As Evelyn hunted for him in the willow thicket, carrying her halter, she recalled the time Bill roped a bull, and Scram, staring down that straight Plymouth cordage rope, slid eighteen feet through shale before the bull tipped over. But he was no pet; to catch him you had to corner him, and, if he got his pivot foot behind you, he’d whirl and be gone. Once that started, it was best to look for another horse.
Scram watched her approach from his hideout in the golden willows. Through agility, guile and murmurings, Evelyn was able to lay a hand on his shoulder; an electric shiver went out from the spot her fingers touched his skin. Then her hand was over his neck to catch the halter from the far side and lift it into place. “So,” she said, “now we make beautiful music together,” then led him through the snow to the saddle shed; treading his hot, nervous feet while she saddled him, he reduced the ground to mud. Evelyn brushed away the little pocket of snow in the groove at his croup, then undid the witches’ knots in his tail while he gazed about in worry. She gave him an old red-and-gray Navajo that was well molded to him, and when she threw the saddle over his withers, he jumped straight up, then froze when the offside billet fell against his side. He was selling this as the worst hour of his life, especially when Evelyn reached way under to catch the cinch and ran several loops of the latigo through the rigging. She tightened him up all round, ignoring his posturing, slapped the ground seat noisily. When she grabbed the horn and pulled the saddle back and forth to check the fit, he humped up so much the front and rear of the saddle were clear of his hide.
“Oh, my,” said Bill to his horse. “The Indian feller got holt of you.”
“Do you believe this?”
“I’m more worried about the weather. Find ’em quick and get back. Six, all black-hided.” When Scram sighed, Bill cheeked him at the bridle and said, “He’s ready.”
Evelyn got on, just boot tips in the stirrups until she felt certain the present good-natured prancing didn’t become more enthusiastic, and the two of them loped off toward what looked like approaching night. Bill watched them go. Evelyn told herself she was heading even farther away from convenience stores and dealerships, fraud protection, exclusive passwords and travel coupons. She felt free.
A thousand feet of sandstone bluffs used up all the prancing, and the river was winding below them like a silver snake. Evelyn never lifted a rein and immediately had the feeling that Scram knew exactly where the cattle were; once they started toward the crest, she could see fine snow streaming off the lip in the north wind. She tied her scarf around her face and urged Scram up the steep hundred yards that remained, a wall of serviceberry brush forcing a tortuous route. At the top, they were met by terrific space, a thousand-mile prospect of three great mountain ranges under speeding clouds, and the spindly trail of a railroad. Good God, thought Evelyn, six heifers? The wind had pressed the trees around them into a crooked wood of stunted trees, now a haunting, boreal chorus.
Like a trail of water most visible to cattle, there was a pattern in the steadily descending side hill of wild cottonwoods, some broken away by a small avalanche. At the base of a low cliff the wind no longer blew, but snow fell heavily on lichenous rock, a trampled salt trough and a patent mineral feeder with a windvane whose axle made the most plaintive noise. Scurf pea tumbled across the flats, scattering its seeds. The heifers had paused here before moving on north, slightly shielded from the weather by the falling away of the country to the east.
It was necessary to turn into the storm along a drift fence as the ground grew more sloped and shaley. After several hundred yards, it was a relief to come upon an old sheepherders’ cairn that she recognized. Only now could she admit that she’d been turned around. If the sky were clear, she’d see the Belts from here, but the storm had confined this place. In the clouds of shifting snow, the breakouts of light and the groans of winter, Evelyn could hear the cattle above her in a stand of sere juniper. So she encouraged Scram to make a climbing curve around the trees to keep from driving the heifers away into even deeper invisibility. She wanted them to flee toward home thinking they’d invented the idea. Scram got right onto the plan, which turned out to be unavailing as the heifers saw them and bolted high-headed into the driving gale. To try to gallop around them when she couldn’t see the ground beneath her required a heart-stopping leap of faith, but Scram knew the heifers were escaping, and he electrified the tentative touch of Evelyn’s spur into violent acceleration that started between her knees and rushed back into Scram’s lowered hindquarters. Ledges of brush — just dark shapes — disappeared behind her, an explosive gait that was not interrupted until Scram had jumped over things he alone could see. She’d forgotten the sting of snow and hard cold wind. Indeed, she had little idea of anything in this moment of absolute stillness atop a stopped, heaving horse, until she gazed around her into the astonished faces of six heifers. Their final bid for escape was answered by quick floating turns as Scram sent them ambling home, Evelyn rocking along to the creak of an old saddle while Scram assumed his businesslike, shuffling walk. As her eyelashes gathered a cloudy fringe of snow, she turned everything over to her horse; he seemed to know there was a trail here somewhere.
Upon reaching the corrals the heifers bucked and cavorted jubilantly. Why had they been sent away? They were so grateful to be home. Bill closed the gate with a nod as Evelyn noted thin pine smoke from the chimney and considered the warmth inside the house. She wrapped Scram’s reins around the pipe rack and unsaddled him quickly; he was still dry under the blanket, and at his paddock, he dropped the bit from his mouth and wheeled to his hay feeder without waiting for a pat.
“Where were they?”
“It’s hard to say. I couldn’t see a thing, but Scram seemed to know where we were.”
“Well, the waterer’s fixed. The float was jammed and cross-pin bent. I had to drive it out and make another one.”
“Those things are nothing but trouble.”
“Beats spuddin’ a hole in the ice every time you need to fill a bucket.”
“Ice,” said Evelyn. “Whose idea was that?”
“Sonja Henie.”
“Do you need any help?”
“Don’t think so.” He couldn’t face her. “I don’t look for nothin’ with the cows. Haven’t had to pull the first calf. I might get the neighbor kid to help at night when the heifers start springin’ regular. No problem walkin’ them heavies in. They been there before.” Bill was a great cattle nurse, one with foresight, sorting tasks ahead of time, feeding, calving, grafting a twin to a cow who’d lost her calf, knowing which neighbor had an orphan to spare, salting in the right places, cleaning corrals, controlling flies, branding and doctoring, breaking, weaning, shipping, culling and picking sound replacements or appropriate bulls, holding birth weights and weaning weights in his head for every cow, avoiding panic, anger at the agricultural economy and, worse, the inexorable feeling that he was going backward and living in a country all too happy to watch him drown in a job that probably didn’t exist anymore.
She wasn’t sure when Bill would finish, so Evelyn went into the house and called Natalie to tell her this would be a good time to drive out for a visit. With that done she set about making dinner, even though she knew it would have to be served to Bill when the cattle had no need of him. She concentrated on his great qualities out of fear that there might be a grievance between him and Natalie and herself.
But for all that, he couldn’t quite look Evelyn in the eye when he came inside and perched on the edge of the couch with an anxious, ingratiating look on his face.