CHAPTER 13
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Judy stood in the near stall with her ears sideways and one back foot cocked, an eye on me the way a fourteen-year-old bay mare looks at a new rider who has finally shown up on time. I checked the girth. Then I checked it again.
“He said to check it twice,” I said to Judy, who did not appear to have an opinion.
In the far stall Luke had Copper's off-side wool blanket already onto the peg and the saddle a foot above the horse's back, coming down the way Luke's saddles came down: no sound.
His tack went in an order I had begun, three mornings ago, to be able to predict.
Blanket. Pad. Saddle set. Girth walked around and drawn just so, one hole tighter than a barn hand would have set it.
Nothing wasted. His hands were fast when no one was watching them. I had noticed. I had not said.
The east door was open. Eight-thirty light came in like a bar of clean water, and the barn was still a good eight degrees cooler than the porch. The signet ring on his left pinky caught the light as he moved. L. C. W. Faint. Worn thin along the underside from the pinky-turn he did without thinking.
My grandfather's initials had been three letters too. Not those three.
I turned back to Judy and thought, without warning, the barn is 340 feet off the main house. Nonconforming under any modern setback code. I love how it looks anyway.
My lips moved on the last word.
“That so.”
He was still not looking at me. He was looking at Copper's near hoof.
Heat came up my neck the way it did when he clocked me and I hadn't caught him watching.
“I was thinking about the setback code.”
“I know you were.”
Neither of us laughed. I did not turn my head to check whether the corner of his mouth had done the corner-thing.
Some knowing is quieter when you don't confirm it out loud.
We rode out at nine fifteen. The sun was already hard over the eastern ridge and had the pre-Extreme quality a Bitterroot day gets before the fire-ban calendar goes red by lunch.
Luke rode one length ahead of me, then one length behind, then one length ahead again.
He did not announce the change. He was reading sight-lines for me the way a man reads sight-lines for cattle: quiet, professional, unignored.
Judy's hooves found the switchback where the switchback began.
Gravel first. A ten-yard stretch of gravel that crunched under her weight like the parking lot behind my Denver firm at six a.m. when I used to be the first one in.
Then packed clay for a short strip where a spring had once run. Then gravel again.
My palms sat on the reins the way he had shown me — thumb and forefinger, no fist — and by the third repeat of gravel-and-clay-and-gravel I could feel it in my sternum before I heard it in my ear. A rhythm. A road my hands were being told about.
I had never sat on top of a moving animal for this long. The mare's warm bulk under my thighs was a language I had been learning in the barn. I was starting to speak it now on the trail. Slow verbs.
Luke did not talk on the climb. Somewhere in the far pines a jay hollered once. Under my thighs Judy stepped up and up and up, and each time the gravel gave over to clay my sternum caught the switch a beat before my ear did.
I loved it.
That is what I would have written in the memo. I loved it, and I did not know how to file that under any known line item.
At ten-thirty we hit the west fence corner.
Luke dismounted first and came to Judy's near shoulder and did not offer his hand — he watched me come down the way he wanted me to, weight on the far stirrup, right leg swung clear, then the drop.
My boots hit the dust. Judy blew out through her nose in a way I had come to hear as approval.
“Come see,” he said.
He walked me to the corner post. Three-strand barbed wire: top strand tight and old, middle strand tight and new, bottom strand slack the way an old man is slack — held together by memory.
“I ran the middle in April.” He put a finger under the middle strand. “Ten new staples. Top holds. Bottom holds if you don't lean on it.”
I ran my hand along the middle wire. Warm. The barb points were forge-sharp the way new barbs are, and the sun was on the back of my knuckles, and before I could shut it down —
“You could file a boundary adjustment on this corner.”
“That so.”
“Move the fence to the true survey line. It's off by four feet north.”
He watched me. The corner of his mouth did the corner-thing.
“It's zoned pastoral,” I said. “There isn't a setback code. I know this. I am nervous.”
He gave me his canteen. He did not tease me past that.
I drank. The water was warm and metallic and I would have paid for it in a Denver restaurant on a first date and been told I had chosen well.
We climbed higher after the fence. The trail bent. Judy leaned into the incline. My thighs began to have an opinion I did not offer, and I did not offer it, and it kept the opinion to itself.
