| [Jan. 1st, 2011|07:09 pm] |
Ginta studied the grass in the meadow; most of it was close cropped and trampled flat by hundreds of cloven-hoofed feet. Clumps of sheep droppings made it clear this was a spot favored by local herders. There were no signs in the soft soil that wouldn't have been erased weeks ago, but the vegitation was worth studying. What few spring-flowering weeds the sheep had left untouched were almost all still holding their blooms in tight little buds. That meant it had been cold here, until recently.
As he walked, he recovered his breath, body cooling from the run, and temper cooling from the argument. His right leg was shaking with fatigue, aching sharply where the bones had been fractured, and he was almost light-headed from having run so fast, for so long. Kakashi had to be feeling it, too. Had to be as exhausted, if not more so. And terrified for Ryouma.
Ginta was terrified for Ryouma.
It was a thought he kept trying to turn away, but the fear had surged to the fore of his mind again and again on the run here. After three weeks, the chances of finding Ryouma alive...
Were better if Ginta stayed focused and kept looking. What had the other teams missed? The first and third teams had taken the bluffs trail, and the second had followed the Little Falls, and all three teams had concluded that there would have been no reliable path for Ryouma to have taken but those two. Evidently they'd found something they considered definitive that proved Ryouma had been here, but Ginta only had the third team's report, and all it had said on the subject was that they concurred with the prior findings that Tousaki had camped here. It didn't say what those findings were, or why they agreed.
It probably wasn't worth the time to redo that search. Take it at face-value. Ryouma camped here. Okay. And three weeks ago there was a hard enough freeze that no open flowers had survived. Ryouma was a smart ninja, and familiar with this area. As familiar as Ginta. This was Team Badass's old stomping grounds, the path to that lookout post in Snow Country where Ginta had first met Ryouma. Ryouma wouldn't take the Falls trail if it was icy, not in mid-April. Would he?
Ginta took a long, deep drink from his canteen, then pulled out a ration bar and took a sharp bite, chewing the thick, slightly sweet mouthful just enough that he could swallow it and take the next bite.
If there were some kind of proof that Ryouma had taken the lower trail... There. There, broken branches on a small cluster of saplings at the edge of the meadow. An ice storm. A recent ice storm must have broken them, for at the ends of the broken branches dangled a few, barely unfurled baby leaves. Ryouma would never have taken the Falls trail in an ice storm.
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