it back. If he did, the horse would follow him. And if it didn't, he'd still never see his friends again. They were gone and Bell was being played with. Well, he wasn't in the mood to play games. He was in the mood to win. He'd get that fucking horse if it was the last thing he did.

The effigy was where everything had started. When. It would be the end of things, too, one way or another. So, Bell fetched Sammy's back-up cane—a nice sturdy aluminum with a round-hooked rubber handle—and readied himself at the base of the grand cedar tree.

Once he cleared the first few branches, most of which had been snapped off by other travelers about his height, his hooves found footholds, and the hyena's cane let him snag anchoring points that would've been far out of reach. Except, when next his paw closed firm around the base of a green-feathered branch, the goat's sense of gravity shifted again.

He was digging a hiking stick into a loose gravel road that overlooked wide, verdant forest thickets and, further out, idyllic spans of empty grass field. It was cold. Dry. The early morning mountain air nipped at his fur and the curious empty spot where his horns ought to be. Beside him, looking over the pastoral scene, was a petit red fox with perky tits and a wistful stance. Iris. She was clad in hiking gear, warm like the color of her fur, practical and form-fitted.

Bell was clad in a sundress that blew in the mountain breeze.

“Iris?" asked the goat. Uncertainty.

“Hm?" said the fox, absent. “Oh, sorry—I guess I should've warned you about the hike out here. Don't worry," she added over her shoulder, black-streaked muzzle still fixed on the distance, “we have a truck. Three, actually. It's simply tradition that you make the first hike up on your paws. We have a lot of those."

“First hikes?"

“Traditions."

Iris breathed deep, large ears flattening back, as though she had finally come up for air after a long dive into unforgiving waters.

“Iris?" said the goat. “I'm not sure I belong here."

“What an odd thing to say," said the red fox, “at this particular moment. You came all this way. I hadn't heard from you—any of you, actually—in years. Why choose this moment to doubt?"

She dug her paws into the gravel beneath her. There was a lesson she wanted to teach. Iris could be frustrating, that way.

“Because it's about to happen?" Bell ventured. “Because it makes it real?"

“Are you asking?"

“I think," said the goat, “we should keep moving. The view is admittedly spectacular, but I don't remember how long you said the hike was going to be, and I'll have plenty of time to appreciate it later. Many days and weeks and months, in fact."

Iris shook her head. “You only get to see it for the first time once, Bell. Come and stay."

“I don't think I want to."

“Not forever," said the fox. “Just for a poem?"

Bell planted the walking stick in the gravel and braced against it, hooves digging into the earth to keep the goat's balance at such a steep angle.

_“Pleasure was

Our shuttered sight,

Paws enjoined

And squeezing tight -

Lingering

Like a camera deployed -

Abandoned faded

Polaroid."_

Iris never pulled her eyes from the distance. Never took a good look at the goat, really.

“Go on ahead, Bell," she said. “I'll catch up in a bit."

When Bell grabbed hold of his walking stick again, however, it was a branch of flexible cedar, and he was ascending, surrounded by worn ribbon and pastel chalk-marks, and then his gravity shifted again and he was climbing downward toward the rippled lake. Looking down—up—Bell saw the bluff below—above—him, with his hooves catching crevices from their rough, unworn angles. His horns, returned to him, itched fiercely. The night's sky was vast and star-riddled. It waited to swallow the goat whole should he fall.

A spotted hyena flew past him, the streaking sandy comet of fur in his own private galaxy. No splash, no hard impact on water, no sign that he'd gone past—but what lay ahead of him, lounging on a church altar and clad in nothing but his fur and the white mesh of a wedding veil, was the tan-and-peppered form of a coyote. Discarded flower petals, daisy-white, decorated him as well as the hewn stone and the lake's surface. Little stars on the lake's ink.

“Come on in, Bell," called Riles. He was panting. Heavy. Exhaustion or exertion, or like someone had crushed all the air from his lungs with a tactical piano. “The water's fine!"

“I can't!" replied the goat. The sky loomed above/below him. “There's—I'll fall!"

