Part 4
She found Maggie three hundred yards up, on the little flat bench below the dead cottonwood.
The mare wasn’t grazing; there was nothing up there to graze. She stood over a patch of pale, hard ground with her head low and her ears pointed at the dirt. As Laurel came up the last of the slope, breathing hard, Maggie lifted her right front hoof and struck the ground, dragged it back toward her chest, and struck again. This was nothing like a horse banging a gate for supper. She worked at the dirt slowly and deliberately, spending strength she hadn’t gotten back yet.
Laurel stood ten feet away and watched her do it four more times. Then she buckled the halter on and led her down, and Maggie came without argument, the way she did everything.
Laurel reset the brace post that same morning and was late to the hay outfit’s job.
The next morning the west fence was intact and Maggie was up on the bench anyway. She had walked the whole length of the west line to the low corner where the ground dipped and the bottom wire sagged, and she had stepped over it. Laurel found her on the same patch, striking at the same dirt. The morning after that, Laurel had tightened the low corner and Maggie had gone through a gap by the old corral gate that Laurel hadn’t thought a horse could fit through. She found her on the bench at dawn, standing over the same ground.
Three mornings in a row, a twenty-four-year-old mare who could barely keep weight on had climbed a rock slope to dig at dirt that grew nothing.
That afternoon Laurel sat in the truck outside the hay outfit’s shop and called Whitcomb. She told him she thought Maggie was going senile. She’d read that old horses could get confused, fixate on things, wander. She said she needed to know if it was time to have the conversation they hadn’t had yet.
He drove out Wednesday and walked up the hill with her. He was sixty-one and took the slope slower than she did, and when he got to the bench he stood there catching his breath and watching the mare for a long time without speaking. Then he checked her. Eyes, ears, the way she tracked his hand, her reflexes, her feet. He had her walk a tight circle and back up.
“That’s not where I’d start looking,” he said finally. “Her head’s clear. Clearer than mine some days.”
“Then what is she doing?”
He looked at the bench, at the dead cottonwood, at the draw below with its gray willows. “Horses keep a map of country longer than people like to think,” he said. “Water, a gate, a trail through bad ground. You move a horse a hundred miles and bring it back ten years later, it’ll go straight to the creek crossing the people forgot about.” He scratched his jaw. “She may not be confused at all. She might be remembering something.”
Laurel went back up that evening alone, with a flashlight, and for the first time she looked at the ground instead of the horse.
The bench was flatter than the slope around it, which she’d always taken for nature. The rocks on it were wrong. There were maybe a dozen, none bigger than a loaf of bread, and they didn’t lie the way rocks lie when weather drops them; they sat in a shallow arc. She paced out twenty steps and looked back, and in the flashlight the arc became two sides of a rectangle, with the rest of it buried or scattered. She knelt and yanked a fistful of cheatgrass out by the roots. Underneath, the soil was full of small sharp gravel, gray and angular, nothing like the rotten tan rock on the rest of the hill.
She was back at first light with a shovel and a pick.
The top eight inches were baked so hard she chopped instead of dug. Below that it loosened into the same gray fill, and at about two feet the shovel blade rang. She dropped to her knees and cleared it with her hands.
What came up under her fingers was concrete, gray and plain, poured and troweled by somebody a long time ago. It had a rounded lip, and along one edge the lip had been worn glassy-smooth, the way years of animals leaning over to drink will polish anything.
It took her the rest of that day and half of the next, with Tess hauling buckets of fill away in a garden cart, to open it up. What she had was a concrete stock tank, about ten feet long and three feet wide, packed full of gravel and dirt and a few rotted fence boards. Down at the bottom, the concrete was banded with white mineral rings, one above another, like the marks on a bathtub. At the north end the lip had broken off, and out of the wall came a galvanized pipe, two inches across, running off underground almost due north, toward the property line. At the south end a second, smaller pipe left the tank downhill, toward the draw where the willows had died.
She followed the north pipe with a steel probe bar, driving it down every few feet and listening for the ring. About forty feet along she hit a small concrete collar with a valve set inside it, the wheel rusted and crusted solid. Beyond the valve the pipe kept going. She followed it as far as her own fence, where the probe still rang, and stood with the bar in her hands looking across the wire at the long green shoulder of Ashby Ridge pasture rising north into the hills.
Whitcomb came out again because she called him and wouldn’t say why. He stood down in the hole with his hands on his hips.
“Gravity stock water,” he said. “My dad helped put in two of these. You’d tap a spring or a seep uphill, run pipe down to tanks, let the slope do the work. Every outfit in this valley had something like it before electric pumps got cheap. Most of them got abandoned when people drilled wells.” He looked up at her. “But if this was fed, it was fed from somewhere. And somebody would’ve had to own the right to take it.”
Bea Halvorsen was eighty-two and ran a dozen goats on ten acres down the county road, and she’d lived in the valley all her life except for two years in Boise she still talked about as a mistake. Laurel drove down Saturday morning with a coffee cake and asked her, almost as an afterthought, whether she knew who’d owned Laurel’s ground before the couple she’d bought it from.
Bea didn’t have to think. “That was Sweetwater,” she said. “Hal Pruitt’s place. He raised good horses there thirty years, and when he died the kids sold it off in pieces. Two thousand six, maybe seven.”
“Do you remember anything about the water?”
Bea laughed. “Everybody remembers the water. In the bad years in the eighties, when people were selling cows they couldn’t water, Hal Pruitt never worried a day. He had a spring that never quit. Piped it right down into his pastures.”
“Where was the spring?”
Bea pointed through her kitchen window, past her driveway, north to that same green shoulder of ground. “Up there. Just over your line.” She paused. “Ashby land now. Has been since the estate sold.”
Laurel took out her phone. She’d taken a photo of Maggie’s left shoulder two weeks before, meaning to ask Whitcomb about the old freeze brand, faint white hairs in a shape she’d never been able to read. She held it out.
Bea put on her glasses and looked for a long time.
“Well, I’ll be,” she said. “That’s Hal’s brand. The S over the wavy line.” She handed the phone back. “The Ashby boy used to work summers for Hal when he was in high school. Started half his colts for him.” Her eyes went back to the photo. “Where on earth did you get a Sweetwater mare?”
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