Adrian stopped so abruptly that Wyatt Miller’s bad knee struck the saddle horn. The red roan stood across the trail, watching a narrow cut in the rock above them. Wyatt turned him toward the valley. Adrian turned right back. They had spent three days gathering cattle before the weather closed in. A storm was building over the Bitterroots, and Wyatt wanted his own stove, a dry pair of socks, and the gate of the Double K shut behind him. His horse wanted to climb a ridge that barely offered a path for deer.
The last heifer had fought the rope that morning, and Wyatt’s hands still ached from it. He had promised himself he would be off the mountain before the first snow. On the lower trail, their tracks would be easy to follow even after dark. Adrian’s choice would take them above the timber, where the light already seemed to be draining out of the day.
“We’re going home,” Wyatt told him. He eased the reins against the gelding’s neck. Twelve years together ought to count for something. Adrian braced his feet and would not move.
Wind came down the pass with the sharp mineral smell that preceded snow. Wyatt searched the trees above them. Nothing disturbed the gray branches. He loosened the strap over the revolver at his hip anyway. A hungry bear could still be moving this late in November, and a cougar needed no invitation from the season.
Adrian lifted his head. His ears stayed aimed at the height of the ridge, his nostrils working. He made a low sound Wyatt knew from the barn, when another horse came in after dark.
“You hear somebody?” Wyatt asked.
The gelding started uphill before Wyatt could settle the question. Loose shale shifted beneath the shoes on his front feet. Wyatt could have forced him around on level ground. Here, with the drop beside them and Adrian set on going, a fight over the reins seemed the fastest way to lose them both. He gave the horse enough room to place his feet and followed the line of his ears.
Wyatt counted the switchbacks at first. At the fourth, the main trail had disappeared behind a shoulder of stone, and he could no longer see the valley. He turned once to fix the way back in his mind. A broken pine on the right, pale granite below it, then a dark strip of timber. The markers looked too much alike, but they were all he had.
The deer track disappeared under fallen branches. Adrian stepped over one trunk, then climbed a slope of broken stone where Wyatt had to lean against the horse’s neck. Once a hoof slipped, and the roan came down on a knee. Wyatt felt a moment of weightlessness before Adrian pushed himself upright. He sat back and nearly turned them around.
He had ridden Adrian through calving nights and spring floods. He knew the difference between a horse trying to get away from a thing and one determined to reach it. For the better part of an hour, Adrian kept choosing the climb. Wyatt let him, though the decision grew harder to defend with every yard.
Near the top, a wall of limestone broke the wind. The track widened enough for the horse to stand squarely. Wyatt dismounted, grateful for solid ground under his boots, and saw an opening beneath an overhang. Pine limbs had been pushed into it. A blue tarp lay half buried under them, its edges held down by stones.
The tarp was the first thing up there that could not be explained by weather. No hunter would have chosen that shelf with a horse, and there was no pack or bedroll outside to suggest a camp ready for winter. Wyatt ran a hand over Adrian’s damp neck. The gelding had climbed until his sides were heaving, but he kept his attention on the shelter.
Someone had built a fire there. A few blackened rocks enclosed ash that the wind could not quite reach. Wyatt touched one with his glove. Cold. Beyond it, the shelter was too dark to see into.
“Hello?” he called. “Anybody in there?”
The tarp did not move. Adrian walked past him, lowered his nose to a gap between the tarp and the rock, and breathed into it. Wyatt heard a short intake of air, so faint he might have mistaken it for the wind. He held still. A hand came out from beneath the blue edge and found the soft part of Adrian’s muzzle.
Wyatt’s fingers closed around the grip of his revolver and then released it. He could see the hand now: scraped knuckles, darkened fingertips, a tremor that ran all the way into the wrist. The horse allowed the fingers to rest against him. Wyatt crouched where whoever lay inside could see him.
“My name’s Wyatt. I’m going to lift this.” He waited, then peeled the stiff tarp away.
A woman was curled against the back wall under a dirty blanket. A man’s canvas coat hung loose around her shoulders. One boot was gone. Pine branches had been tied along her right leg, and burlap covered the foot beneath them. Her hair had fallen across most of her face. She recoiled from the light and from Wyatt, pressing herself into stone she could not pass through.
He kept his hands in view. “Easy. I came with the horse. That’s all.”
The woman studied him through a narrow opening in the tarp. Wyatt removed one glove and laid it on the ground beside him. She looked at the uncovered hand, then at Adrian. Only when the horse nudged the blanket near her shoulder did she let Wyatt draw the tarp back the rest of the way. He moved slowly enough that she could see every motion.
Adrian put his nose near her again. She caught a fistful of his mane and held on while Wyatt gently moved the hair from her eyes. He remembered those eyes behind the counter of the feed store, amused when Adrian tried to get at a sack of oats Wyatt had already paid for. He had seen them again at the county fair, narrowed against the summer sun.
“Clara?”
Clara Hayes had been missing since the flood in September. Her pickup had struck a bridge piling below the canyon road; the shattered cab was empty when they pulled it out. The sheriff’s volunteers searched the banks for two weeks. Wyatt had spent four of those days looking among the deadfall himself. No one found her. At the October memorial, Tom Hayes stood beside an empty casket, gripping his hat so tightly that the brim bent under his fingers.
Wyatt had gone to the memorial because he had searched and because he knew Tom well enough to speak to him in the feed store. He had had no words worth saying at the church. The river had given them a truck and no body, and each day without Clara made the answer seem more certain. Looking at her now, he could recall the precise sound of water against the logs where he had ridden past. He had searched below the bridge. She was above him all along.
Now Clara gripped Adrian’s mane with the same desperate strength. Wyatt said his name again and told her where he was from. She watched his mouth, then his bare face, as if the rest of him might vanish when she blinked. Her eyes filled. She drew a breath that caught in her throat.
“Tom?” she asked.
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