for one wild moment; any

[Scalped]

The boughs hang heavy with ice and snow; there are clumps of ice and burr in her mane, in her tail, and beneath the wintering shag of her pelt, she grows fat with foal. She shivers, but not from the cold, more from the memory of the stallion that covered this fall. He was black as night, black as her boy’s eyes had been, but he was grotesque too - she still feels his rot on her skin, chunks of flesh cling to her own, frozen there by the winter. She remembers him cold, undead as she stood beneath him, trapped by his weight and their instinctual need to mate - there was no love in it, no promise or glory, only the bits of gore that clung to her skin, only the rake-marks down her sides from his strangely taloned-feet and deeper punctures near her withers where his fangs had grasped sharp and deep. Scalped shivers from this, from what monstrosity might quicken in her womb but somewhere, an old coyote clamors to the moon and she is soothed by the lonesome sound it makes. She is old, but undying, and still the scar on her breast hurts with a hurt that age has not sweetened nor lessened. The medicine-hat can feel the ghost-hook of the horn against her flesh, like his sharp teeth and his talons as he mounts her; these are memories that will never leave her, his horse-stink of death, her own death and gasping realization that she lives and lives yet, long years without cease. Her thoughts turn away from that pivotal moment in her life after death, even from that pivotal moment of mating not too long ago before the land became blanketed in snow, when the shadows were long and his intent was longer and more wicked. She thinks of the others that came before this one that grows fat and happy and slumbering in her womb; those get of hers that walk the lands now - two colts and a filly, all grown, all on their own, but she can smell them, smell the traces of her own immortality flushed with the vibrancy of their lives - it should kill her to know that their blood is mortal in their veins, short-lived and she hears that coyote stammer again. Their lives are as long as it howls - she knows this, and knows it is how it must be - her undying, them eventually dead and gone, others will take their place as it has always been. Scalped though, is perhaps lonely herself. She never stays around these foals long, once they’re weaned, she tends to leave them to fend for themselves. Had lingered in fact, too long with the first - a colt of her chestnut coloring but lacking her old medicine-markings. She had liked his sire, that feral stallion with the wolf-marked face and whickerings, but she had stayed too long by his side only to leave and take up with another less feral but of the same stock stallion. She bore him a filly, but that was an indifferent girl who liked to go her own way and went as soon as she could, shortly after her first tastings of grass hit her belly, she was gone like the wind. That left her last colt, with the strange horns, like no buffalo she has ever seen, long and curling in their height, black and sharpened to a point. He had been a strong colt, a big bay that already stood taller than her at a year. They had tarried a time or two, in the meadow, and that was the second longest she had spent with a foal. Now he’s gone off and Scalped is thinking of how in the end, they all leave and she hasn’t found anyone or anything long-lasting like she is. So she does what she does best - roam and stray, and she decides to visit the long windblown sands of the desert without really knowing why but knowing deep down in the marrow of her, that she had a dream once, of sands deep and sliding, of a wind that blew hot on her old unswayed back (she still looked as she did in those first days - a mare in her prime, muscled and thick, rawboned and steady; only difference was the long ugly scar on her red-shielded breast that was made by an old angry buffalo bull when he gored her, bringing her death and the first taste of a long unending life through some magic or other he had in his shaggy humped self as it lay beside her, their blood mingling on the grassy plains, her boy trapped somewhere between them, dead himself) and that’s where she found herself, atop a dune, where the sand sang and slid beneath her hooves, and the wind blew hot and fierce in her pale face beneath the red warcap that circled her brow.