The Horse Whisperer

'You okay there ma'am?'

Annie wiped her face and swallowed.

'Yes. Thank you,' she said. 'I'm fine.' She got up.

'Your daughter was getting kind of worried down there.'

'Yes, I'm sorry. I'm going now.'

He tipped his hat as she went. 'Night ma'am. You go safely now.'

She walked back down to the car, aware he was watching. Grace was asleep, or perhaps she was only pretending to be. Annie started the engine, switched on the lights and made a turn at the top of the road. She looped back onto the interstate and drove through the night, all the way to Choteau.

Part Three

Chapter Fourteen

Two creeks ran through the Booker brothers' land and they gave the ranch its name, the Double Divide. They flowed from adjacent folds of the mountain front and in their first half mile they looked like twins. The ridge that ran between them here was low, at one point almost low enough for them to meet, but then it rose sharply in a rugged chain of interlocking bluffs, shouldering the creeks apart. Forced thus to seek their separate ways, they now became quite different.

The northern one ran, swift and shallow, down a wide, uncluttered valley. Its banks, though sometimes steep, gave easy access to the cattle. Brook trout hung with their heads upstream in its breaks and eddies, while herons stalked its shingled beaches. The route the southern creek was forced to take was lusher, full of obstacles and trees. It wove through tangled thickets of Bebbs willow and red-stem dogwood, then disappeared awhile in marsh. Lower down, meandering a meadow so flat that its loops linked back upon themselves, it formed a maze of still, dark pools and grassy islands whose geography was constantly arranged and rearranged by beavers.

Ellen Booker used to say the creeks were like her two boys, Frank the north and Tom the south. That was until Frank, who was seventeen at the time, remarked over supper one night that it wasn't fair because he liked beaver too. His father told him to go wash his mouth out and sent him to bed. Tom wasn't so sure his mother got the joke, but she must have because she never said it again.

The house they called the creek house, where first Tom and Rachel, then later Frank and Diane had lived and which now was empty, stood on a bluff above a bend in the northern creek. From it you could look down the valley, across the tops of cottonwood trees, to the ranch house half a mile away, surrounded by whitewashed barns, stables and corrals. The houses were linked by a dirt road that wound on up to the lower meadows where the cattle spent the winter. Now, in early April, most of the snow had gone from this lower part of the ranch. It lay only in shaded, rockstrewn gullies and among the pine and fir trees that dotted the north side of the ridge.

Tom looked up at the creek house from the passenger seat of the old Chevy and wondered, as he often did, about moving in. He and Joe were on their way back from feeding the cattle, the boy expertly negotiating the potholes. Joe was small for his age and had to sit like a ramrod to see over the front. During the week Frank did the feeding, but at weekends Joe liked to do it and Tom liked to help him. They'd unloaded the slabs of alfalfa and together enjoyed the sight and sound of the cows surging in with their calves to get it.

'Can we go see Bronty's foal?' Joe asked.

'Sure we can.'

'There's a kid at school says we should've imprint-trained him.'

'Uh-huh.'

'He says if you do it soon as they're born, it makes them real easy to handle later on.'

'Yep. That's what some folk say.'

'There was this thing on the TV about a guy who does it with geese too. He has this airplane and the baby geese all grow up thinking its their mom. He flies it and they just follow.'

'Yeah, I heard about that.'

'What do you think about all that stuff?'

'Well Joe, I don't know a whole lot about geese. Maybe it's okay for them to grow up thinking they're airplanes.' Joe laughed. 'But with a horse, I reckon first you have to let him learn to be a horse.'

They drove back down to the ranch and parked outside the long barn where Tom kept some of his horses. Joe's twin brothers, Scott and Craig, came running out of the house to meet them. Tom saw Joe's face fall. The twins were nine years old and because of their blond goodlooks and the fact that they did everything in a noisy unison, they always got more attention than their brother.

'You going to see the foal?' they yelled. 'Can we come?' Tom put a big hand like a crane-grab on each of their heads.

'So long as you keep quiet you can,' he said.

He led them into the barn and stood with the twins outside Bronty's stall while Joe went in. Bronty was a big ten-year-old quarter horse, a reddish bay. She pushed her muzzle toward Joe who put a hand on it while he gently rubbed her neck. Tom liked to watch the boy around horses, he had an easy, confident way with them. The foal, a little darker than his mother, had been lying in the corner and was now struggling to his feet. He tottered on comical, stilted legs to the sheltering side of the mare, peeping around her rear end at Joe. The twins laughed.

'He looks so funny,' Scott said.

'I've got a picture of you two at that age,' said Tom. 'And you know what?'

'They looked like bullfrogs,' Joe said.

The twins soon got bored and left. Tom and Joe turned the other horses out into the paddock behind the barn. After breakfast they were going to start working with some of the yearlings. As they walked back to the house, the dogs started barking and ran out past them. Tom turned and saw a silver Ford Lariat coming over the end of the ridge and heading down the driveway toward them. There was just the driver in it and as it got nearer he could see it was a woman.

'Your mom expecting company?' Tom asked. Joe shrugged. It wasn't until the car pulled up, with the dogs running around it still barking, that Tom recognized who it was. It was hard to believe. Joe saw his look.

'You know her?'

'I believe I do. But not what she's doing here.'

He told the dogs to hush and walked over. Annie got out of the car and came nervously toward him. She was wearing jeans and hiking boots and a huge, cream-colored sweater that came halfway down her thighs. The sun behind made her hair flare red and Tom realized how clearly he remembered those green eyes from the day at the stables. She nodded at him without quite smiling, a little sheepish.

'Mr Booker. Good morning.'

'Well, good morning.' They stood there for a moment. 'Joe, this is Mrs Graves. Joe here is my nephew.' Annie offered the boy her hand.

'Hello, Joe. How are you?'

'Good.'

She looked up the valley, toward the mountains, then looked back at Tom.

'What a beautiful place.'

'It is.'

He was wondering when she was going to get around to saying what on earth she was doing here, though he already had an idea. She took a deep breath.

'Mr Booker, you're going to think this is insane, but you can probably guess why I've come here.'

'Well. I kind of reckoned you didn't just happen to be passing through.' She almost smiled.

'I'm sorry just turning up like this, but I knew what you'd say if I phoned. It's about my daughter's horse.'

'Pilgrim.'

'Yes. I know you can help him and I came here to ask you, to beg you, to have another look at him.'

'Mrs Graves…'

'Please. Just a look. It wouldn't take long.'

Tom laughed. 'What, to fly to New York?' He nodded at the Lariat. 'Or were you counting on driving me there?'

'He's here. In Choteau.'

Tom stared at her for a moment in disbelief.

'You've hauled him all the way out here?' She nodded. Joe was looking from one of them to the other, trying to get the picture. Diane had stepped out onto the porch and stood there holding open the screen door, watching.