Then the trees changed. Ponderosa gave over to a corridor of white trunks. Papery. The leaves were small and round and set on their stems like coins on edge, so that when the wind came through the whole stand went silver at once.
I stopped Judy.
I had not known a slope could do that.
I had grown up in Denver. I had been to the mountains. I had seen aspens as a still object at a pullout, from a Subaru window. I had never seen a whole slope of them flip in the wind while I sat on top of an animal on a trail through them.
Luke stopped Copper a length behind me.
He did not say a thing.
The leaves turned once, then twice, then again. Silver. A green flash. Silver. It looked like the slope was breathing at me.
This is what my grandfather had, I thought (I was arguing with my own memo, and the memo was losing), and did not sell. And I own this. And it does not fit in an envelope.
Judy shifted her weight under me and waited.
I do not know how long I sat there.
“Ready?”
His voice, from a length back, quiet.
“Yes.”
I moved Judy forward. Behind me the aspens went silver again on my back.
The highest overlook was above the wildflower meadow, and by one-thirty the whole valley below was in the sun of a day that would top ninety-seven.
Extreme. The fence line at the bottom rippled in the way heat can make a straight line remember it is only a line.
Judy blew. Copper dipped his head to a patch of yellow bunch grass and Luke let him.
Luke dropped his reins on Copper's neck.
He took a small pair of binoculars out of the inside pocket of his jacket. Compact. Rubberized. I had not seen him carry them before, which meant they had been in that pocket every day and I had missed it.
He put them to his eyes. Focused. One beat. Two.
He held them out to me without a word.
I took them. My hand shook a small tremor from the ride and the sun and something else I did not name. I raised the glasses and worked the wheel.
A truck at the ranch gate below. Silver-white. Heat mirage rippling around it in a way the eye did not want to trust. Nose pointed at the cattle guard. Nobody I could see in the cab. Nobody I could see outside it.
“That's a rental,” Luke said, behind me.
“How do you know.”
“Front-plate mount is a stick-on. Real ranch trucks don't have that.”
I tightened the wheel. The truck did not get any less silver.
“Nevada plates,” he said.
I lowered the glasses. Looked at him.
“You can see the plates.”
“No.”
He took the binoculars back. Slid them into the jacket.
“But I would bet the ranch.”
The wind came up the meadow and lifted the small hairs at the back of my neck, and somewhere below us the aspens moved again on a breeze that had not reached me yet.
Neither of us said the next thing.
Judy blew again — a longer note, uncertain — and Luke turned Copper for the descent.
The descent took us back through the aspen corridor.
Judy walked without needing my hands. My hands went to the reins anyway because I was trying not to think about the truck.
The switchbacks dropped us fast. Gravel-clay-gravel again in reverse.
My sternum had learned the rhythm and did not need to be told.
Third switchback from the bottom, Judy sidestepped a loose scree of shale.
I did not fall so much as I got dumped.
The saddle did not throw me. Judy did not spook.
The world did not tilt. My weight simply shifted a half-second late and the near stirrup was empty and I came off the near side and landed on my right knee in the gravel and skidded six inches and the denim tore across the front of the knee.
The skin did not tear. My palms braced. Judy planted her front feet and did not move.
Luke was off Copper and beside me in less than four seconds.
His hand went under my elbow. His other hand at the small of my back. He did not pick me up; he held me at the angle at which I had chosen to be angled.
“Bruised,” I said. My voice came out level. That was interesting. “Not cut. Get me back up before I decide walking is smarter.”
He held one beat.
His thumb settled at the pulse point on the inside of my arm.
He stayed there one beat longer than reflex would have required.
I caught the extra beat. He caught me catching it. Neither of us said a thing.
Then his other hand came under my other elbow and he lifted me — no strain in his shoulders, no sound out of his mouth — and set me on my feet.
“Weight?”
I put weight on the right leg. The knee protested. Held.
“Fine.”
“Sit a minute.”
He steered me by the elbow to a flat granite ledge one long step off the trail. Judy stood. Copper stood. Luke crouched in front of me. Not too close. Watching my hands.
I watched my hands watching me. The tremor eased. My thumb tapped once against my palm. Then still.
“Now?”
“Now.”
He got me back into the saddle from the near side and did not touch my leg. Did not brush it. He mounted Copper. We went down.
Judy walked more slowly. She was reading me, I decided — and it was a decision I would not have been able to make three weeks ago.