13. Mandy
Mandy
The trail came out of the bottom timber and the wind hit them broadside.
Junebug put her ears flat against the cold, and Mandy tipped her chin down inside the high collar of Mary Jo’s ex-husband’s old Carhartt.
Thirty yards ahead, the buckskin climbed through the last band of scrub, and Andrew’s brown hat went in and out of the trees.
She had spent the first hour of the ride watching his back and refusing to call it watching.
Last night she had put her hands on that back beneath a white shirt he had ironed for her.
She had felt the muscle move under her palms, heard him laugh when her hip struck the horn, watched his face lose every defense he owned.
Now the same man rode ahead of her as if the truck had carried two strangers home.
She was not ashamed. She had settled that before she took off the green dress.
The lock had turned under her hand because she was angry, not because she regretted anything.
She had stood inside the spare room with her forehead against the door, still warm from him, and listened to the house go quiet.
The pleasure stayed. So did the insult of his deciding, within minutes of touching her, that he might need to save her from what she had chosen.
She slept less than an hour.
At quarter to five, Walt’s voice broke through the kitchen radio while Andrew stood at the counter in yesterday’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled and his town coat still on the back of a chair.
Mandy sat at the table in ranch clothes with two mugs between them.
He had not looked at her since she came in.
Andy, you’ve got cattle up Cathedral and a sky I don’t like.
Andrew set down his coffee. “You up for a long day?”
She looked at the clean side of his face, the gray coming back along his jaw, the mouth she could still feel on her skin.
“Before we go,” she said.
His eyes came to hers.
“You are not going to turn last night into something I did to you.”
The room held still around the radio static.
“I am not,” he said.
“And you are not going to act as if I should be sorry because you are frightened.”
His hand tightened once around the edge of the counter.
“No.”
It was not enough, but Walt came back through the speaker with the count and the weather closing over the upper country, and the morning took the rest of the conversation away from them.
Andrew pushed her mug toward her with one finger. “Drink.”
She drank. He went for his coat.
They saddled in the dark and rode out without touching.
The wind up here did not gust so much as lean.
It came across the scree from the south face of the ridge in long, flat pushes that flattened the wiry grass and ran cold under the collar of the Carhartt.
Her left ear was numb. Her right hand inside Mary Jo’s spare wool glove had gone dull with it.
Her grandmother had once told her that cold always found the part of you dressed for another day.
Mandy had dressed for the kitchen at five.
The trail at noon had other requirements.
The sky over the ridge had gone the white of an old enamel pan. A dark front dragged itself over the back of the south face, closer than it had been an hour ago.
A hundred head had drifted over the saddle into Cathedral Creek during the last forty-eight hours. They had not come back.
The scrub ran out at the top. Junebug stepped onto the open shelf above the timber, and the wind hit them full force. Mandy let the night fall away. Whatever waited between her and Andrew could wait. The cattle could not.
The buckskin was a hundred yards out now, on the rise. Andrew had turned him broadside to the wind to wait for her. He didn’t wave or call. He sat the buckskin and watched her come up.
She drew Junebug alongside him on his lee side and looked down into the Cathedral Creek head, where timber thinned to grass and grass to rock. Far below, black and red cattle bunched against the sheltering trees. A white Hereford face showed here and there. They were not moving.
“How many do you see?” Andrew said. He didn’t turn his head.
She made herself look properly. She’d learned in three weeks of Walt’s quiet teaching that the first number you saw in a herd was the wrong number and the second was usually closer.
“I see,” she said, and counted aloud the bunches she could pick out, “twenty in the near group, thirty maybe under that big spruce, forty under the timber. Ninety. Plus what’s behind the spruce I can’t see. ”
“Ninety-six,” Andrew said. “I make ninety-six, and the four I can’t see are calves at the udders of cows I can. They’re all here.”
“All right.”
“Look up.”
She looked up. The storm had pulled forward off the ridge and hung over the south timber. Snow already fell beneath it on the exposed rock, and the lower edge moved steadily toward them.
