'You hear about that woman killed by a mountain lion out jogging?' said Smoky.
'The lion was jogging too?' Tom asked, all big blue-eyed innocence. Everyone laughed.
'Why not?' said Rona. 'Hey fellas, it's California.'
'That's right,' said T.J. 'They say he was all in Lycra and wearing these little earphones.'
'You mean one of them Sony Prowlmen?' said Tom. Smoky waited for them to finish, taking it well. Teasing him had become the morning game. Tom was fond of him. He wasn't a Nobel prizewinner, but when it came to horses he had something going for him. One day, if he worked at it, he'd be good. Tom reached out and ruffled his hair.
'You're okay Smoke,' he said.
A pair of buzzards circled lazily against the liquid blue of the afternoon sky. They floated ever upward on the thermals that rose from the valley, filling that middle space between tree and hilltop with an eerie, intermittent mewing. Five hundred feet below, in a cloud of dust, the latest of the day's twenty dramas was unfolding. The sun and maybe the signs along the road had lured as big a crowd as Tom had ever seen here. The bleachers were packed and people were still coming in, paying their ten bucks a head to one of Rona's helpers at the gate. The women running the refreshment stall were doing brisk business and the air was laced with the smell of barbecue.
In the middle of the arena stood a small corral some thirty feet across and it was here that Tom and Rimrock were working. The sweat was starting to streak the dust on Tom's face and he wiped it on the sleeve of his faded blue snap-button shirt. His legs felt hot under the old leather chaps he wore over his jeans. He'd done eleven colts already and this now was the twelfth, a beautiful black thoroughbred.
Tom always started by having a word with the owner to find out the horse's 'history', as he liked to call it. Had he been ridden yet? Were there any special problems? There always were, but more often than not it was the horse who told you what they were, not the owner.
This little thoroughbred was a case in point. The woman who owned him said he had a tendency to buck and was reluctant to move out. He was lazy, cranky even, she said. But now that Tom and Rimrock had him circling around them in the corral, the horse was saying something different. Tom always gave a running commentary into the radio mike so the crowd could follow what he was doing. He tried not to make the owner sound foolish. Too foolish anyway.
'There's another story coming through here,' he said. 'It's always kind of interesting to hear the horse's side of the story. Now if he was cranky or lazy, like you say, we'd be seeing the tail twitching there and his ears back maybe. But this isn't a cranky horse, it's a scared horse. You see how braced he is there?'
The woman was watching from outside the corral, leaning on the rail. She nodded. Tom had Rimrock turning on a dime, in deft little white-socked steps, so he was always facing the circling thoroughbred.
'And how he keeps pointing his hindquarters in at me? Well, I'd guess the reason he seems reluctant to move out is because when he does he gets into trouble for it.'
'He's not good at transitions,' the woman said. 'You know? When I want him to move from a trot to a lope, say?'
Tom had to bite his tongue when he heard this kind of talk.
'Uh-huh,' he said. 'That's not what I'm seeing. You may think you're asking for a lope but your body's saying something else. You're putting too many conditions on it. You're saying "Go, but hey, don't go!" Or maybe "Go, but not too fast!" He knows this from the way you feel. Your body can't lie. You ever give him a kick to make him move out?'
'He won't go unless I do.'
'And then he goes and you feel he's going too fast, so you yank him back?'
'Well, yes. Sometimes.'
'Sometimes. Uh-huh. And then he bucks.' She nodded.
He said nothing for a while. The woman had got the message and was starting to look defensive. She was clearly big on image, made up like Barbara Stanwyck, with all the right gear. The hat alone must have set her back three hundred bucks. God knows what the horse cost. Tom worked on getting the thoroughbred focused on him. He had sixty foot of coiled rope and he threw it so the coils slapped against the horse's flank, making it burst into a lope. He coiled the rope back in then did it again. Then again and again, making the animal go from a trot to a lope, letting it slow, then up to a lope again.
'I want him to get so as he can leave real soft,' he said. 'He's getting the idea now. He's not all braced up and tense like he was at the start. See the way his hindquarters are straightening out? And how his tail's not clamped in all tight like it was? He's finding out it's okay to go.' He threw the rope again and this time the transition to the lope was smooth.
'You see that? That's a change. He's getting better already. Pretty soon, if you work at it, you'll be able to make all these transitions easy on a loose rein.'
And pigs will fly, he thought. She'll take the poor animal home, ride him just as she always did and all this work will have been for nothing. The thought, as always, moved him up a gear. If he fixed the horse real good, maybe he could immunize the poor thing against her stupidity and fear. The thoroughbred was moving out nicely now but Tom had only worked on one side, so he turned him around to make him run the other way and did the whole thing over again.
It took almost an hour. By the time he finished, the thoroughbred was sweating hard. But when Tom let him ease up and come to a standstill, the horse looked kind of disappointed.
'He could go on playing all day,' said Tom. 'Hey mister, can I have my ball back?' The crowd laughed. 'He's going to be okay - so long as you don't go yanking on him.' He looked at the woman. She nodded and tried to smile but Tom could see she was crestfallen and he suddenly felt sorry for her. He walked Rimrock over to where she stood and switched off the radio mike so only she could hear when he spoke.
'It's all about self-preservation,' he said gently. 'You see, these animals have got such big hearts; there's nothing they want more than to do what you want them to. But when the messages get confused, all they can do is try and save themselves.'
He smiled down at her for a moment, then said: 'Now why don't you go saddle him up and see?'
The woman was close to tears. She climbed over the rail and walked over to her horse. The little thoroughbred watched her all the way. He let her come right up and stroke his neck. Tom watched.
'He's not going to look back if you don't,' he said. 'They're the most forgiving creatures God ever made.'
She led the horse out and Tom brought Rimrock slowly back to the middle of the corral, letting the silence hold for a while. He took off his hat, squinting at the sky as he wiped the sweat from his brow. The two buzzards were still hanging there. Tom thought how mournful their mewing sounded. He put his hat back on and flicked the switch of the radio mike.
'Okay folks. Who's next?'
It was the guy with the donkey.
Chapter Eight
It was more than a hundred years since Joseph and Alice Booker, Tom's great-grandparents, made their long journey west to Montana, lured like thousands of others by the promise of land. The passage cost them the lives of two children, one from scarlet fever and the other drowned, but they made it as far as the Clark's Fork River and there staked a claim to a hundred and sixty fertile acres.
By the time Tom was born, the ranch they started had grown to twenty thousand acres. That it had so prospered, let alone endured the ruthless round of drought, flood and felony, was mainly due to Tom's grandfather John. It was at least logical therefore that it should be he who destroyed it.
John Booker, a man of great physical strength and even greater gentleness, had two sons. Above the ranch house that had long since replaced the tarred homesteaders' shack, stood a rocky bluff where the boys played hiding games and looked for arrowheads. From its crest you could see the river curving around like a castle moat and in the distance the snowy peaks of the Pryor and Beartooth Mountains. Sometimes the boys would sit there side by side without talking and look out across their father's land. What the younger boy saw was his entire world. Daniel, Tom's father, loved the ranch with all his heart and if ever his thoughts strayed beyond its boundaries, it was only to reinforce the feeling that all he wanted lay within them. To him the distant mountains were like comforting walls, protecting all he held dear from the turbulence beyond. To Ned, three years his senior, they were the walls of a prison. He couldn't wait to escape and when he was sixteen he duly did. He went to California to seek his fortune and lost a gullible succession of business partners theirs instead.