Riles gave a mirthless, ejaculatory bark of laugh, harsh and raw and pained, but the coyote stayed sprawled over the altar. Not an iota of snark while Bell made steady progress down/up the cliffjump, hooking Sammy's cane into the small jagged gaps of its unsanded underbelly. Soon his horns grazed the lake's surface. Bell contorted himself, shoulders and neck strained to watch the coyote lying still on the altar, although Riles's quick brown foxy eyes had followed the goat down the few dozen feet he'd traveled.

The coyote's look was unwavering and Bell was not. He held his breath, found a new anchoring point, and ascended/descended with a hefted leap. The lake ate his horns first, then his snout with its icy, night-chilled lips, and, when at last his hooves touched the underside of the water's surface, Bell caught a cedar branch which stretched wide and thin, and so too did Bell. Expanding like a slow-pulled film of sheet plastic, paws and skin and brain and eyes flattened outward. The goat's already-wide peripheral vision became all peripheral, no center to hold, his barbell irises an infinite x-y plane of their own with a null z axis.

The goat was nylon.

Sammy and Allister were fucking in the tent. Bell couldn't look away—he was all eye—but the sounds alone had before been a siren song for the goat, and watching them from every possible angle was orchestral.

He felt his paws, still, and his hooves, and although his muscles were thin as paper, they still obeyed. And when he moved in the world within the walls, his perspective remained the same, a fixed camera, but the contents of the tent changed. Time progressed. Condensed sweat beaded along Bell's nylon and dripped and pooled at the foot of his walls while Allister's whiny fu-u-ucks grew more frequent and higher in pitch.

If Bell moved laterally, he could slide his all-eye until it was no longer nylon but skin and fur, nerves and neurons, synapses firing at the horny urging of neurochemical ecstasy. For a while, he climbed forward in Sammy's pelt. His senses overloaded with the warmth of sandy spotted fur and the loudness of hips grinding hips and, most of all, the irresistible urge to bottom out over and over again in the ferret beneath him.

Then he was under Allister's skin. The sensations were foreign but familiar, the same genre by a different author—waves of slippery pleasure. Delicious pressure. Wrists pinned down by the hyena, footpaws hooked together around his back, muzzle bumping muzzle grinding against neck, caught by paws seeking chestfur and coiling around shoulders and digging claws into back, and when Bell's eye was both of them at once and Allister came, the goat felt obliteration.

Peace, for a moment. He could stay here.

He climbed forward still.

The world wrapped around him, fish-eyed and cylindrical. Or, no—he was shrinking again, collapsing around the world. Bell was small. Pitiful. He had two eyes, barbell once more, and while they did not feel as they once did, they spotted small holes in the pale, creased void around him. Windows to watch through as the goat climbed, and climb he did.

He was among a forest of aspens. Clone colonies. Allister, Riles, and Sammy were clad in their hiking packs and little else but their sweat-and-cum-matted fur. Cheerful and laughing, albeit muffled by the treebark that separated Bell from them and quieted further by the distance. Each window-hole along his ascent brought the goat closer to them but never close enough. He was once again the forgotten friend, the spare part, second fiddle to first-chair bassoon, trailing behind them and never hearing their jokes the first time around.

In desperation, he wailed Sammy's cane against the aspen's inside eyes, thumping with a furious rhythm. Only the ferret among all them stopped. Perked their ears. Looked around and moved their muted muzzle.

Sammy fired back an acidic pH 0 glare and Allister gave up the fight. They reached the foot of the ridge trail, along which there were no aspens—not even at the summit. Bell was fine with that. He knew with some certainty what he would have seen there.

Gravity pulled once again, first at Bell's horns and soon thereafter the rest of his body. The goat had emerged from the lake wallowing in mud, earth-gouging hooves and tight-clenched pawfuls of cedar reeds the only thing separating him from a long and disastrous sidelong fall. The sun was harsh, and the heat, torrid. The world around him, however, was bleak. Unfinished.

