13. Mandy #2
Twice in the next hour the bunch tried to break.
The first time was a yearling bull, second from the back, who turned suddenly down-draw and tried to go past her on the right, and Mandy turned Junebug on her hindquarters without thinking and was in front of the bull before he understood what had happened.
He stopped, looked at her, snorted once, and rejoined the line.
The second time was a cow with a calf at her side who couldn’t keep up.
The cow had stopped in the snow and was bawling for the calf, who was twenty yards back trying to find his feet in the drifted edge of the draw.
Mandy held the herd against the cow and went back for the calf herself.
She got down off Junebug for the only time on the ride and bent to the calf and got a hand under each of his shoulders and lifted.
The calf weighed a hundred and ten pounds and her arms shook.
She got him out of the drift and up onto the broken ground of the draw and set him next to his mother, and the cow nudged him and started walking and the calf walked.
Mandy got back on Junebug and they moved.
Her hands no longer looked like the hands of a woman who’d been engaged to Preston Whitfield.
Back then, her right thumb was in the care of a manicurist named Linh who charged ninety dollars and asked after her father by name.
Now it had a split down the meat of it she’d earned on a stall door and hadn’t bothered to bandage because there hadn’t been time.
They were red and chapped, and inside the gloves they were the color of cold meat, and they did the work and didn’t shake while they did it.
They held the rein. They’d become a thing that did what she told them.
Andrew came down the line once. Out of nowhere through the snow.
The buckskin appeared at her shoulder, and Andrew leaned over and put one gloved hand on her thigh through the Carhartt for two counts, hard, and was gone again up the line.
She didn’t look up. She hadn’t asked for it.
He’d given it anyway, and she didn’t need to look up to know it.
The draw narrowed. The wind narrowed with it.
The snow became less of a sideways shove and more of a falling thing, which was somehow worse, because falling snow didn’t let a person guess where it was coming from.
The herd climbed. Junebug followed without being asked.
Mandy held the line at the back and at the side at the same time, riding hard short arcs back and forth, and a cow lowed, and the answer came back from a cow further up, and the herd held.
The upper end of the draw came up over a small rise and let out onto the bench that was Elk Park.
Mandy felt the country open under her before she could see it through the snow.
She felt Junebug pick her head up, recognize the place, want to keep walking.
She heard the wood pole gate of the holding pasture creak up ahead through the storm.
Andrew had ridden up and opened it. She heard the lead cow’s hooves change sound as the lead cow stepped onto the trampled ground of the holding, and then there was a long shuffling press of cattle going through wood and the herd was inside.
She rode the back end of them through the gate and across the pasture toward what she could only just see was the rough shape of a corral and a cabin and a low shed behind a windbreak of stunted firs. She heard the gate close behind her.
She had not seen Elk Park in daylight, and tonight would not change that.
The cabin was a single low shape in the snow with a stove pipe out the back and a window on the south wall and a single step up to a plank door that had no porch.
The shed beside it was three sided and open to the lee.
The corral was small, a holding for the saddle horses, with a hitching rail across one side that someone had put up forty years ago and someone else had kept up since.
She rode Junebug into the shed beside the buckskin. She got down. Her legs didn’t work for the first count. She put a hand on the saddle and waited. They came back.
Andrew was at the buckskin’s head working the cinch.
“The cattle are good,” he said. “There’s water in the spring out the back of the holding. Cold but it runs. They’ll paw the snow down to the grass under the lee timber and they’ll be all right till morning. The wind comes off them in here. I had Walt run six bales up Tuesday.”
“For when.”
He didn’t turn his head. “For if.”
She got her gloves off and went to her own cinch.
Her fingers had to be told what they’d been doing for an hour.
She got the saddle off, got Junebug’s bridle off and the halter on and tied her to the rail next to the buckskin, pulled the blanket off, and rubbed Junebug down with a feed sack she found on a nail.
Andrew did the same for the buckskin without looking at her or saying anything.
When the horses were rubbed and watered from the bucket that had ice on it and were given the small ration of grain Andrew had brought up on the back of the buckskin in a sack, he put his hand on the bucket and looked at her over the buckskin’s withers, and Mandy looked back at him.
“Cabin,” he said.
“Yes.”
She pulled her gloves back on. They crossed ten yards of open snow to the cabin. Andrew pushed the latch and put his shoulder against the swollen door. It stuck once, then gave with a dry pop. Cold air spilled from the unheated room. He stepped inside and held the door for her.
She came in.