The Wrangler

by Pamela Britton

  “Fine,” he said. “Should have taken a Benadryl before we left.”

  “I have some in my pack. I was thinking once we climbed higher my own allergies might act up, but, nope, I’ve been just fine. Of course, I’ve been so busy talking, I might just not have noticed. Lorenzo’s been chatting my ear off. He’s a nice guy. Did you know his ancestors were part of the Spanish land grant? Apparently his great-great-grandfather was some kind of Spanish noble…”

  She was babbling, and he knew why.

  She was giddy.

  Her eyes glowed like the wings of a butterfly. She held the reins tightly, as if she needed something to hold on to to keep herself planted in the saddle. Speaking of that saddle, she was wiggling in it—when she wasn’t craning her neck so she could look up ahead. If she’d asked him, he would have told her they were almost there. He could see the branches getting thinner. And there was the fallen oak, its broken trunk scarred by lightning.

  “Sam,” he said.

  “…but I was thinking if we didn’t see them tonight, maybe I could head out on my own—”

  “Sam,” he said again, louder.

  “What?”

  “Look.” He pointed ahead.

  Like drapes made out of foliage, the canopy of leaves parted. At first you could see nothing more than the mountain on the other side. But as they stepped closer, you could see more and more of the floor below, specifically, a lake about a mile below them, one surrounded by a treeless, grass-laden valley, and at the farthest edge of the water…

  Sam gasped.

  Clint knew she’d spotted them. The horses were exactly where he’d hoped they’d be—by the edge of the lake—their reflection shining up to them in the surface of the water. He was glad he sat next to Sam when she saw them for the first time.

  “Oh, Clint.” She pulled Coaster up. “They’re so beautiful.”

  So was she. More beautiful in those seconds than any other woman he’d seen before. Tears filled her eyes, and he had to look away because if he didn’t, she’d be in on his secret.

  He was blinking back tears, too.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sam didn’t want to breathe she was so afraid of startling the horses below them. Coaster shifted beneath her, his ears suddenly pricked forward. He’d spotted them, too.

  “Aren’t they amazing, boy,” she told her horse, patting him.

  She’d seen wild horses on TV. Heck, she’d watched every horse documentary there ever was. But seeing them now, live, in the flesh, took her breath away. They were a distance away, if she held up her hand they’d be about the size of her thumbnail. They came in all different colors: bays, sorrels, black and gray. Sometimes all those colors were on one body, sometimes like Buttercup next to her, dappled.

  Behind her, she could hear the wagon coming. One of their horses neighed. A second later, a few of the horses in the valley pricked their own ears. One of them—a black-and-white paint—trotted forward a few steps. He seemed to sniff the air, all the while looking in their direction. She watched as his tail rose up—like a flag of warning—his head climbing higher and higher as he tested the wind. And then he trotted forward again, only that trot turned into a gallop. All the horses in the band were looking in their direction now. The black-and-white shook its head, his mane flying, and Sam knew this was the stallion.

  “They’re going to run,” Clint said, his voice barely audible—as if he was afraid the horses might hear him.

  “To where?” she asked.

  “Not far. The end of the valley, probably. Like I said, they’re not afraid of us. Once Atlas realizes we’re not a herd of mountain lions, he’ll settle down.”

  “Atlas?”

  He looked up at her, nodded. “The black blotches of color. They look like continents on his sides.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  Mom, are you seeing this? They’re real. Tomorrow I might even get to touch one.

  “You two going to get a move on?” someone yelled. Cappie, Sam realized. The old coot had been giving her dark looks since the moment she’d gone to throw her plate away. She’d only nibbled at her hamburger and Cappie had seemed to take that as a personal affront.

  “We’re moving, we’re moving,” Clint said.

  A few of the other riders rode ahead of the wagon.

  “They down there?” Dean asked.

  “They are,” Clint answered.

  Dean’s horse neighed. Down below, the group of horses was coming to a slow stop. The black-and-white stallion—Atlas—had turned back to face them.

