by Terri Farley
Sam yawned. Not until yesterday, when Dad mentioned the possibility, had she worried that she might be the only one home when Brynna went into labor. Gram had books about all kinds of first aid, and there had to be something about helping someone have a baby. She knew it was a natural process. Dark Sunshine hadn’t needed a bit of help, but people were more complicated than horses.
Last night she’d looked over her notes from Kit’s interview because they were in the same notebook as her list. She was more convinced than ever that Kit loved rodeo so much that he’d go back to it the minute whatever injury that cast was hiding healed. Maybe then Jake would be himself again.
Why didn’t Luke Ely, their dad, sit both guys down and talk to them? Maybe it was just something they had to work out, or Kit might not want to risk a major fight because he’d be leaving again so soon. Actually, she didn’t care how their feud was resolved; she just hated Jake being mad at her.
For a guy who didn’t use many words, he’d sure picked ones that hurt.
Sam tapped her pencil eraser on her desk and decided the best thing about making the list had been thinking about the Blind Faith program. The skills she’d picked up working with the HARP girls would help her with the city kids who came to the range already loving wild horses and wanting to help them. Her job, Sam decided, was to make sure the city kids got one glimpse of a herd running across the playa, free and wild. Then they’d stand up for the horses forever.
Sam’s pondering came to an end when Blaze barked.
“Hush, you silly thing!” Gram’s voice floated up the stairs between her footsteps.
Before Sam could ask why Gram was coming up to wake her before her alarm went off, Gram stood in the doorway in her red corduroy bathrobe and said something Sam had dreamed of hearing: “Snow day!” and then, before Sam could shout in celebration, Gram added two words that were even more beautiful. “School’s canceled!”
Chapter Eleven
“What do you do on a snow day?” Sam asked Brynna as the entire family straggled down the stairs.
“Eat it, for one thing,” Brynna said, licking her lips. “Mound fresh snow in a dish and drizzle it with maple syrup or orange juice.”
“Oh, yum,” Sam said.
“In town, you’d probably sleep in, but that’s a waste of a holiday. Still, you can eat breakfast in your nightgown,” Gram said.
“And wait for the pump to quit workin’ because of a power failure,” grumbled Dad, who was the only one already dressed.
“Oh, Wyatt, stop,” Brynna said. She gave Dad a shove that made him smile.
Gram divided a huge cheese omelet and a stack of thick-sliced wheat toast among the four of them, promising Sam a bowl of snow with chocolate syrup after she’d had something that would “stick to her ribs.”
Sam was licking the last bit of frozen chocolate from her bowl when she thought of more good luck brought by the snow.
“This means my teachers can’t assign any last-minute homework. What I’ve got—just reading Jane Eyre for English and bringing in a baking sample for cooking class—is all I’ve got.”
“Reading and baking,” Dad grumped as if things had been tougher when he was a boy. “Sounds to me like you got off easy.”
“Well,” Sam stalled, certain Dad would fill her idle hours with work. “I probably wrote some other stuff down in my notebook and it’s just slipped my mind.”
“Fine,” Dad said. He rose from the table, took his silverbelly Stetson from its hook, and placed it on his head. “Like I told you last night, winter weather brings new responsibilities. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t,” Sam promised, and she was even more relieved he hadn’t piled on more chores when the phone rang.
“It must be Jen,” Sam said, almost tripping on her nightgown as she skidded across the kitchen to grab the phone before anyone else could.
“Did you hear?” Jen yelled. “No school!”
“Yeah, but I’m mad at you—”
“Be mad at my parents. They’re the ogres that—”
Sam heard sounds of lighthearted disagreement beyond her friend’s voice.
“No, they’re not ogres,” Jen said. “I stand corrected. If they were, they wouldn’t allow me to go on an exciting snow ride with you as soon as I do my chores.”
Then Jen made a kissing sound. Sam assumed Jen had directed it at her parents, but that was a first. She couldn’t wait to hear what had caused such joy at the Kenworthy household.