Bell had crawled in from one edge, where the lake abruptly began, its waters vanishing thereafter into white oblivion. The closer the goat inched to the center, the more the landscape took on detail. Color. Ash-grey reeds became a pale, watery green, fitted with textured brown caps. The stones and boulders of the lakeside were no longer hollow frames, instead filled with weight and casting mighty shadows. Even the mud held its shape better—the mud here knew it was mud.

Nestled in the foreground sat a posing ferret. Allister. Bell could see them now. Kristina was a distance in front of the ferret, a dark blur, only an impression, but she was there.

Craning his tired neck, Bell searched the distant cliffjump for three shadows—yet while one shadow was indeed a coyote, it was far too tall to be Riles, and the falling figures beside it were not shaped like a goat nor a hyena.

One was an otter's shadow, hunched and dejected as though expecting yet another blow from the heavens. The other was voluptuous and vulpine and dauntless even during their collective plummet to the cool waters below.

Yet, the more that the goat stared, the more detail revealed itself, until Lev, Iris, and Jesse were unshrouded by the sun. Suddenly animate, they screamed—Lev the shrillest of all—with unbridled excitement and plunged to the fringe of Kristina's sketch and out and beyond.

Bell wiped away his tears and crawled the final few feet until he was level, if perpendicular, with Allister. The ferret was frozen like a marble statue. Posed like one, too. Bell would be clay.

He tore free fistful of reeds and wrapped them around his limbs, slathered mud along his hooves and calves and thighs, peppered his fur with sandy gravel, and wedged himself against the beach with a cracked boulder that crushed the air from his lungs. The goat curled himself bodily around Allister, all four limbs like closing talons, and stared at the blur of the binturong.

Bell blinked.

Darkening blue sky surrounded him, framed only by the thinning branches of the cedar tree's peak above. His muscles ached. His paws were sticky with sap and sweat and yet also dusted dry with chalk. The stench of cedar was overwhelming.

Across from him was the effigy of the horse, empty eyes turned toward the goat.

Bell kicked.

The effigy plummeted nearly two-hundred feet to the ground with a splintering crack.

***

The sun hung low, scraping golden treetops as Bell dragged what remained of the horse effigy up the cliffjump's grass-and-gravel incline.

It had hit the earth body-first, legs upturned toward the sky, and the cedar-woven hollows gave it a sponge-like quality that probably explained why it survived. That and its unapparent lightness. With better grip the goat could have lifted the whole thing, but he was tired and his brain too wracked with guilt and relief to put tools together. There was a calming simplicity to dragging it by paw. You pulled dried, feathery cedar. Cedar followed.

Neither had emerged unscathed, but Bell reasoned he'd had the better outcome. The horse's neck had snapped and re-set upward, such that its long flat skull was fixed toward the sky. Bell no longer felt its unwavering stare. A mercy. Moreover, the only new hoofprints he'd found since the fall were his own.

There would've been a poetry to kicking it off the bluff. A different poetry, too, if Bell simply weighed it down, leaving it to be found by the next would-be campers secreted away to this obscure part of the woods.

In the end, he couldn't decide. Bell left it perched on the precipice of the cliffjump, teetering in the early-evening wind.

When he returned to camp, Kristina stood tall at the base of the cedar tree, arms stretched high to help down Allister. Swatches of colorful, powdered chalk decorated their clothes and their fur—the latter most apparent with V.V.'s ombre pelt. They looked like bewildered ravers arriving a week late to a music festival.

Bell sobbed when he saw them and charged at Kristina, the immovable object, for an embrace. Half an inconsolable hour went by before they could coax the goat into sitting down without immediate physical contact. Yet still, Allister gripped his paw like a perplexed if gravely concerned parent—one who did not understand why their cub was upset, but understood nevertheless that they were feeling, for whatever reason, something profound—while Kristina went off to refresh their water supply. Soon after the binturong's departure, they offered Bell their sleeve to clean off his snout.

The gesture set him sniffling again and, in a rare gesture of charity, the ferret did not make fun of him. Instead, Allister launched into a nothing story, for which the goat was immensely grateful. While Bell couldn't make heads or tails of what it was about or when it took place, the sound of their voice, wryness and all, was enough.