  “I see he’s still ruling the roost,” Dean said.

  “Is that the stallion?” someone else said. Lorenzo. “The black-and-white toby?”

  Toby. Short for tobiano, a word used to describe the unique markings on the horse’s body.

  “That’s him,” Clint said.

  Lorenzo reached around behind him, opened the duffel bag strapped to the back of his saddle and pulled out—

  “Hey,” Clint cried, whipping Buttercup around. “No cameras.”

  Sam didn’t know how he reached the man so fast, but one minute the camera was in Lorenzo’s hands, the next it was on the ground. Cappie and Gigi had caught up to them by then, Cappie’s “Whoa” clearly audible.

  “Hey!” Lorenzo said. “That’s a three-hundred-dollar digital.”

  “I don’t care if it’s the Hubble Telescope. You were told before you came out here no cameras.”

  “Yeah, but those could be any wild horses in the world. What’s the big secret?”

  Clint leaned toward the cowboy. “You know damn well and good.” He faced Gigi. “We made a mistake bringing this kid along.” He turned Buttercup toward another one of the wranglers, a dark-haired man Sam had been introduced to, but whose name she couldn’t remember. “Craig, escort Mr. Villanueva back to the ranch, would you.”

  “Hey, man,” Lorenzo said, “you don’t have to send me back. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  “Not good enough,” Clint said, swinging a leg over the front of his saddle and sliding off like it was a lounge chair. He picked up the camera. “You’re going back, and I’m keeping this.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Watch me.”

  “Clint,” Gigi said. “Don’t be so hard on the kid. He made a mistake, that’s all.”

  “I don’t care. I want him off my ranch. Now.”

  “And I want my camera.”

  “No.”

  “It’s worth a lot of money,” Lorenzo said.

  “I’ll reimburse you for it.”

  Lorenzo looked at Gigi as if hoping she might take his side again. She didn’t.

  “Come on,” Craig said, adjusting the cowboy hat on his head. “Let’s get started down the hill. We have to make it to the camp before sundown.”

  Lorenzo glanced in her direction next. Sam just shook her head. The idiot should have known better.

  “Go,” Clint all but yelled.

  Lorenzo jerked on the reins, and Sam winced. She could tell he’d hurt his horse’s mouth.

  “Damn fool,” Clint said, bending and picking up Buttercup’s reins.

  No one said a word.

  “He’s lucky I didn’t knock him off his horse.”

  Gigi cleared her throat, eyes on her grandson. “Me thinks the man doth protest too much.”

  Clint swung back to her, the heel of his left boot digging into the ground. “Aw, what the hell is that supposed to mean?” he asked, wrapping the strap of the camera around his wrist.

  “Nothing,” Gigi said, all innocence.

  Sam looked between the two. She wasn’t the only one to stare at them. Obviously there was more to this conversation than met the eye.

  “Let’s go, everyone,” Clint said, stuffing the camera in his pack. He didn’t even use the stirrup when he swung up onto his horse, something Sam had always wished she could learn to do. ’Course, Clint’s horse wasn’t seventeen-plus hands.<
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  They rode off, the jingle of the chuckwagon’s harness following in their wake. Nothing could have spoiled Sam’s mood. Not Clint’s standoffish behavior earlier, not the altercation with Lorenzo, nothing. She’d seen the horses. Finally.

  Their base camp was at the foot of the same mountain they’d just traversed, at one end of a long valley. Sam could tell in an instant that the Baer family had been there many, many times before. There were logs surrounding the sleeping area, their trunks long since stripped of branches and bark, the wood beneath it the dark gray of a silver fox. A blackened area of earth marked where countless fires had been. The shore of the lake wasn’t far away, either, nor the line of trees they’d just emerged from. It was like an oasis in the hills.