“Great,” Sam said. “I have snow chores on top of my regular chores. I’m supposed to work with Dallas and Ross since Dad let Pepper go home to Idaho for the holidays.”
Dad paused halfway out the door and turned around.
“Not that I’m complaining,” Sam said, and she saw Dad nod before he kept going. “I’m supposed to keep all the buckets and troughs clear of ice, and the river where the cattle drink, too, if it gets frozen over—and, oh yeah…” Sam said the next part casually, wondering if Jen could hear her smile. “I’m also supposed to keep the road, from bridge to highway, shoveled off.”
“What do they think you are, a snowplow? That’s a huge job, especially if you can’t drive.”
Sam jiggled the phone cord, then swooped it like a jump rope, trying to make Jen guess her good news.
“Hello? I said…” Jen’s voice trailed off in puzzlement.
“Well, actually…you’ll never guess—”
“Get out!” Jen shouted.
“Yesterday my dad took me to get a hardship driver’s license, and—”
“And you’re not chauffeuring anyone anywhere, except for me, in case of emergency,” Brynna reminded her.
“I know,” Sam said.
“I heard,” Jen said. “But Sam, that’s amazing. Do you feel different? All old and responsible?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t forget,” Jen said solemnly, “we made a pact that neither of us would ever drive like Mrs. Allen.”
“No way,” Sam said. “But hey, since cars will never, ever replace horses in a sane world…”
“I hear you,” Jen said. “I’ll meet you at War Drum Flats as soon as I can.”
Snow muffled everything. Edges of the bunkhouse, barn, and run-in shed were rounded off. At first Sam thought snow had already mounded into drifts, but then she realized the trees bowed toward the earth under their burden of snow, changed into smooth humps instead of tall slender things.
But it hadn’t snowed any more since Dad had left the house. Sam followed his footsteps to the barn and to each water trough—none of which were frozen. She paused to shake the snow off the trees and they sprung up, sprinkling her with crystals as the branches reached for the sky once more.
The ice spangles on her sleeves melted into drops as she kicked down through the snow to the bare dirt in front of the chicken coops. The two roosters watched critically from their doorways before strutting out to scratch at the chicken feed she scattered. They didn’t eat it, Sam noticed. They merely made chirring sounds that coaxed the hens to come out.
It was the perfect kind of snow, Sam thought—fluffy instead of icy. Deep, but not sticky enough to clump together on her boots and make walking impossible.
It was already warming up when she finished her chores and headed into the barn. She shed her jacket and hung it on a hook along with her long wool scarf before checking the creep feeder in Tempest’s pen.
She smooched for the filly, but Tempest didn’t come. Sam could hear her tiny hoofs galloping in her small pasture. Just as Sam emerged from the barn into the pasture, a slab of snow on the barn roof sloughed off and landed on Tempest.
The black filly reared, dumping the snow, then ran along the fence line, around and around, bucking and kicking until she made sure she’d outrun the cold white attacker.
“It’s okay, baby,” Sam crooned, moving toward the filly, but Tempest stood as far from the barn as she could, looking up at the roof, braced for another assault. “Want my glove?”
Sam yanked off a glove and dangled it, but the filly’s trembling attention remained fixed far over Sam’s head.
There was a lot to learn when you were a baby animal, Sam thought, and she couldn’t teach Tempest what she should and shouldn’t be afraid of. How could you anticipate something like a miniavalanche sliding off a rooftop?
Standing with hands on hips, waiting for Tempest to come to her for a comforting ear scratch, Sam glimpsed Dallas through the fence rails.
“What if I put Ace in here to keep her company after I come back from riding?” Sam called.
“Couldn’t hurt,” Dallas replied briefly, but Sam could tell he liked being asked.