Bell often felt the ferret floated above the fray on the grace of their humor. For once, Bell was floating up with them, belly-down.

“Anyway," Allister continued, reclining back in their folding chair, “I woke up with what was the worst hangover of my life thus far—though little did I know, I'd break that record in two months—and the host, this little tiny deer dude who's even shorter than you are told me, 'Okay, you've been at our apartment for four days. You're fun, but the party's over, so you have to leave today,' and then I totally didn't because we ended up fucking like an hour later. He actually paid for my taxi ride. A keeper, really."

Kristina fitted a refilled bottle into Bell's paws as though she were slotting a tentpole into its respective hole. Practiced and ever-so-slightly clinical, but she did so with her usual stoic empathy. Then the binturong sat cross-legged beside them on the ground and stared up at the goat with dark, expectant eyes.

“Okay, Be. Storytime's over," said the ferret. “You need to tell us what happened."

“I don't know where to start," said the goat.

“What happened to the campsite?"

“It was trampled. What do you remember?"

“Oh, no, you don't get to turn the questions back on us like that—"

“—humor me, please."

With practiced intent, V.V. swung one leg over the other and folded their paws over their knee. Narrowed their eyes at Bell and cocked their snout to the side. Waiting.

“It was me," he said, snuffling like a cub. “I was the horse. I think."

“You think."

“Is your phone dead?"

“No, I literally just charged it for the photos we were gonna—hey wait what," Allister said, their crooked snout cracking wide with a confused frown. “What the fuck?"

From the thicket came the distant, muffled whoop of a coyote. Bell's eyes smarted again.

“I promise I'll explain," said the goat, “but if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to cry again."

He did.

***

“A shared hallucinogenic experience," said Sammy. He drummed his claws along his knee, other paw still fixed on his cane. “Like mass hysteria, but fueled by, like, a bad batch of mushrooms or something."

“Do not move," said Kristina.

“That's dumb," said Allister.

“Really dumb," said Riles. The coyote rolled his neck, collectively swaying the four of them given his arms were stretched wide over all their shoulders and the ferret was leaned against his legs. “Revoke your university degree level of dumb. Did you even take anything two days ago?"

“I might have," said the hyena, sly.

“And Bell?"

Silence.

“Thought so."

“Besides," added the ferret, who spoke up toward the sky, “two full days? That's one Hell of a trip."

“Give me a better hypothesis," said Sammy.

“Riles. Ball's in your court."

“Just where I like 'em," said the coyote. “Duh. The answer is obvious. Bell's psyche or whatever attracted the horse—"

“—never mind! Both of you suck."

“Do not fight," said Kristina, and then there was quiet. The binturong's pencil scratched with delicate, practiced paws. “I am almost done. I will not show you the picture if you are fighting."

They came in the early morning—early for them, at least—before the heat of the day set in and the humidity threatened to wrinkle Kristina's sketchbook. She'd spent fifteen minutes posing them on the bluff with the broken effigy behind them, but Bell hadn't complained. It no longer itched his horns.

“I'm sorry," he said, unprovoked, for the umpteenth time, probably, and Sammy swatted at his thigh with his cane.

“No more apologies. Additionally," he added, as an afterthought, “we don't even know that you did anything. Either way, I doubt any one of us blames you."

“Nope."

“Nuh-uh."

“I do not," said Kristina. With one strong heft of her knees, she rose. “I am done. Come and see."

Riles dragged them all up when he stood—the coyote was a rising tide to reluctant, self-sabotaging ships—and as per usual had to be first. When he turned the sketchbook around in his paws, however, his ears pinned back, his tail stilled, and his muzzle grew pensive. He handed off her sketchbook to Allister.

V.V. pressed a paw to their snout and blinked back tears. Bell heard the rolodex in their brain spinning, searching for levity, but either the ferret found none or thought better of it, and passed the sketch to Sammy.

He regarded it.

“Oh, Kristina," said the hyena. “I—well, I haven't the words." He leaned forward on his cane, bumping up against the binturong's side in lieu of a hug. “Thank you."