  “There’s horse pens over there,” Clint said, pointing. Sam turned. To her left the mountains formed a V. A long time ago, someone had built a massive corral, the boards blending in with the surroundings to the point that she hadn’t noticed it at first. On purpose, she realized. The neutral material camouflaged the chutes in such a way that the wild horses probably wouldn’t see them until the last minute, making them easier to catch.

  “You can put Coaster in one of them,” Clint added. “Unless you think he’ll be okay in with the other horses.”

  She almost reminded him that Coaster was technically his horse, but she didn’t want to do that. Not when his mood seemed to be improving by the minute. Maybe he’d just been stressed about getting to camp. Maybe that’s why he’d spent the better part of a day ignoring her.

  “I’d rather keep him separate,” she said. “At least until he gets used to the other horses.”

  Clint nodded, but his attention was quickly taken by one of the cowhands. Left to her own devices, Sam made quick work of stripping the tack off Coaster so she could turn him loose in one of the handful of pens that lined the corral.

  “You were a doll today,” she told the horse, giving him a pat before turning back to camp.

  “What can I do to help?” she asked Gigi.

  Gigi smiled. “You know, I love a person who’s not afraid of work. Go on into the back of the wagon. We’ll need help moving the bags of horse feed. There’s a collapsible cart in there you can use to move them around.”

  That was the start of about an hour’s worth of work. Each bag needed to be ripped open and a bucket of alfalfa cubes scooped out and fed to each horse. Fortunately, rain-fed water troughs were already filled because for a moment Sam had worried about having to lug water from the lake.

  By the time everything was unpacked, the tents set up and the horses settled, it was nearing sunset. Sam dreaded the thought of doing this all over again in another location two days from now when they went after the second group of mustangs.

  “Oh, dear me, no,” Gigi said, her gray hair picking up the sun’s waning rays so that it looked like liquid silver. “This is base camp. The three herds of mustangs we manage all live within a few miles of here. This herd actually lives in the same pasture as our corrals—here.” She pointed to the ground. “The other two live through various gates to the north and south of us. We’ll close off this one in the back pasture when we bring the other two herds for sorting and vetting.”

  “So the horses will stay in the same corral for the next week?” For some reason she’d been under the impression they’d be moving camp every night.

  Gigi nodded. “Someone will bring fresh supplies for us this weekend, but we’re putting down stakes right here.”

  “Wow,” Sam said. It all seemed simple. She’d had it in her head that it’d be a convoluted mess to get up and gather three herds of horses. Instead it sounded like the hard part would be going out and finding them.

  She lifted her hand to her eyes to look out across the lake.

  And couldn’t breathe.

  Had her field of vision shrunk?

  It was hard to say, but she knew of one surefire way to tell. She’d gotten good at perfecting the maneuver. Pulse pounding, she lifted her thumb, bringing it up to her line of sight. In that way she could gauge the amount of space between the edge of her nail and the area she was blind.

  It had narrowed; no doubt about it.

  The breath left her. What did this mean? It had narrowed a lot, and so quickly. Always before it’d been so slow as to be barely noticeable.

  Okay, no need to panic, she told herself. She would check tomorrow, try to gauge how quickly it was shrinking. If at all. It might not shrink again for days, maybe weeks, with luck, months.

  She tipped her head up. If that wasn’t the case she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

  SHE LOOKED SAD. Staring at the horses across the lake, Clint would have thought she’d be excited.

  “Go to her, Clint,” Gigi said, walking up and placing a hand on his shoulder. “She needs you.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” he admitted.

  “Can what?” she asked.

  “Be there for her,” he said, glancing down at his grandmother. “You were right earlier, I’ve started to…” He shook his head. “I really care for her.”

  “Of course you do,” Gigi said softly. “You wouldn’t be the man you are today if you didn’t have a great capacity for love.”

  “I didn’t say I was in love with her.”

  She gave him a smile that said…yet.

  He just shook his head again. This was when he either backed off or moved forward, eyes wide-open.