She felt her stomach decide something a beat before her head did.
“We’re not getting them home,” she said.
“No.”
“Elk Park.”
“Elk Park,” he said.
He turned the buckskin and looked at her. Whatever he had locked away in the kitchen was not absent from his face now. She saw concern, trust, and the memory of the dark truck between them. He let her see all three for one breath.
“Mandy,” he said.
“Yes?”
“You take the lower side. Push them up the draw at the spring. Don’t let them break for the timber on the east. I’ll come around above and drop in behind. We move them slow. Slow gets them there. Fast gets them scattered and gets you hurt.”
“Okay.”
“Stay where I can see you. If you go down a draw and I can’t see you, I want a whistle every count of fifty.”
“Yes.”
“I know you haven’t done this in a storm.”
“No.”
“You can do it.”
She looked at him. Desire had not made him careless with her. Fear had not made him doubt her. When he said she could do it, he meant the work, and the certainty settled something in her that the long night had not.
“All right,” she said.
He nudged the buckskin and went left around the rim. She nudged Junebug and went right.
The bowl had its own weather. The broadside wind narrowed as soon as she rode below the rim and tried to lift her hat. She let Junebug choose the line. The mare knew the ground, and Walt had taught her that a horse who knew the country was worth two riders who did not.
She came around the lower lip of the bowl wide of the cattle on purpose.
She kept Junebug at a walk. A walk was a hard ask of a horse who’d smelled the storm and wanted to be over with this, but Junebug was twelve years old and steady and let Mandy hold her at it.
The cattle saw her at three hundred yards.
The lead cow lifted her head and looked at her and went back to standing where she was standing.
Mandy didn’t pick up her pace. She came at them angled, a long curve, and as she rode she made herself small in the saddle and easy on the rein and reminded herself of every piece of cow sense Walt had given her.
Look like part of the country. Don’t look like a thing trying to do something to them.
Let them decide to move because they have decided you’re going to be where they are if they don’t, and not because they’re afraid of you.
Fear scatters. Pressure moves. She put pressure on them.
She rode the lower side of their bunch in a slow arc that closed by a foot every step Junebug took.
At sixty yards, the lead cow turned her head toward the spring draw without lifting it, and at forty the second cow followed the first, and at thirty the whole near group of twenty was walking into the throat of the draw.
The cows under the spruce came off at their own pace and joined the back of it, and the cattle in the timber came out of the timber and joined behind those.
Mandy was riding a slow rolling wedge that was lifting a hundred head of cattle up a draw into the wind, and out beyond the upper rim Andrew was riding the other arm of it.
She didn’t have to look to know he was there because she could feel the herd holding its line where his side of it should have been falling open.
The snow came in over the rim then.
It came not in flakes but in a flat sideways push of small wet pieces driven by the column wind, and inside thirty seconds it was on the brim of her hat and on Junebug’s mane, and the visibility went from a quarter mile to two hundred yards to one hundred.
The lead cow faltered. Mandy felt the whole herd hesitate behind the lead cow.
She pressed Junebug forward without rushing, came up the lee side of the bunch, found the lead cow’s eye through the snow and held it, and pushed past her on the inside, and the lead cow took the next step she didn’t want to take, and the herd took the step behind her.
A whistle came down the wind from the upper side, two short notes.
Mandy whistled back, two short notes, didn’t look up.
The draw started to climb out of the bowl.
Junebug leaned into it. The cattle started to climb.
The snow got worse. Mandy lost feeling in her face from the cheekbones down and stopped noticing she’d lost it.
She had a job. The job was a hundred head and a draw and the cabin at the top of the draw a mile and three quarters away on the ridge that she couldn’t see anymore, and Junebug under her and Andrew somewhere on the upper side and a lead cow with a Hereford face turning white with snow walking three steps in front of her into the wind.
She lost track of time. Once, she wondered whether the roads below were going white and whether the men at the Antler would drive in it. Then the lead cow shifted and took her attention.