The portrait was unremarkable in detail, its hatched pencil-shading betraying the haste with which its author had sketched. The aspens behind them were but loose clouds of leaf, and the broken horse a simple outline like a constellation against the sky. What made Bell's heart flutter, however, were the seven figures piled over one another on the foregrounded log.

Dignified Iris held a tilted paw beneath her angular chin as well as Sammy's spotted one, a poised pair of high-society infiltrators. In front of both their footpaws lay Allister, elbow braced against the earth and lounging like they were about to be fed grapes. And, indeed, Lev and Jesse, tall coyote and squat otter, dangled the finest grapes from the mime region of France above the ferret's snout, wrapped and impossibly tangled up with one another as they always were down to their tails. Riles sprawled wide from the center, determined to catch every one of them, be it with arm or tail or tongue or even just the tip of one of his toes, and with his inescapable gravity yanked Bell past their collective event horizon, never to leave, although the goat always looked as though he were attempting to flee the scene of their crimes.

“You should have added yourself, Kristina," said Bell, returning the sketchbook. “I'd love to see you in there."

“I am in there," she said. “Who will cook tonight?"

Bell did—he owed them as much, he figured, even if they'd told him a hundred times to stop apologizing, although it never seemed to click for them that he wasn't apologizing for being the horse, but for, well, everything else. N plus one other apology-deserving actions that, evidently, everyone else had forgotten and to which Bell had clung like a cub's favorite moth-bitten blanket found boxed in the attic twelve years later.

After dinner had long since come and passed and the stars were so bright you could practically reach out and grab them if you lay back on the beach, Bell let out a contented huff and trailed an absent paw through Sammy's chestfur.

“I believe," said the hyena, "I owe you an apology."

“If I'm forgiven,"—a jolt of pleasure ran up the goat's spine—“so are you."

“I just—well, I haven't been around much this summer. Or, more accurately, every summer and the other three seasons as well. And while I suppose it's true that everyone grieves in their own way," he continued, reaching to scratch at the base of the goat's horns, “I can't in good conscience lay all my blame on grief. Unfair and untrue."

Bell shuddered. Sammy snorted.

“I wonder sometimes if I could have changed it."

“We all could have," said Bell. It took effort—every word had to be selected from the delightful static noise firing off in his brain—and though it was stilted, he forced the words out. “We can't anymore, but, yes, it still remains true that we could have changed it."

“I was angry with him, you know."

Bell knew. He grasped a tight pawful of roughspun blanket and involuntarily flexed his thighs. Hiked his scut further out the way on reflex.

“Before and after—he'd blown off our regular board game night three weeks running, so I said I wouldn't come out with him, even though I hadn't actually anything planned that night. And then after—well. I knew Lev liked to take risks, but it only made me feel worse seeing as I'd long since lost my habit of trying to stop him. Not that we know it was a risk that did it, but—well, in any case.

“I felt so terrible for Jesse," said the hyena. He scooted closer on the blanket, knocking his skull, gentle, against the goat's much harder one. Help suspend one of his legs. “I felt like I was barely a person after Lev, but Jesse—there was such a fire in him. He put up all those posters. He wanted to go look in the woods! Somehow I missed that that fire was costing him dearly. And I suppose," he continued, “by the time that we were ready to start moving on, he had only started to grieve. And I left him with that. Fresh wounds, I suppose."

“I know, Sammy," said the goat. The mixed signals had stopped. “I know."

Riles lowered Bell's legs back to the blanket and pulled his paws from under the goat's knees. Licked his muzzle clean for effect, and then stared down it at the pair of them.

“You two are the worst sometimes," said the coyote. “You know that, right?"

“Did we interrupt your buffet with our earnest feelings?"

“If you actually feel bad for Jesse," said Riles, “then just fucking talk to him, yeah? I've got his number. Take the leap. Stop making all his shit about you."

Bell felt Sammy's jaw loll open, for a moment, and then slowly shut. Riles, on the other paw, muttered fucking academics under his breath and hefted up the goat's knees again, lining up his hips instead of muzzle this time.

“Huh," said Sammy.

He found better uses for his tongue soon after.