Dallas had been on this ranch as long as Sam could remember. Dad claimed Dallas had forgotten more about horses than Dad had ever learned. Sam didn’t always approve of Dallas’s old-fashioned ways with horses, but he was kind at heart and he was the one who’d told her, just days after she’d come home from recovering in San Francisco, that she was born to the saddle.
“I think I will, then,” Sam said, smiling, and went to get her tack.
The blanket of snow muffled the sound of Ace’s hooves as he galloped. He snorted with each stride, sending plumes of vapor into the blue and white day, but that was the only sound Sam heard. The world was hushed around her, like the moment before a curtain goes up on a play.
Sam spotted Jen in her lime-green jacket on her palomino mare from at least a mile away, and they came together, horses circling each other in a whirlwind of white.
“Tell me!” Sam shouted, then cupped her gloved hands over her nose and mouth as she felt the cold burn her lungs.
“Harmony Ranch!” Jen shouted.
Jen’s glasses were so fogged up, Sam couldn’t see her eyes, and for one terrible moment she was afraid Jen was moving to ranch country far away.
“Ryan’s taking over the Gold Dust and my family’s entering into an official, on-paper partnership with him. It’s going to be a cattle and palomino operation and we’re all contributing something.” Jen held her reins in her left hand as she counted off on her gloved right hand.
“Ryan’s contributing the land and buildings, Dad’s contributing his expertise and our breeding stock. Mom is kicking in her profit from the money she invested in her cousin’s newspaper in Utah.” Jen took a big breath. “And I’m contributing my college fund.”
“Huh?” Sam asked. “I—how could you—?”
“Kind of a lot to take in, I know, but think of it this way: We all put in enough to split the whole ranch fifty-fifty.”
“What about Linc and his financial mess?” Sam asked.
“Remember that fight Linc and Ryan had that day at the corral? When your friend Pam from San Francisco was here?”
“Sure,” Sam said.
Pam had been visiting and they’d stopped by Gold Dust Ranch to bring Jen her homework because she was still recovering from an accident that had broken her ribs. Ryan had been working hard to recapture his Appaloosa mare Hotspot, and he and his father had quarreled about beef cattle, taking shortcuts and other things that had been hard to overhear from Jen’s front porch.
“Apparently after that fight he deeded the Gold Dust to Ryan to teach him a lesson, so that he’d see it wasn’t so easy to run a ranch—”
“No one ever teaches me a lesson by giving me a ranch,” Sam mock-whined.
“I know,” Jen sympathized. “But it’s turning out so great. Ryan’s willing to kind of treat Dad as a mentor and really run Gold Dust as a working ranch. Oh, and we’ve all agreed to change the name.”
“To Harmony Ranch,” Sam said slowly, but there was one thing in the torrent of information Jen had spouted that worried her. Sam swallowed, then asked, “Your college money?”
“It was a no-brainer,” Jen said. “We all know I’m going to earn a scholarship that will get me into a good school.”
From anyone else, it would have sounded like bragging, but from Jen it was simply the truth.
“Sure,” Sam agreed.
“And the amount my parents have put away for me will help the ranch and, probably,” Jen broke off to grimace, “won’t go that far toward tuition at a really important college. So, I’m actually vested in the ranch.”
“And that means?”
“As soon as I’m eighteen, I own a piece of it,” Jen said, sighing. “Is that cool, or what?”
“Amazing,” Sam said, “and so much better than my daydream, because this way you don’t have to marry Ryan.”
“I’m not ruling that out,” Jen said, and when Sam gasped, Silly reared.
Looking orange against the snow, the palomino mare rocked back on her hind legs and pawed sky-ward with white stockinged forelegs.
Jen shifted her weight forward, brought the mare back down, and reined her in a prancing circle, then pointed at Sam. “That’s about ten years in the future, and anything could happen between now and then. Besides, my parents might not want a convicted criminal blighting a branch of their family tree.”
Sam laughed, then stopped as she realized Jen was studying her as if she were a specimen under a microscope.
“What?” she asked.
“You miss Jake.”
