Chapter One It was dark, though white all around. He moved slowly, afoot because -- ah. Because his horse was lame. The feeder steers traveled with them, he thought, sometimes. Their cloudy forms at the corner of his eye: ruddy Herefords and Limousins, white-face Angus crossbreds, pale Charolais. Hijos de puta, always tromping in where not wanted.
His thoughts formed and dissolved behind his eyes like mist. Lazy bastards, those others. Warming their butts in the break hut. They would lose everything. Though he too had -- No, not everything. Not his best horse, his roping rig. Wallet and papers zipped in the pocket of his parka.
He wanted to touch the pocket. This did not happen. Nonetheless, they were there. Receipts; money, a little. People said the Foulks Brothers paid well, when they paid. He had been paid twelve times. Pressed his luck: stupid.
His weighted feet moved grudgingly, more slowly, stopped. That was all. Nothing hurt. He knelt, settled back. He wished to clear his left eye. This did not happen. Tug at his right hand. Slither. The rein slid away like a snake. A vague shape moved past, out of sight. Lost. Socorro. Socorro.
At eight thirty Alice Andison logged out of her spreadsheet program with a nervous shudder, went into the kitchen, and filled a Baggie with oat-and-molasses horse cookies. January's numbers looked good, which worried her more than if they had looked bad. Bad numbers at least gave you an idea where you stood with the gods, but good ones left you wondering when the lightning would strike. Was I born a pessimist? she thought. No, just a clear realist. The old joke about the rancher who won the lottery ("What will you do with the money?" "Keep on ranching till it's gone") barely scratched a smile out of her; it was just too near the bone. She pulled on her thermal coveralls.
The collie Bel lay against the kitchen door, whining. She wanted to stay inside, and Alice wanted to keep her in because she was old and stiff and felt the cold, but Bel couldn't stand it. Collies lived outside, she knew. The other two were out there, in the kennel in the carport. Suddenly she struggled up, and Alice heard the other dogs barrel out past the pickup, claws scratching the cement. A volley of barks, and something went creaking past the front of the house, paused, and then the whole circus moved on down the slope toward the shed yard. Bel cried and scraped at the door.
"What in hell?" muttered Alice, a Moon Boot half on. She hopped across the house, knelt on the window seat, and made a tunnel of her hands on the frost-knit window. Nothing. Immaculate snow, ice-chip stars, frowsy locust twigs hanging still. She could hear the dogs, but they weren't shrieking like they did for a bobcat or a porcupine. She pocketed her horse treats, stood for a moment with her thumb on her lip, and went and got a big flashlight from the utility closet. Its batteries wouldn't last in this cold, but it was long and heavy, weaponlike.
She went out; Bel shot away downhill toward the barns. No question about where the party was. The high-drifted snow of the front yard had been tossed by the skirmishing dogs and by -- what? Powder snow, too cold and fine to keep a sharp imprint. She tramped slowly down the slope toward the diminishing noises, shining her flashlight from side to side, its beam turning yellow, then orange. No sound now but the squeak of her boots in the powder.
On her left were long pens going down to the creek, the shadowy shapes of horses drifting uphill, sensing some entertainment. On her right the three hay sheds, with the flatbed wagon standing loaded and ready for the morning. Nothing and nobody inside, and anyway the collies weren't there. Ah, there -- Sweep ran out the door of the foaling barn, caught sight of her, and ducked back in.
Gripping her flashlight right-handed, Alice slipped into the shed and flicked on the overheads. The big fluorescents flickered on, revealing the three dogs grinning in a circle around a horse that had just cleaned up a flake of grass hay left loose in the wheelbarrow. As she watched, the animal abandoned the barrow and limped urgently onward toward the stacked bales. Automatically, Alice registered breed, sex, and color: quarter-horse mare, spang-in-your-eye red chestnut. Carrying a roping saddle in good condition. And hopping lame, though not bleeding anywhere that Alice could see.
The bosal bridle on her head had no bit to get in the way of her eating. Not that anything less than a muzzle would have, it looked like. The collies looked from Alice to the mare and back, delighted withtheir prize. A bay colt, three years old, kept inside while a wire cut on his pastern healed, pointed an ear at Alice but kept his starting eyes on the foreign horse; even the cat Ike, high up in the bale stack with his paws tucked in, ogled her. But the mare spared nobody an ounce of attention, just went on jerking one starving mouthful after another out of the handiest bale of mixed grass.
