The breath of three hundred horses makes a curling twisting mist in the cold November air. Their warm bodies were steaming from their exertions. We were obliged to try and keep formation but the ancient redwoods didn’t care about that. They were parting us and cutting us as if they were moving themselves. You could have tethered fifty horses to the girth of some of them. The curious birds of America were calling among the trees and from the far heights dropped the myriad speckles of frost. Now and then something cracked in the forest like musket-fire. There wasn’t any sense the trees needed us
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