“Está bien,” Alejandro reassured his brother. “It doesn’t matter.”
He didn’t sound angry at all. Natividad guessed her older brother might even be glad that the car had run off the road. He might not mind if there was one delay and then another, so that the moment they came to the heart of Dimilioc remained a moment in the future and not yet this moment. She would understand that. She was Pure, so she was safe – pretty safe – and Miguel was only human. But Alejandro – black dogs were so territorial. Miguel thought it would be OK, but Natividad thought her twin might be too sure of his logical analysis of what Grayson Lanning ought to do to really believe he might do something else.
“So, I guess we’ll walk the rest of the way,” Miguel said, once they were all sure the car was stuck. He patted the steering wheel wistfully. “Maybe we can get the car back later.” He reached into the back seat for their pack, glancing over his shoulder at Natividad. “It can’t be so far now. Three or four miles, maybe. And it’s not that cold.”
This was optimistic. It was very cold. No part of Nuevo León ever got so cold, not even the mountains. Here, their breath trailed white and frozen through the brilliant air, puffs of living steam against the stark black branches of the trees. And there was a great deal of snow here. Natividad could not remember snow ever falling at home in Potosi, far less at Hualahuises where Mamá’s family had lived.
They pushed their way through knee-deep snow all afternoon. The whole world was white and black: the occasional green of needled pine and the flash of red as a bird flew by only served to accent the bleakness of the winter forest. Natividad could not imagine how the bird could live in this frozen world, where there seemed neither fruit nor seed nor insect nor anything else that might sustain living creatures. She thought this must be a hard country for bird or beast. A hard country for people, too. Even for black dogs.
Yet this cold northern world was not perfectly silent. Pine needles rattled in the occasional breeze; now and then a clump of snow fell softly from a branch. Somewhere not far away a bird called sharply, unmusically. Perhaps the red one, perhaps another; Natividad did not know the birds of this country. They had occasionally seen others through the afternoon: little ones of gray and buff and white; once a small flock of large black ones, like crows but bigger, which might have been ravens.
She stumbled over a snow-covered rock, and Alejandro touched her arm, stopping her. “You are alright?” he asked her. “Not too tired?”
“I’m fine,” Natividad said, waving away any concern, but she could tell from the way that Alejandro looked at her that he didn’t believe her. She smiled at him reassuringly, but the smile took a deliberate effort. She was tired. And the cold was awful. But she didn’t want to make her brothers stop for her sake. Miguel, hovering protectively at her elbow, looked alright, but Miguel had spent his whole life trying to keep up with their older brother. He was not tall, but he was sturdy and strong for an ordinary human, and the cold did not seem to bother him as much as it bothered her.
Alejandro himself, of course, did not really feel the cold. Black dogs didn’t. It wasn’t fair. Natividad gave Alejandro a look in which she tried to combine scornful amusement and impatience. She said, again, “I’m fine.” Her breath, like Alejandro’s, hung in the air, a visible echo of her words.
“She’s fine,” Miguel said, putting an arm around her shoulders.
Natividad leaned against her twin, her smile suddenly genuine. “See?”
Alejandro was not convinced. “We could stop, rest. We have not come very far. I think we still have a long way to walk. You should rest. We could make a fire. You have those cerillos? Matches?” He looked at Miguel. “We could boil water, have coffee. Eat something. Then you would have not so much to carry.”
Miguel grinned, a flash of white teeth in his dark face. His smile was their father’s. Just recently, as Miguel had shot up in height and lost the plump softness of childhood, Natividad had begun to see echoes of their American father’s bony features emerging in her twin’s face. “I’m fine, too,” Miguel said. “But I wouldn’t mind carrying some of this weight on the inside instead of the outside.”
Miguel, though much less strong than Alejandro, was the only one of them carrying a real burden. Natividad carried a shoulder bag with matches and a thermal blanket and some food, and her brothers had insisted on her carrying their small remaining cache of American money. Her twin carried everything else: the little pot to boil water; mugs and powdered cocoa; jerky and nuts. Extra clothes, too – especially for Natividad, of course, which was a little embarrassing, but only a little. It wasn’t her fault her brothers didn’t care about clothes.