“Miss him? That jerk? No, I don’t. It hasn’t been—”
“Call him and apologize,” Jen suggested.
“For what?” Sam yelped. “I didn’t do anything.”
“There are always two sides,” Jen began.
“Not this time,” Sam told her.
“Well, you know he won’t take the first step. Even if he’s eaten up with regret, he’s too shy to say so,” Jen said.
“I don’t care. He’s the one who’s wrong,” Sam said. “How am I to blame for him being weirded out over his brother?”
“Kit? I thought he was great.”
“He is,” Sam insisted. “I think Jake’s jealous or something.”
There was a moment of silence. Silly played with the roller on her bit and Ace swished his tail and finally Jen sneered, “That sounds like him.”
“What does?” Sam asked.
“Using you as his whipping boy.”
Sam hesitated. She wasn’t sure what that meant.
“You know, he takes out his resentment of his successful brother on you.”
Sam wanted to tell Jen she was wrong, but when she remembered Jake’s cold face, she couldn’t. Then she told Jen the rest of it.
“I guess you’re right. After all, he told me he was done being my friend. So, say what you want. I’m not going to defend him anymore.”
“What a jerk. He always has been, Sam. You were just too nice to see it. Believe me, you’re better off without him hanging around. He’s such a loser.”
“Now wait a minute,” Sam snapped. “I know you guys have this rivalry, but Jake is always there when I need him. Like you. In fact”—Sam snatched a breath to keep going—“in fact, the two of you…” Sam’s voice trailed off when she saw Jen’s smug smile. “That was a trap, right?”
Jen had said all those rude things about Jake to see if she’d defend him, Sam thought. And it had worked.
“Just testing,” Jen said.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Sam told her.
“I know, but you’ll thank me for it later.”
“No, I won’t,” Sam said, but she had to smother the laugh triggered by Jen’s certainty.
“So, hey, in the meantime, until you forgive me?” Jen said, and Silly began prancing, attuned to the change in her rider’s attitude.
“Yeah?” Sam said. Now Ace tossed his head and pulled at the bit in excitement.
“Catch me if you can!” Jen yelled.
She touched her heels to Silly’s side, lined out across the snow-covered range, and Sam didn’t even try not to follow.
When they finally stopped the horses, Sam could see the way up to the cleft in the mountains where the Phantom’s secret valley lay. Covered with snow, the individual mesas were hard to make out. Only f
aint shadows indicated the plateaus. And when a wind fanned over the mountains and rushed over the snow, gathering cold before slamming into the girls and horses, Sam could see nothing up there but a curtain of white.
While Ace and Silly licked the snow at their feet, Jen studied the mountains, then steadied her glasses on the bridge of her nose.
“Something tells me that would be the perfect place for an avalanche,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” Sam asked, rubbing her gloved hands over her numb cheeks, trying to stimulate a little feeling into them.
“When my mom was still home-schooling me, avalanches were something I wanted to study. You could say I got kind of obsessed with them. For instance, most people think that the most dangerous time for avalanches is in the spring, when the earth warms up and snow thaws and slides down.”
Sam thought about the slab of snow that had slid down the barn roof onto Tempest that morning. “That’s what I thought,” Sam agreed.
“Well, it’s true, but only by a few percentage points,” Jen said. “And around here, if you’re talking about naturally released avalanches, not something triggered by hikers, the time immediately after a storm, like during the first twenty-four hours—”
“Like now?” Sam asked.
“—is the most dangerous for blocking highways, smashing buildings, and stuff like that, and yeah, like now.”
The wind moaned through the trees up on the ridge. Sam thought if she were the kind of person to imagine snow banshees, she might be shivering in her saddle. As it was, she knew she was only shivering because she was freezing.
“Look!” Jen said, pointing. “See that?”
“Give me a hint what I’m looking for,” Sam said, squinting.
“The wind direction just changed. See, up there? Where it looks almost like white smoke swirling along the mountaintop?”
“Yeah,” Sam said.
