CHAPTER 24
Levi
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The wind is north and gusting forty, and a man who has run horses through a fire-summer once knows the sound of forty knots through lodgepole before he has put his boots to the floor — I have done it once, in Wyoming at twenty-one — and I say it to the dark of the lean-to, low, because when a thing matters I speak low.
"All right. We go up."
The kitchen window is gold already. Christ's teeth, she is up; the lamp has been on since the smoke woke her and not the dawn. I cross the dooryard with the rope on my shoulder and I do not stop at the cabin step. If I stop she will come out and the day will be longer.
She comes out anyway.
She has the gray shawl, the bone pin holding her braid, a wet bandanna over her forearm. She crosses the dust, stops at the pump six paces ahead of me, works the handle two strokes — the pump pulls air, then water thin and tasting of iron in my own teeth — wets the bandanna and holds it out.
"Levi."
"Love," I say.
She does not correct me. I take the bandanna and our fingers do not touch, on purpose, because if our fingers touch this morning I will go off the day, and I cannot.
"Tie it on me, sweetheart."
She steps closer, lifts the wet cloth to my face, ties it over my nose and mouth at the nape under my hair, her thumb-knuckle once against my jaw, the lavender of her trunk-lining and the iron of the pump-water at my mouth through the cloth.
"Go," she says.
"Love."
"Go, Levi Thorn."
I go. I rub the cleft of my sternum through the bandanna where she cannot see, and I cross to the round-pen.
Ardent is at the far rail — he is at the far rail any morning the basin has weather under it.
The white star, the ears forward, the off hind weighted, and he watches me come and does not move.
"Easy, love," I say through the cloth. "We go up. Christ's teeth, mate, you are going to do a thing today you have never been asked, because we are out of a country if you do not. Easy."
He blows once into the bandanna. The exhale is the silver-grass-sweet long willing thing, dust-streaked because the smoke is in his coat, but the smell is the one I know, and I lay my forehead against the white star a half-second.
I saddle him slow. I bridle him; the bit comes against the teeth and he opens for it.
I take the bone-and-rawhide charm out of my coat pocket.
The bone bead is a quarter-inch warm — the cannon-bone of a sorrel mare named Tiller who went through a frozen sluice in a Montana winter when I was eleven.
I have worn it against the cleft of my sternum since 1862.
I have not, in seventeen years of horses, put it on a horse, because to put it on a bridle is to ask a horse to carry a thing I have asked no horse to carry.
"You are not Tiller," I say to him through the bandanna. "You are not the horse my mother went back for. You are not the horse Owen went back for. You are here, love. Easy."
I tie the rawhide loop with a slip-knot at the brow-band on the off side where the buckle cannot foul it. The bone bead lies flat against the cheek-piece, and Ardent shifts the off hind once and stands.
"Walk on, love."
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Six o'clock. The trail is steep above the corral; the smoke is in my throat through the bandanna in a way that is not the basin's smoke — it is the country's smoke, the long smoke from over the divide, sitting on us like a wool blanket I cannot take off.
I am not afraid yet, because Ardent is not afraid.
At the second bend I look back. The dooryard is a gray pip below. Willa is at the iron pump with a bucket. Beck has the freight canvas down off the porch beams; he will soak it the moment Willa is back. Tate is gone — the wagon was off at five-thirty, down-pass with Old Brigham in the crate.
I rub the cleft scar through the bandanna. That is three.
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Seven o'clock — the sun gone behind the smoke, I am reckoning by the muscle of Ardent's shoulder — and the trail comes over the shoulder of the north ridge into the upper pasture.
The seven broke saddle horses are at the snowmelt seeps under Engelmann spruce.
Pie at the front drinking, the two bays at her flank, the off-mare at the rear, the piebald lain down, the two roans at the trough.
The cattle are at the lower edge — Beck has been here at first light, I can see the bootprint at the wire. Twenty-six head, eating brittle grass because they will eat brittle grass before they will run.
I bring Ardent up to Pie, lean off the saddle, clip the lead-line, bring her round. The other six come because Pie is the lead-mare.
"Up, loves. Up where the country cannot reach you."
We go up. Half a mile of switchback through stunted krummholz; above it the saddle, the snowfield at ten thousand and a little feet, bare rock. The wildfire cannot climb because it has no fuel above the krummholz line.
