Salt

Then comes the night of Nellie’s near escape.
She’ll never know exactly how, but Lucy likes to think it began as most escapes do: in the dead of the night. What’s still called the hour of the wolf. Decades back, before the buffalo¹ were slaughtered² and the tigers that fed on them died too, a lone⁴ horse in these hills would have quaked in fear of carnivores come slavering. Though there are no tigers, Nellie trembles like her ancestors. She’s smarter than most people, her master claimed. She knows there are things more fearsome than any living threat. The thing strapped⁵ to her back, for instance, that dead thing she can’t shake. Nellie waits till the stars stare through their peepholes of sky and the two sleepers⁶ lie quiet. Then she commences to dig.
Nellie digs through the hours of the wolf, the snake, the owl⁷, the bat, the mole⁸, the sparrow. At the hour of earthworms stirring in their burrows⁹, Lucy and Sam wake to the knock of hooves against the stake.
Sam is quicker. Four strides and Sam’s caught the reins¹⁰ in one hand. With the other, Sam slaps Nellie. Hard.
The mare¹¹ only snorts, but the sound echoes in Lucy along with the sound of other slaps by other hands on other parts. She leaps between girl and horse. Sam’s hand halts in midair. Only then, her neck loosening, does Lucy admit she didn’t know if Sam would stop.
“She tried to run,” Sam says with arm still raised.
“You scared her.”
“She’s a

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