Alice stood uncertain. Where had she come from? No saddlebags, no slicker or bedroll tied behind the cantle, so probably not a runaway from a pack string or hunting outfit -- anyway, what lunatic would go hunting or camping in such weather? Forest Service horse? Same objection; furthermore, the rimfire roping rig with its two cinches, lariat neatly coiled and tied? That heavy Mexican bosal?
Her hands ached distractingly.
The rider: if not here, where?
"Anybody up there with you, Ike?"
"Mip," he replied, and licked his nose.
She walked out, thoughtful, and made her evening round of the pens, counted and observed the horses, checked that they had hay, dispensed cookies. Looked, for good measure and by the browning ray of her flashlight, into the machine shed and the covered arena. Nobody there, but anyway she was coming around to the belief that the chestnut mare's lameness and solitary state meant that she had had a fall somewhere up in the hills and parted from her rider there. Probably some time ago. Those ribs were pretty well covered, but her belly was drawn up from lack of water. (Though sprung in a suggestive way behind the cinch.) Could she have been lost for as much as three days, since before the blizzard and the deep freeze? Alice found herself calculating the rider's chance of survival, her own obligations.
She would have to try. Wouldn't she? Though it might mean miles, hours. And the rider might be, probably was, dead already. Or she might reasonably wait for morning and call the state police. Or call her sister in Waitsburg for advice. No, she couldn't; Janet would try to drive up, get stuck on the way, and freeze in a ditch. Pa, she thought longingly, as she deep-bedded the red mare in the second foaling box, untacked and blanketed her, supplied her with water and three flake -- on second thought, four flake of grass hay. Pa, what should I do? But Allan was dead. And anyway, she knew what was right.
Come on, Alice. Cowboy up.
Catching up and saddling her mystified but biddable gray gelding, she led him up to the house and tied him to the porch while she went in to take her cell phone off the jack, stow it in a zipper pocket, and change her boots. Mounted, she looked down at the barns, debating with herself about the bolt-action twenty-two in the tack room. Decided against it.
"Glen: kennel. Bel: kennel. You, Glen! Kennel." The puppy crept dismally in with Bel. Alice cast across the yard a couple of times until she found the stray horse's back trail, a trench of plowed-up snow with a ribbonlike mark parallel where the mare had carried her head aside to keep from stepping on the trailing reins. Checked her watch: nine forty-five. She would give it two hours, she decided. In such cold and in knee-deep snow, that would be as much as she and her horse were worth.
The back trail led eastward from the house, into the gap through which, when not frozen solid, Dorothy Creek ran down off the high ground where the Standfast cows spent their summers. Tricky, the narrow trail along the creek. Again and again Alice brushed down drifts of powder off overhanging fir branches, so she guessed the mare must have been riderless when she passed through there. Slowly on up the gap, the gray horse Tom Fool puffing smoke, out of the gulch and onto the flat after a hard-slogging hour, and Sweep suddenly raced forward. Alice's stomach lurched. There he was, dead sure enough, and she had forgotten to bring a tarp to skid him in on. Damn. She wished she had not come.
It was a good flat piece of pasture, a long dogleg, in the middle of it the frozen rider upright as a dolmen in a waste of reflected starlight. Wanting none of this to be happening, Alice pressed forward. Sweep scurried up, crouched in front of the dark thing as if to drive it, leapt to one side. Came back and faced it, tail waving. Barked and pawed at it, dashed back to Alice.
"I'm coming. Leave it alone, Sweep." She could see the body clearly now, kneeling in the snow, arms clamped across itself and the long fur fringe of the parka's hood hiding its face. She halted her horse, dreading to look. Whereupon she realized that the rag of white vapor that passed at intervals across the front of the hood came not from the collie, but from the corpse.
At seven fifteen in the morning as usual, Alice got a call from her sister on the cell phone, the landlines being down. Janet Weston generally called twice a day, catering to her guilt about living comfortably in Waitsburg, leaving Alice alone at Standfast after their father's death. Janet called it a security measure, both of them knowing full well that between her daily calls lay time in abundance for awful things to happen to Alice: falls, tractor rolls, tramplings. Better than nothing, though. Also, the regular contact helped Janet judge her general mental and physical state. Janet harbored a belief that Alice would work herself into a breakdown if not carefully monitored. Alice harbored the same belief about Janet who spent more hours than not teaching at the local community college.
"Hey, Yan....
