Over to one side of the ranch house, past its green watered lawn, there was a smallish sturdily railed paddock of not more than an acre. I’d spent all breakfast looking out of the window at the seven horses in it. Three mares, two small foals, two stallions. Both the stallions were bays, but one had a white blaze and was no thoroughbred.
‘What are those horses over there?’ I asked the wrangler, pointing.
He paused a second while he worked out how to put it delicately to an ignorant dude, and foreigner into the bargain, and then said, ‘We breed most of the horses, on this ranch.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘Do you have many stallions?’
‘Three or four. Most of these’, he glanced round the patiently waiting mounts, ‘are geldings.’
‘That’s a nice looking bay,’ I commented.
He followed my eyes over to the small paddock again. ‘He’s new,’ he said. ‘A half-bred Matt bought in Laramie two or three weeks back.’ There was disapproval in his tone.
‘You don’t like him?’ I said.
‘Not enough bone for these hills,’ he said briefly, finishing the second stirrup. ‘Now, is that comfortable?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
He nodded with casual friendliness and went to see to someone else. The wranglers differed from the dudes only in the matters of age and dress. They were all boys or young men between eighteen and thirty, several of them college boys working their vacation. The dudes were either parents or children; scarcely one in the twenties. No one, Betty-Ann Wilkerson told me knowledgeably, called cowboys cowboys anywhere except in films. Cowhand was possible, but the right word was wrangler. There were no cattle on the High Zee. The wranglers herded the horses, and the horses were there for the dudes to ride.
In the matter of clothes the wranglers were less flamboyant, less well pressed, altogether dustier. They had been up since five-thirty and other people’s holidays were their hard work.
‘They turn the horses out on the hills every night,’ Wilkie explained, ‘and go up and herd them down in the morning.’
We set off from the ranch in two parties, about twelve guests and two wranglers in each. Down over a flat wooden bridge across the narrow river, and up into the main Teton range opposite. Wilkie rode in front of me and Betty-Ann behind as we wound upwards through the woods in single file; and neither of them tired of talking.
‘They turn the horses out on the hills over here because there isn’t enough pasture in the valley to feed them.’ Wilkie turned half round in his saddle to make sure I could hear. ‘They go miles away, most nights. The wranglers fix a bell on to some of them, like cowbells in Switzerland, so that they can find them in the morning. The ones they put bells on are the sort of natural leaders, the horses other horses like to be with.’ He smiled heartily. ‘It’s sure difficult to see them sometimes, with the sun shining through the trees and making shadows.’
What he said was true because we passed a group of three in a hollow later on, and I didn’t see them until one moved his head and clinked his bell.
‘They only bring in the number they need,’ Betty-Ann filled in. ‘They just leave the rest out, and maybe bring some of them in tomorrow, if they come across them first.’
‘So sometimes a horse could be out for a week at a time?’ I suggested.
‘I guess so,’ Wilkie said vaguely. He didn’t really know. ‘Of course, if they want one particular horse, the wranglers will go right up the mountain to find him, I do know that.’
‘Anyone who can ride well enough can go up with the wranglers in the morning,’ Betty-Ann said. ‘But they canter up and down here instead of walk.’
The path was steep and also rocky.
‘These horses are born to it, honey,’ said Wilkie kindly. ‘Not like the riding school horses back home.’
At eleven thousand feet the path levelled out on to a small tree-shaded plateau overlooking a breathtaking pine-wooded valley with a brilliant blue lake in its depths. The cameras came out and clicked excitedly. The chattering voices exclaimed over an order of beauty that demanded silence. And eventually we rode down again.
Yola asked me at lunch if I had enjoyed my morning, and I said without difficulty that I had. The Wilkerson children were calling me Hans and asked me to swim in the stream with them in the afternoon. Wilkie clapped me heartily on the shoulder and told me I was a good guy, and Betty-Ann had irritatingly begun looking at me in a way which would change her husband’s mind about that instantly, if he noticed.
I left the lunch table last and whisked away a large slice of bread in a paper napkin. Alone in my cabin I unpacked some specially acquired groceries, filled one pocket with sugar cubes, and on the bread scooped out a whole tin of sardines. With the bread still held in the napkin I walked down through the sage brush and along to the mares’ and foals’ paddock, reaching it on the far side from the ranch house.
There I offered sugar in one hand and sardines in the other. The mares came and sniffed, and all chose sugar. The foals chose sugar. The bay with the white blaze chose sugar. The dusty half-bred that Matt bought two or three weeks ago in Laramie came last, less curious than the rest.
He sniffed at the sardines and raised his head with his ears pricked, staring across at the high Tetons as if hearing some far off sound, smelling some distant scent. His nostrils quivered gently. I looked at the splendid lines of bone in the skull, the gracefully slanted eye, the perfect angle of head on neck. He had the crest of a thoroughbred stallion, and the hocks of a racehorse.
He bent his head down to the sardines and ate the lot.
Yola and Matt Clive lived in a cabin of their own, separate from the main ranch house, which contained only the dining room, kitchens, sitting room, and wet day games room for the guests.
Yola backed an olive-drab pick-up with small white lettering on its doors out of a shady carport beside her cabin, and drove away down the dusty road. I stared after her, half amazed, half smiling. Full marks to the horse van drivers, I thought. They’d seen both the Snail Express van and the pick-up. They must have seen them both several times, but even so, they’d remembered.
Guests were allowed to use the telephone, which was located in the Clives’ cabin. I strolled over there, knocked on the door, and found the place empty. Not locked, though in this case there was a key. There were no locks on any of the guest cabin doors: one could only bolt them on the inside, with a simple wooden wedge slotted into the latch.
A quick tour of the Clives’ cabin revealed two separate single bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and office. I planted three hypersensitive listening devices as invisibly as possible, and unhurriedly left.
After that I climbed into the Chevrolet and drove myself back to Jackson, where the telephone was more private. My call to Buttress Life lasted a long time, and Walt’s contribution to the second part of the conversation consisted of gasps and protests of ‘You can’t.’
‘Listen, Walt,’ I said in the end. ‘We’re not policemen. I imagine your company would settle for the property back and no questions asked? And my brief is to restore Chrysalis to Dave Teller. Just that. Nothing more. If we start things the way you want, we’ll end up with a lot of smart lawyers and most probably a dead horse.’
There was a long pause. ‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘OK. You win.’
He wrote down a long list of instructions. ‘This is Wednesday,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘Sunday morning. That gives you three clear days. Should be enough.’
‘Only just.’