He was magnificent. Deep-chested and strong in the quarters, he weighed maybe more than a thousand pounds. His coat was a perfect white. The reason he hadn't yet seen Tom and Annie was that he was too busy seeing off a more pressing intruder. A young stallion, a bay, was making a bid for the mares.
'Things get kind of heated this time of year,' Tom said quietly. 'It's the mating season and this young fella thinks it's time he had a go. He'll have been trailing this band for days, probably with a few other young studs.' Tom craned in the saddle to peer around. 'Yep, there they are.' He pointed them out to Annie. There were nine or ten of them another half-mile or so to the south.
'That's what they call a bachelor band. They spend their time hanging out, you know, getting drunk, bragging to each other, carving their names on trees, till they're big enough to go steal some other guy's mares.'
'Oh. I see.' Her tone made him realize what he'd said. She was giving him a look but he didn't return it. He knew exactly what the corners of her mouth would be doing and the knowing of it pleased him. 'That's right.' He kept his eyes firmly on the mustangs.
The two stallions were standing nose to nose, while the mares and foals and the challenger's distant friends looked on. Then suddenly both stallions exploded, tossing their heads and squealing. This was when the weaker one would normally concede. But the bay didn't. He reared up and screamed and the white stallion reared too, but higher, and thrashed at him with his hooves. Even from here you could see the white of their bared teeth and hear the thwack as their kicks struck home. Then, within moments, it was over and the bay scuttled off defeated. The white stallion watched him go. Then, with a glance at Tom and Annie, he ushered his family away.
Tom felt her eyes on him again. He shrugged and gave her a grin.
'You win some, you lose some.'
'Will the other one be back?'
'Oh yes. He's gonna have to spend some more time at the gym, but he'll be back.'
They built a fire by the stream, just next to the place where they had kissed. They buried potatoes as before in its embers and while these cooked they made a bed, laying their bedrolls side by side with the saddles for a headboard then zipping their two single sleeping bags together. An inquisitive huddle of heifers stood with lowered heads on the other bank to watch.
When the potatoes were done, they ate them with sausage fried in an old iron pan and some eggs Annie thought would never survive the journey. They mopped the dark yolks from their plates with the rest of the bread. The sky had clouded over. They washed their plates in the moonless stream and laid them on the grass to dry. Then they took off their clothes and, with the flicker of the fire on their skin, made love.
There was a gravity to their union which seemed to Annie somehow to befit the place. It was as though they'd come to dignify the promise here witnessed.
Later, Tom sat propped against his saddle and she lay folded in his arms with her back and head against his chest. The air had grown much colder. Somewhere high on the mountain above them there was the yip and wail of what he told her were coyotes. He draped a blanket over his shoulders and drew it around them, cocooning her against the night and all encroachment. Nothing, Annie thought, nothing in that other world can touch us here.
For many hours, staring into the fire, they talked about their lives. She told him about her father and all the exotic places where they'd lived before he died. She told him about meeting Robert and how he'd seemed so clever and dependable, so grown up and yet so sensitive. And he was still all of those things, a fine, fine man. Their marriage had been good, still was, in many ways. But looking back now, she realized that what she'd wanted from him was actually what she'd lost in her father: stability, security and unquestioning love. These Robert had given her spontaneously and without condition. What she had given him in return was loyalty.
'I don't mean by that I don't love him,' she said. 'I do. I really do. It's just that it's a love that feels more like, I don't know. Like gratitude or something.'
'For his loving you.'
'Yes. And Grace. It sounds awful, doesn't it?' 'No.'
She asked him if it was like that with Rachel and he said no, it was different. And Annie listened in silence while he told her the story. She conjured life in her mind from the photograph she'd seen in Tom's room, the beautiful face with its dark eyes and glossy tumble of hair. The smile was hard to reconcile with the sorrow Tom now spoke of.
It was not the woman but the child in her arms that had moved Annie most. It gave her a pang of what, at the time, she refused to acknowledge as jealousy. It was the same feeling she'd had when she saw Tom's and Rachel's initials in the concrete of the well. Oddly, the other photograph, of the grown Hal, gave full mitigation. Though he was dark like his mother, his eyes were Tom's. Even frozen in time, they disarmed all animosity.
'Do you ever see her?' Annie asked when he'd finished.
'Not for some years. We talk on the phone now and then, about Hal mostly.'
'I saw the picture in your room. He's beautiful.'
She could hear Tom smile behind her head. 'Yeah, he is.' There was a silence. A branch, white-crusted with ash, collapsed in the fire, hoisting a flurry of orange sparks into the night.
He asked, 'Did you want more children?'
'Oh yes. We tried. But I could never hold on to them. In the end we just, gave up. More than anything, I wanted it for Grace. A brother or a sister for Grace.'
They fell silent again and Annie knew, or thought she knew, what he was thinking. But it was a thought too sorrowful, even on this outside rim of world, for either one of them to utter.
The coyotes kept up their chorus all night. They mated for life, he told her, and were so devoted that if ever one were caught in a trap, the other would bring it food.
For two days they rode the bluffs and gullies of the high Front. Sometimes they would leave the horses and go on foot. They saw elk and bear and once Tom thought he saw, watching from a high crag, a wolf. It turned and went before he could be sure and he didn't mention it to Annie in case it worried her.
They came across hidden valleys filled with bear-grass and glacier lily and waded up to their knees through meadows turned to lakes of brilliant blue with lupine.
The first night it rained and he pitched the little tent he'd brought in a flat green field strewn all about with the bleached poles of fallen aspen. They got soaked to the skin and sat huddled together, shivering and laughing in the mouth of the tent with blankets over their shoulders. They sipped scalding coffee from blackened tin mugs while outside the horses grazed unbothered, the rain sleeking off their backs. Annie watched them, her wet face and neck lit from below by the oil lamp and he thought he'd never seen, nor ever would he see, any living creature so beautiful.
That night, while she slept in his arms, he lay listening to the drumming of the rain on the tent roof and tried to do what she'd told him they must, not to think beyond the moment, just to live it. But he couldn't.
The following day was clear and hot. They found a pool fed by a narrow twist of waterfall. Annie said she wanted to swim and he laughed and said he was too old and the water way too cold. But she wouldn't take no for an answer, so under the dubious gaze of the horses they stripped and leapt in. The water was so icy it made them shriek and they had to scramble right out and stood hugging each other, bare-assed and blue, jabbering like a couple of loopy kids.