The east grade still had two miles on it, and the light was already off the canyon wall, when the last notice post above the left-hand ford showed bare timber. The screws were in the wood. The sheet was gone. A pale square marked where the warning had sat since spring. The map sold at the Prospect Office shows one ford. It leaves out the second, and it leaves out which one holds.
Lower Caster's Notice Authority ordered the pull before noon. The order went to forty-one slate houses that carry trail pages for caravans and packers. The authority called the slips bench orders. A count of the dockets against the sitting book at Mill Saddle found no entry for the slips at the Bench of Third Fences. The pages were already down.
The slip that took the ford warning used docket 14-F, a fence quarrel between cousins that closed eleven years ago. The hearing date is the thirty-first of a month that has thirty. The wax on the corner is the bottling stamp of a cider house on the court's own street, pressed hard enough to look heavy in a poor light. The slate houses took the pages off before the afternoon bell. No clerk went to ask whether the bench sits on a day the calendar does not have.
What came down was a spring note. The left-hand ford is passable at the hock if a line stays on the upstream stones. A gray sow stands in it at dusk. She waits until the last frame is committed, shoulders it into the current, and eats what spills. The note said to use the left water and keep the grain uphill. The Prospect Office sheet that replaced it, nailed to a side board by midafternoon, calls the ridge open for seasonal traffic and enterprise. The sow and the second ford are off that sheet.
Ives Tanner had six frames on a contract pack. The warning was already down. He took the wide water because the map said ford. The wide water is the right-hand one. It looks kinder from the bank and takes a pony to the hip. The sow did what she does. The last frame went over. Tanner's right hind opened on a downstream rock. He made Sable Nightshade's lean-to on three legs, two miles short of the yard he was paid to reach.
"The board was there in the morning," Tanner said. The wrap on the leg was already spotted. "By the time we came down it was screws and a pale square. We took the wide water because the map said ford. The map is what they sell at the office."
Nightshade keeps the lean-to where the trees start. She has posted the sow's hour on that board every spring since the fence case closed. She lives there.
"She isn't hunting anypony," Nightshade said. "She wants the oats, and she knows the hour. I put that on the post in the spring. A desk took the words and left the sow."
The Prospect Office has been calling the ridge an opportunity in its seasonal sheets. Deputy Pennant Holme stood in the dispatch room with the drawer of copies open. "We are in the business of clearing the route for use," he said. "If the paper says clear it, we clear it. Checking whether a month has thirty days is a second-season project."
The bounty board at the ford stake raised the sow to eight hundred bits at dusk and called the ridge suitable for touring companies. Gloss Banner and a nephew in a rented helmet asked for the engagement ground and posed beside the pale square. They kept to the dry stones. The sow came at her hour, stood in the ford, ate grain the current had parked from Tanner's frame, and took the game path the map does not draw.
Sergeant Moss Pellam of the Caster watch said a probe was open. The forged slips sit in a drawer two floors above the desk that sent them. "The paper is in a drawer," Pellam said. "The drawer is in our building. That is what I can give you before dark."
The notices were still down when the usable light went. The office sheet stayed on the side board. Two miles of grade remained. The left-hand ford was at the hock and empty. The right-hand one was the water a hurt pony had already paid for.
