Part 2
Wade took the cup from Noah before it tipped into his lap. There were questions he needed answered, but the boy was looking at the door as though someone might be standing on the other side.
“You’re staying by this stove for now,” Wade said. “That’s your whole job.”
Noah pulled his feet farther beneath the blankets.
The mare had raised her head. Wade brought her water in a shallow bucket and held it steady while she drank. Her muzzle left damp circles on his glove. When he checked beneath the blankets, he could see how narrow she was through the ribs, though her belly carried a rounded fullness that made him suspect she was in foal.
He kept that thought to himself.
The day went to small necessities. A cracked board let snow sift into the bedding, so he nailed a scrap over it. Tuck needed feeding and water. The stove needed wood. Every few minutes Wade crossed back to Noah, checked his hands, listened to his breathing, and found another reason to adjust a blanket.
By afternoon, a little color had returned to the boy’s cheeks. The mare began picking at her hay.
Noah watched her eat with such concentration that Wade set his own supper aside to look too.
“That suit you?” he asked.
“She’s not shaking so much.”
“No. She’s coming around.”
“My mama says the mountains keep stories in the wind.” Noah spoke without turning his head. “You can hear them if you’re quiet.”
Wade set another piece of wood in the stove. “We’ve had plenty to listen to.”
He didn’t ask where the boy’s mother was. Noah had barely managed the words he’d already given him.
Toward evening, Wade led Tuck to the trough and broke its new skin of ice. When he came back, Noah had moved close to the mare. He was kneeling in the straw, talking so softly that Wade couldn’t hear him from the door. The mare lowered her head until her muzzle nearly touched the boy’s hair.
Wade waited before stepping inside.
That night he dreamed Mara was standing at the kitchen table, shaking flour from a dish towel. She didn’t look toward him when she told him he couldn’t lock the door against everybody.
He woke on the barn floor with his hand closed around the rifle stock beside his bedroll. The stove had settled to red coals. Noah slept a few feet away, and the mare’s breathing came slow and regular from the bedding.
Wade released the rifle and reached for another split log.
By the next morning, Noah could sit without swaying. Wade gave him warm water and a piece of softened bread while he sorted oats into feed pans.
“She keeps looking at us,” Noah said.
The mare stood in the work corner, one hind foot resting, her eyes following Wade’s hands.
“Maybe she’s waiting to see what we do.”
Noah considered that. Then he smiled, briefly, into his cup.
Wade went out to repair the gate latch and shovel a path to the well. The exertion warmed him enough to loosen his coat. He could hear Noah moving around inside, the scrape of a bucket, the mare’s hoof settling into straw. He had become so accustomed to working without another sound that twice he stopped to listen.
When he returned, the boy was asleep against the mare’s side.
She stood with unusual care, keeping her feet planted while the child’s cheek rested against her coat. Wade crouched and eased a folded blanket beneath Noah’s head. The mare watched but didn’t move.
Up close, he found the curved scar beneath her mane again. The hair had grown poorly over it. He ran one finger beside the mark, never across it.
“Somebody didn’t deserve to get near you,” he said.
Her tail moved once.
That afternoon, Wade cleared the short path to the cabin behind the barn. He brought Noah inside and left the mare beneath the covered entrance, where she could see the boy through the open door while Wade carried in wood.
The cabin held a cot, a table, two chairs, and shelves he hadn’t dusted since autumn. Noah paused beside the table. On the shelf above it stood a photograph of Mara and Adam, taken during a summer when nobody had thought to count the summers left.
“My wife and boy,” Wade said.
Noah looked at him.
“They died a while back.”
“I’m sorry.”
Wade turned the oatmeal with a spoon. “Thank you.”
He set a bowl in front of Noah. Outside, the mare nosed the doorframe, leaving a wet mark in the dust.
By sunset the boy had fallen asleep beneath a quilt on the cot. Wade sat on the porch with coffee cooling between his hands. The mare stood in the sheltered paddock adjoining the barn. When he shifted his boot, she flinched before she could stop herself.
He thought of Noah’s hands, wrapped in scraps instead of gloves. Of the old rope injuries. Of a mother’s order to run.
The mare lifted her head toward the cabin window.
Wade finished the cold coffee and went to check the boy.
He searched for tracks again the following morning. He followed the shallow draw to the pines, then worked back toward the fence, reading every patch of disturbed snow he could find. Nothing remained that would tell him where Noah had come from. The storm had buried tire tracks and footprints alike.
At the barn, Noah was using Tuck’s old curry brush on the gray mare. His strokes were slow and serious.
“She likes this part.” He pointed to the thick hair at her shoulder.
“So does Tuck,” Wade said. “Though he’ll tell you he hates everything.”
The gelding lifted his head from his hay, and Noah laughed.
That evening, Wade opened the weather log he kept near the stove. He wrote down the snowfall, the fence damage, and the place where he’d found the child. Halfway through a sentence, Noah asked whether they were staying.
Wade rested the pencil on the page.
“You can stay while I get things sorted out.”
Noah looked around the little room. “I don’t want a different place.”
Wade shut the book. For a moment, he busied himself straightening its corners against the table edge.
“Then we’ll start here.”
At sunrise, while he saddled Tuck, the mare made a soft little sound from the paddock. Wade looked over the rail. Her ears moved toward him; she was waiting for the feed pan in his hand.
The name came without any effort.
“Lark,” he said.
Noah appeared in the barn doorway, dragging on his second boot.
“That her name?”
“Unless she objects.”
The mare put her muzzle into the pan.
“She doesn’t,” Noah said.
Wade spent the morning bracing a loose section of corral while Noah brushed Lark and offered her small pieces of apple. Tuck would tolerate Wade’s hands and very few others. Lark, with scars enough to justify biting everyone in reach, let the boy lean his forehead against her neck.
By noon, the road had been opened enough for Wade’s truck. He left Noah in the cabin with a full woodbox and strict instructions to remain close, then drove into Belvern for feed, groceries, and help.
He found sheriff Denise Rusk at the feed store, maneuvering a salt block onto a cart.
“Well,” she said, looking up. “I wondered if you’d decided town was beneath you.”
“Been busy.”
“That’ll be news to the coffee crowd.”
Wade took the other side of the block and helped her settle it. Then he told her about the storm, the mare, and the boy.
Denise stopped smiling before he finished.
“A first name’s all you have?”
“Noah. About six. Says his mother told him to run.”
“And you found him with a mustang.”
“Under her, mostly. She’d kept the wind off him.”
Denise pulled out her notebook. “We’ve been getting reports from the north ridge. Somebody’s taking horses out of the closed range. No authority to do it, and no record of where they’re going…”
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