Christ's teeth, the climb is slow. The piebald does not want to leave the brittle grass. Beck's herd-bull is at the top of the cattle-line and the rest follow him.
I do not look back until the lead-mare puts her front feet on bare rock. I look back. The basin is gone — a bowl of gray below me, the smoke at the cabin shake. I cannot see the iron pump. I cannot see Willa. That is four.
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Nine o'clock. I count them at the snowfield. Seven. I count Ardent in. Eight. The eight horses of the Last Claim string are above the line; the cattle are at the saddle's south flank in a windless pocket; the seep is running; the horses can drink for two weeks if the smoke holds.
I put my forehead against Ardent's white star.
"You stay, love. You stay with them. I am coming back at dusk if the wind holds."
He blows once. I turn from him. I do not look back, because if I look back I will not go.
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Eleven o'clock. The descent is worse than the climb because the smoke has thickened and the wind has come round at fifty-knot gusts in the lodgepoles, and the wet bandanna at my mouth is dry already.
I come down off the lower wire into the stand the cattle have grazed flat — the stand the fire took the windward edge of in the night — a long burned-out windrow of half-trunks and crowned-off canopy and ground-fire still going at the duff, the air rippling above it, the smell of pine resin scorched and needle-cast burned, the windrow running across the trail for thirty yards.
There is a horse on the wrong side of it.
She is fifteen hands at the wither, chestnut, a white blaze running the bridge of her face, a yearling, a filly, eight weeks past her first weaning, alone with the windrow at her near side.
She is panicked — off-fore raised half a foot in the freeze of a horse who has worked out, fifteen seconds ago, that the country has stopped being a country.
A fallen pine is between her and the herd's track — a lodgepole the fire took down on its windward edge, thirty inches across at the butt, the lower branches gone, a clean horizontal at the level of her chest — and she is on the burn side and she is going to die if I do not get her up.
I think Christ's teeth and I do not say it.
I walk to her. Slow, the long line coiled at my elbow. I lay my left hand on the bark of the trunk — Christ, the bark is cool; the trunk has been down since the night.
"Hello, love. You are not Tiller. You are a yearling filly with a white blaze, and we are going to walk together to the herd at the seeps."
She does not move.
I undo the spare halter at my shoulder, hold it open in my left hand, and I talk her in.
It takes ten minutes. The words do not matter.
Easy, love, easy, come round — and she comes.
She comes round the off side because the only direction the country allows her is mine.
She comes with her white blaze a hand-span from my left palm and I slide the halter up her nose and over her ears and buckle it at the second hole, and her ear flicks once and she stands.
"That is one, love. The first of three."
I clip the long line. I cannot lead her round the trunk — either side is burning ground. The only way out is back along the trail, and the trail crosses the windrow.
I rub the cleft scar with two fingers. I walk to the windrow's narrow stretch — four steps wide, the trunks crossed at the level of a horse's knee, the duff hot but not open, a black mat of duff-coal hotter than a man wants. A horse can step it.
I whistle for Ardent — the long flat single note he comes for — and he comes, down through the krummholz at a trot, the bridle still on him because he has shaken the loose tie off, the bone-and-rawhide charm at his off cheek-piece, and he stops at four feet.
Christ's teeth, the relief of him at four feet is a thing I have not got the language for. "You followed me. Later. Easy now."
I bring him to the trunk. He stops four feet from the filly. He blows once. She blows once back.
"That is one, love, and the second is a lift."
I loop Ardent's reins at the saddle-horn.
I take the filly's lead-line in my left hand.
I bend at the knees the way I have bent twice before to lift smaller foals onto a saddle for short carries.
There is no rule for a yearling across a burning windrow on a stallion at ten thousand feet, and the rule that applies is the one I am borrowing.
I take her at the brisket — front, low, palms up.
She does not bolt because she has the halter at my left hand and Ardent at her face.
I lift. She is heavier by twenty pounds than the colts I have lifted, the weight at her hindquarters.
I take it in my shoulder and bring her up — slow, the slow of a man finding a strength he does not have a name for — and over the saddle, belly down, the white blaze to the off side.
She breathes into the cantle. She does not move.
"Easy, love. That is two."
I swing up behind the cantle and come down at the rear, my thighs at her four legs, her belly across the saddle in front of me, the bone-and-rawhide charm a hand-span ahead of her white blaze.
Ardent shifts the off hind. Once. He does not move past that.