So they had started before first light.
By the time Rosalind stepped off the porch, the yard was already awake in the particular, organized way of a ranch about to do something it has never done before. Sam had the Bar Seven hands saddled and waiting, not in a line for inspection but gathered in loose knots, talking low, the way men talk when they know the day will be remembered. There were nine of them she trusted, and three more who had come in the night from the sheep camp, Basque shepherds in heavy coats, with dogs at their heels that watched everything and trusted nothing. And there, standing beside the wagon with the fence posts loaded in the back, were Miren Zubizarreta and Ana Zubizarreta, and the sight of them stopped Rosalind for a moment on the bottom step.
Miren was sixty-three and looked older in the morning light, her face a map of weather and work, her hands already busy with rope. She had not come to Juniper Creek to be forgiven, and she had not come to forgive. She had come because the waterhole was hers to stand beside, and eighteen years of silence had not changed that by one inch. Ana stood next to her, straight-backed, her schoolteacher's dress exchanged for a riding skirt and a work shirt, her hair braided tight, her eyes on the herd already moving out of the far corral. She had refused Rosalind's money. She had refused to be made into a daughter, a charity, a story. What she had asked for was the waterhole in her family's name and a school for shepherd children, and Rosalind had said yes to both before she understood the full price of either — and the price, it turned out, was this morning. It was standing in public, in daylight, on the wrong side of her own manager's arrangement, and letting the whole valley see which side she had chosen.
Rosalind walked to the wagon and took the reins from the driver. "We drive to Cottonwood," she said, loud enough for the yard to hear. "We drive the herd back to the waterhole, and we camp there, and we rebuild the sheep-camp fence. We do not draw iron unless iron is drawn on us. We do not shout. We work. Let the work be the argument."
Sam nodded once, and swung up into his saddle, and the hands fell into their places with the easy, practiced motion of people who have moved cattle together for years. The herd — two hundred head, the heart of the Bar Seven's remaining stock — came out of the corral in a slow, dusty river, and the dogs worked the flanks, and the shepherds' dogs worked with them, cattle dogs and sheepdogs moving in a pattern that would have been unthinkable a month ago and now looked, to Rosalind's eye, like the most natural thing in the world. Cattle and sheep had never been grazed together on Bar Seven land. That was one of the unwritten laws of the valley: cattle country and sheep country, separate, as if the grass itself knew the difference. Today they would walk together to the same water, and the grass would have to learn.
Ana rode up beside Rosalind as the column formed, and for a while they rode in silence, which Rosalind had come to understand was Ana's way of being honest. The girl — no, the woman, twenty-four and already harder than most men Rosalind knew — looked ahead at the road, not at Rosalind, and when she spoke it was about the work. "The old fence line ran from the cottonwood with the split trunk to the flat rock," she said. "Miren remembers where every post stood. We can have the line up by evening if the ground is soft enough."
"The ground will be soft enough," Rosalind said. "It rained three days ago, and the waterhole is still holding."
Ana nodded, and then, after a moment, she said something else, quieter, as if it cost her. "My aunt cried last night. Not when we talked about the fire. When you said the school would have her name on it too. Not just mine. Hers."
Rosalind felt that land somewhere low in her chest, and she did not answer at once, because she had learned — late, and at great cost — that some things should not be answered with words. She rode on, and the herd moved, and the valley opened up ahead of them in gold and green and the pale blue of a sky that had not yet decided whether the day would be hot.