Ginny opened her eyes. Below, the Queen was walking among the mules ripping up the pages of her book into bits then smaller bits then feeding all sizes of bits to the mules. She slipped under bellies and heads to do so, offering palmfuls of broken paper. Her headlamp beamed through the blotted shadows. Her voice responded to sighs and nickers in and out of view in parts. They ate the paper, chewed it. An arm, a horse neck, a mule’s ear bit off on the end. The 30-30 shifted up to the Creature and down then to the Queen in a gown or nighty, pearly buttons. She spoke to Maul, the Keeper of the Mules, then walked to the weeds where the Priest was sleeping. Bowman. The men were unimportant to the story. The paper bits were falling, eaten. The Creature, too, had pearls up his middle thorax, like fish swimming in a line. In the Creature’s hand was a silver tool, wood maybe, then a pair of boots mixed with the Queen’s headlamp, a flash of creamy rump, the paint, blended into peripheral sight with the Creature’s hands and knees on the rock. How do the eyes mix two scenes? The brain does it all the time. The Creature had a chain with teeth over one of his shoulders, rust rubbing his creature-cape, loose skin or wings held down by chain. The Queen dipped away among the schools of animals. Her lamp submerged and probed reefs of slim legs and hooves and paper fluttering. She was a black submarine beaming plumes of tails, horse heads floating black-plum, ferns and starlight on blue-scaled horse hide, and paper as bubbles through aspens. The Creature was a hovering bird. The Queen stood up. The reef was gone. The paper bits were gone, digesting. Her lamp slid above the surface. Some bird sound had reached her Queenly ears. Ginny turned and ran uphill toward the cob.

She did not think of the rodeo boy as she climbed scree. She did not connect the two. She breathed hard and thought of the cob and this Creature following. The pistol hung in her free hand. The rifle rode over the other shoulder. The scree was difficult and fell away. The sound clinked down, gathered sound, and the Creature shifted out of her wake. He climbed up parallel, spoke something from just below.

“Wait. Wait for me.”