  What a stupid analogy to use.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  Gigi’s smile was nearly as bright as the moon beginning to rise. It hung in the blue sky to her right. “Take your time. Dinner won’t be ready for another few minutes yet. Tell her you understand.”

  He didn’t understand, though. There was no way to ever comprehend what she must be feeling right now.

  But he sure as hell wanted to try.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You want to get closer?”

  Sam jumped. “Can we?” she asked, looking up at him. Her butt had grown cold sitting there by the edge of the lake.

  “Sure,” he said, glancing over at his grandmother. “Dinner won’t be ready for a while. We have some time. We just have to go above the tree line. Try and stay downwind of them. Come on. I’ll take you there.”

  Sam’s spirits lifted when he held out his hand. She stared at his fingers in question, wondering what he wanted until it suddenly dawned on her that he was simply trying to take her hand.

  She smiled, and placed hers in his.

  “Clint-and-Sam-kissing-in-a—”

  Sam heard the thud of a hand connecting with flesh from where she stood.

  “Oww,” someone cried.

  They both turned in time to see Dean clutching his midsection. “I was just teasing,” he said to Elliot.

  The old cowboy was whittling a piece of wood. “That’ll teach you to open your mouth,” the man said, absolutely deadpan.

  Sam looked back at Clint and started laughing. He smiled, too, but only after staring at her intently for a moment.

  “Come on,” he said, squeezing her hand.

  He led her to the tree line, where the two of them had to climb before they were far enough into the trees that the horses wouldn’t spot them. The brush was thicker here, Clint guided her along an animal trail. Above them, branches stretched toward the darkening sky. They had to duck those branches from time to time, and as they neared the end of the lake, Clint motioned with a finger that she should be quiet.

  Her pulse quickened.

  She knew they were close, could hear their soft snorts through the trees. One of them stomped a hoof—probably a fly on its leg. And then the two of them began to slowly move down the hill, through the trees and shrubs, Clint motioning her behind him. They moved silently, stealthily until, at last, the trees began to thin again and there—right there—not more than fifty feet away, was a buckskin mare, her black tail so long it dragged on the ground. Clint stopped at the trunk
of a tree and they squatted to watch.

  Thirty or so head grazed peacefully in front of them.

  Oh, Clint.

  She didn’t say the words—of course she didn’t—but she told him with her eyes. They hadn’t been spotted yet…Around back of the mare a colt with big brown eyes peered in their direction, ears pricked forward, then shifting back, then forward again. Had it caught their scent?

  She shared a grin with Clint. The old Clint. Not the surly, standoffish man who’d taken his place for the past twenty-four hours.

  Hooves thundered. Atlas was running toward them. Had the big stallion spotted them? If he had, what would he do? The horse paused by the edge of the clearing, nostrils flaring.

  Atlas had their scent. Clint slowly stood as Atlas’s head lifted. Sam tensed, wondering if the stallion would come at them, teeth bared. But Clint had been raised around this horse, she realized, he must know what it would or would not do. Sure enough, Atlas wheeled around, the mares nearest to him shying away. In a second they were all running, the tiny baby horse Sam had been laughing over squealing and trailing in its mother’s wake.

  “That was incredible,” Sam said as she also stood, her hand at her chest. “I mean, just incredible. I will never, ever forget that.”

  “Never?” he asked.

  She faced him, the thing that always danced through the air whenever they were together returning.

  “Never.”

  “Sam,” he said, his eyes more blue than she’d ever seen them. It must be the backdrop of the lake. Or the sky, which was changing from blue to purple to deep, vivid orange near the mountaintops. “I think I owe you an apology.”

  “No,” she said softly. “You don’t, Clint.”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “I couldn’t deal with it, not at first.”

  “Deal with what?”

  “Your going blind,” he admitted.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am. But it’s not like I’m dying. I don’t have a terminal disease, Clint. I’m going blind, and that terrifies me, but I’ll make it through.”

  He didn’t say anything. Sam’s pulse picked up with each second of silence.