It was four o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon when Tala walked down to the stone corral carrying a light saddle of Mexican leather that she had cleaned and oiled with beef tallow during the rainy days.
In the pen stood the six-year-old chestnut mare that Jonah had bought from the Dragoon stage station—a sturdy, deep-chested animal with clear, alert eyes and a white blaze down her nose. The mare had come to know Tala’s whistle, trotting to the fence whenever she appeared with a handful of crushed maize or an ear of dried sweet corn.
Tala saddled the horse with quiet, unhurried precision. She smoothed the wool blanket over the mare’s withers, lifted the leather tree, settled it behind the shoulder blades, and reached beneath the belly to catch the cinch. She drew the latigo strap through the iron ring, took up the slack until the sheepskin lining was snug against the ribs, and tied the Texas knot with two swift, practiced tugs.
She slipped the bridle over the mare’s ears, adjusted the curb strap so it rested two fingers loose against the chin-groove, and looped the braided rawhide reins over the saddle horn.
Jonah was standing by the corral gate, sharpening a scythe on a flat oilstone. The rhythmic shk-shk, shk-shk of the stone against the curved steel ceased as she led the mare through the opening into the open yard.
He did not ask where she was going. He looked at the mare’s cinches, at the canvas canteen hanging from the pommel, and at the light saddlebag that carried three biscuits of dried plum meal and her small horn-handled knife.
“The creek at the southern box is running three feet deep,” Jonah said, wiping the steel blade with a handful of dry grass. “The gravel is firm at the cattle crossing, but don't take the mare into the red clay above the willow cutbank. It balls in the shoes and brings a horse down if she steps in a badger hole.”
“I know the crossing,” Tala said.
She wore her dark indigo wool skirt, a shirt of clean unbleached muslin, and her cowhide boots. Her hair was bound back with a strip of smoked deerhide, leaving her ears clear to catch the sounds of the valley.
She gathered the reins in her left hand, placed her toe in the oxbow stirrup, and swung up into the saddle with that light, balanced grace that made horse and rider appear as a single organism moving against the earth.
She turned the mare’s head toward the south.
For seven months, every journey she had taken from this ranch had been an expedition of necessity: riding to town to buy salt under the cold stares of the shopkeepers, driving the team to Tucson to answer a summons before a court, or searching the lower washes for stray cattle after a winter freeze. Each time, she had gone out with the invisible weight of other people’s intentions pressing upon her shoulders, wondering whether an armed deputy would appear at the next bend or whether a clerk’s paper would be drawn from a pocket to demand her presence.
Today, there was no paper. There was no summons. There was no errand to buy flour or carry water.
The road that led south out of the ranch yard—the same road where Elias Hutchins had ridden with his border ruffians in the November frost, the same road where Silas Crane had threatened her with an empty warrant at the stage station—stretched before her as an empty, sunlit ribbon of red dirt and gravel, open to the horizon.
She gave the mare a light touch with her heels.
The chestnut moved out into a smooth, rhythmic running walk, her iron shoes ringing against the basalt stones of the trail. They passed the outer fence line where the new cedar posts stood straight and firm; they crossed the gravel wash where the runoff was already sinking into the sand, leaving small pools that reflected the towering white thunderheads over the Chiricahuas; and they climbed the long, stony bench that rose toward the southern ridge.
At the summit of the bench, two miles from the house, Tala reined the mare in.
She sat upon the horse with her hand resting on the pommel, looking back across the basin.
From this height, the ranch house looked small and solitary, nestled into the vast, ancient curve of the valley like a pebble dropped into a dry riverbed. The green patch of clover by the windmill shone like an emerald against the grey-brown scrub, and from the kitchen chimney, a thin, blue spiral of mesquite smoke rose straight into the quiet air. In the yard, the tiny, dark figure of Jonah moved between the blacksmith shop and the hay shed, carrying an armload of cured grass to the calves.