“I want those cows found, Tuff,” Bud had said, leaning over the breakfast table with his palms flat on the surface. “Dead or alive.”
Tuff had said, Then go find ’em yourself, you pussy-whipped phony!
No, he hadn’t said that. But he had thought that. And someday, when he retold the story in the Stockman’s Bar, that was how it would be recalled.
Tuff wished he had more light, but the sun was now behind the mountains. He blamed the horse for delaying him. The gelding had a smooth ride, but was the damned slowest walking horse he had ever ridden. He could have walked up the draw faster his own self, he thought. And if he could have taken one of the ATVs, he would have been goddamned back by now and watching television in the bunkhouse with Eduardo.
Shit.
Tuff reached back on the saddle and unbuckled a saddlebag that was stiff with age. His fingers closed around the smooth, cool neck of a fifth of Jim Beam. He had his memories of Evelyn Wolters, and this brought them back. He cracked the top and drank straight from the bottle. It was harsh, but tongues of familiar fire spread through his chest and belly. Sometimes, he thought, his memories—and what he could do with them—were almost better than the real thing. But he needed that original foundation before he could embellish them to his liking.
He rode up the mountain slowly. He stared in resentment at the back of the gelding’s head, settling on the bony protrusion between the horse’s ears. He fired mental curses at the spot, hoping some would soak through into the gelding’s brain. Not for the first time, he wondered what a fencing tool would do to the skull of a horse.
He rode the fence line, just like the song. The reins were in his left hand and the bottle was in his right. It was turning into a cold night. There was a hint of moisture in the air—probably brought with the cloud cover—that accentuated the smell of dry, dust-covered sage leading up into sharp pine. He smelled his own breath. Not pretty.
The gelding was breathing hard as he climbed a rocky hill toward a stand of aspen trees. Not that the horse was moving any faster—he had only one speed, which was similar to four-wheel drive low—and Tuff was just about ready to call it a night. With no stars or moon, he would not be able to see whether there were strays on this saddle slope or not. And damned if he would use his flashlight. He wasn’t that dedicated.
He wished he could find the missing cows, though, to get Bud Longbrake off of his back.
The aspens stood out from the dark timber that climbed up the mountain into the sky. The aspen leaves had turned already, and were in that stage between yellow-red and falling off. The aspens soaked up what little light there still was, making the stand look like a tan brushstroke on the huge, dark landscape.
“Whoa.”
Tuff stopped the gelding and got his bearings. He slid one boot out of the stirrup so he could twist in the saddle and look around. It was easy to get lost up here, he had learned. But he wasn’t. Far below were the crystalclear blue lights of the ranch yard. Twenty-five miles farther, the lights of the town of Saddlestring shimmered in wavering rows.
He turned back, looking at the aspens. He saw movement in the trees. Or was it a drunken illusion? Tuff wiped his eyes with his sleeve and looked again. This had happened before, him seeing things while he was drinking. But this time there was something authentic about it, something that made his chest clutch. Movement again. Something, or somebody, moved from one tree to another. The form was thicker than the tree trunks, but once hidden it seemed to meld into the darkness. He heard a twig snap, and his horse, who suddenly pricked his ears, confirmed the sound.
He let his breath out slowly. Certainly, it was deer or elk. But game animals didn’t hide, they ran. Under him, his horse started wuffing, emitting a deep, staccato, coughing sound. He feared that sound—all horsemen feared that sound—because it meant trouble was imminent. His horse, his slow-moving, docile horse, was about to throw off hundreds of years of domesticity and become a wild animal again.
Suddenly, the gelding crow-hopped, nearly unsaddling Tuff. His balance was goofy because of his position and the bourbon.
“What in the hell is wrong with you?” he growled, taking an empty swing at the gelding’s ear with the flat of his hand.
Unlike before, the horse didn’t shrug off his action. In fact, the horse began backpedaling down the slope in a panic.
“Damn you, what’s the problem?” he shouted. The gelding was backtracking down the mountain much faster than he had walked up. Tuff tried to turn him, to face him away from whatever had spooked him in the aspens. Sloshing bourbon on his bare hand, Tuff tried to grasp the reins near the bit in the gelding’s mouth to jerk him around hard. The bourbon splashed out of the bottle and into the gelding’s eye, igniting the horse and making him explode into a wild, tight spin.
Tuff clamped down with his thighs and held on. His hat flew off. He let the bottle drop—not something he wanted to do—and found himself knocked forward in the saddle, hugging the gelding’s neck. He had lost the reins, and several things flashed through his mind. With the reins down, the lunatic horse could inadvertently step on them as he spun and jerk both of them to the ground, breaking their necks. He thought of his broken bottle of Jim Beam. He imagined what he must look like, spiraling down a rocky slope in the dark, hugging the neck of a horse. He thought of how unbelievably strong and powerful a horse—a 1,000-pound animal— was when fully charged, like now.
Even as he spun, faster and harder than he had ever spun before, even when he used to rodeo, he wondered what had made the horse spook. Bears could do it, he knew. The smell of a bear in the wrong circumstances could make even a good ranch mount go crazy. This horse is going to fall, Tuff thought, and I’m going to get hurt real bad.
And then the horse tripped on something, recovered momentarily, then bucked. Tuff was thrown through the air—he could feel the actual moment of release when no part of his body was in contact with the saddle or the horse—and time seemed to literally slow down as he went airborne until it fast-forwarded as he flew face-first into a cold, sharp rock and heard a crunch in his ears like a door slamming shut.
10
Joe was up and showered when the telephone rang at 5:45 a.m. With a towel around his waist but still dripping, he padded down the dark hallway toward their bedroom to find Marybeth sitting bolt upright in bed, rubbing her eyes, with the receiver pressed against her ear. From across the room, he recognized the voice on the other end of the phone as that of Missy Vankueran, Marybeth’s mother. He noted the highpitched urgency in Missy’s voice.
“Just a second,” Marybeth said to her mother, then clamped her palm over the speaker and looked up with wide eyes. “It’s my mother, Joe. They just found one of their hands dead on the ranch.”
“Oh, no.”
“They called the sheriff, but she’s wondering if you can go out there.” “Why me?”
“I didn’t ask her,” Marybeth said, a hint of annoyance peeking through. “She’s very upset. She wants you there, I assume, because you’re family.”
Joe had planned to get an early start. It was Saturday, and archery sea-son was in full swing, and an early deer rifle season was opening in one of the areas in his district. Hunters would be out in force. The death of a ranch hand was the sheriff ’s responsibility, or the county coroner’s.
“She says he’s been mutilated, like those cows.”
“Tell her I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Normally, he would have savored the fall morning as he hurled down the old two-lane state highway toward the turnoff for the Longbrake Ranch, Joe thought. The sun had just broken over the mountains and fused the valley with color. Lowland cottonwoods were bursting with red and yellow, and the moisture sparkled on the grass. It was clear and crisp and cloudless. Mule deer still fed in the meadows and had not yet retreated to their daytime shelter of the trees and draws.