Morning found me out of bed well before my usual, and grouchy with it. When I headed to the barn for morning feed, the soft whickers of the horses and banging of feed buckets helped, but I was still out of sorts. I guess I wasn’t the only one with a restless night, though. The tack room held the faint scent of saddle soap, and every saddle and headstall gleamed, polished and dust free. Made me glad I hadn’t come down here myself in the dark hours in search of distraction. The demons riding myback weren’t something I wanted to talk about with anyone, even another insomniac coworker.
Tiffany showed up ten minutes after me, and we worked in companionable silence, feeding and watering. Her husband, John, stuck his head in for a moment, said, “Morning, Seth,” kissed his wife, and headed up to the house. John was a man of few words, but an excellent foreman and organized as hell.
When Tiffany and I were done, we hiked over to the kitchen for our breakfasts. John had the whiteboard marked up with the day’s chores. Colby, six years younger than me, gave him a hard time about being old-school, but John laughed. Here in the mountains where phones lost signal and the internet got iffy in bad weather, there was a lot to be said for the reliability of writing things down.
Davis, the oldest of all of us except Kendrick, had cooked up a hot breakfast to balance out the worsening chill. I ate eggs and bacon and grits while listening to John about which pastures I was responsible for. Ahwan had done light duty the day before, so I’d ride her again.
When he was finished, I said, “Hey, thank you to whoever cleaned all the tack last night. Looks great. I hope you got some sleep after that.”
I expected someone to sheepishly admit they’d insomnia-cleaned, but the other hands looked at each other.
“I saw that, but it wasn’t me,” Tiffany said, and the others shook their heads.
Kendrick chuckled. “Not me either. Sitting in a chilly tack room in the middle of the night is not something my knees would thank me for.”
“Huh. Well, maybe we have brownies,” Colby joked.
“They did a great job. I’ll happily leave out a bowl of milk if they’ll do it again,” Tiffany suggested.
That niggled a little bell inside me, something I didn’t want to think about, so I didn’t. I ate three slices of toast, went to the barn, groomed and saddled Ahwan, and rode out. Patch trotted with me the first hundred yards, but I sent him back to the barn to take it easy.
We’d brought the cattle down a month ago to graze on the winter pastures, black shaggy beasts moving across the faded yellow-green landscape. We still hadn’t seen much snow, and the bare grass was nutrition enough for now. Soon, we’d be running round bales out to them in every kind of weather.
At the moment, our work revolved around checking on the beasts and the fences, and moving our strip wires every week. We kept the bred cows closer in, to watch them through pregnancy, and the yearling steers the farthest out. The whole job was making sure the cattle stayed healthy, and rotating through the pastures to minimize the amount of hay we had to feed.
Some of the work could be done on four-wheelers, especially down here on the flatter winter grounds. Colby loved to tool around on anything with an engine. For me, the chance to get out under the open sky on a well-trained cow horse fed my soul.
Austin was young, even younger than Colby. I wondered if he loved the roar of an engine too, but I remembered his hands steady and gentle as he groomed Ahwan. Good bet he was a horseman, like me…
I shut off my speculation about a man I’d probably never see again, and nudged Ahwan into a jog to check up on a limping heifer.
Nighttime came early in November. The other hands decided to hang out in the great room after dinner and watch a football game on TV. Tiffany and her husband had a bet going. I was too restless, despite the ache in my muscles that went with a full day in the saddle. Getting up and moving would be good for me. Ihopped in my truck and headed up to Selbyville for a piece of pie and a chat.
Old Pete was at his usual stool in Mama’s when I pushed my way inside out of the cold. He raised a hand to me, and I slid my ass onto the seat beside him.
“Seth Grant. Haven’t seen you in a while.” Pete held out a knobby-fingered hand and I shook it.
“Good to see you too.”
“Cattle all set for winter? Pastures in good shape?”
“Doin’ good,” I promised. Once a foreman, always a foreman, I guessed. “Trying more frequent rotations with the strip grazing this year.”
We spent about fifteen minutes talking cattle, ranching, and his arthritis, while I worked my way through a big piece of cherry pie, almost as perfect as Mama herself used to make. Caitlyn stopped by to ask if I wanted seconds, and I made sure to praise her baking. She smiled and that made me feel good. Sometimes I just needed to get off the ranch and see some new faces.
As I was getting ready to go, sticking a five-dollar tip under my plate, I couldn’t help asking, “Hey, we had a young guy come down to the ranch looking for work. Cowboy type, good-looking, skinny, black hair. I told him he was better off looking in town.”
“Yeah, he was in here day before yesterday,” Pete said. “Just a kid, three days out from his eighteenth birthday. He asked about the ranch. I told him it was the wrong time of year for hiring.”
“Did he come back here yesterday? Or today?”
“I ain’t seen him if he did.”
It shouldn’t have mattered. No doubt Austin went to Tolberg, like I suggested. There was no reason for me to feel uneasy.
Still, that chill of worry down my spine stuck with me that night as I showered without jerking off, and climbed into bed. I was exhausted and fell asleep quickly, but woke with a start a few hours later. The quality of the hush outside my cabin likelymeant snow. I sat up, listening intently, but nothing unexpected came to my ears. Somewhere, a cow lowed, just a low grumble of a sound, not the bellow that meant a coyote or cougar. A distant soft, repeated whistle marked a saw-whet owl calling, a beep that’d make a city dweller reach for their phone alarm, but faded into the background for me.
Nothing different.
