"They fight," I said.
He looked at me. “Yeah." The response, the hint of worry in his eyes, was too loaded for me to deal with right now.
Hunter had pushed ahead toward a gap in the brush where a game trail cut toward the creek—the route he'd identified walking the edges last night with Jack. He moved through the terrain with the ease of someone who'd mapped it on foot, and I saw Jack watching him with the quiet attention of a man who recognized skill in someone else.
The morning warmed as we pushed deeper. Open pasture gave way to scrubby mesquite, then denser brush near the water. Visibility dropped. The trees pressed closer, throwing shadow even as the sun climbed.
That was when things started to change.
My mare tensed first. Subtle—the slight bunching of muscle beneath the saddle, ears flicking forward and locking. She was the calmest horse in our string, bombproof, the animal I'd trained myself because I needed a mount I could trust in any situation.
When she got nervous, I paid attention.
"Easy, girl," I murmured, tightening my reins. "Easy."
The brush thickened as we neared the creek. Mesquite gave way to cedar, and the undergrowth closed in until you couldn't see more than fifteen feet into the tree line. Perfect for hiding.
We spread out to cover ground—standard tracking procedure. Daddy took the far left, working the tree line near the property boundary. Wyatt ranged right, checking fencing. Hunter pushed ahead along his game trail. The hands filled the gaps.
Jack drifted toward the rear. I noticed the way he positioned himself—relaxed but scanning, eyes moving in a pattern that wasn't random. Something about it nagged at me. Not ranch work. Something else. Something trained.
I noted it and kept riding.
The creek bed opened up ahead—a wide, sandy stretch where the water ran shallow between eroded banks. Fresh rooting. Torn earth that glistened dark and wet in the morning light, hours old at most. The sounder had been here last night. Right where the cameras said they'd be.
I dismounted. My boots hit soft ground, and I crouched, studying the tracks. Five distinct sets overlapped in the mud near the water. One significantly larger—a mature boar, from the depth and spread. The rooting was aggressive, purposeful. These animals owned this ground.
I pulled my radio. "Daddy, I've got fresh sign at the creek crossing. Five sets minimum, one large boar. They were here last?—"
A bird stopped singing.
Not gradually—mid-note. Like someone had pressed a button.
One second, the tree line was alive with the normal background noise of a Texas creek bottom—mockingbirds,wrens, the constant drone of late-season insects—and the next it was silent. Not quiet. Silent.
My hand stopped on the radio. I'd felt this before. Four years ago, standing in this same creek bottom, watching my father raise his rifle toward a brush line that had gone wrong in exactly this way.
My mare felt it too. She was ten feet behind me, where I'd dropped her reins—ground-tied, trained to stay—but she wasn't staying. She was backing up, ears flat, whites showing around her eyes, every line of her body screaming run.
"Easy," I said. My voice came out wrong. Too thin.
The mare screamed.
Not a whinny. Not a snort. A full-throated scream of animal terror that split the morning and sent birds exploding from cover in every direction. She reared—hooves slashing, eyes rolling white—and the reins were suddenly alive in my hands, ripping through my fingers like greased rope.
I was already falling.
My boot caught the stirrup for one horrible second—the world tilting, the horse lunging sideways, my body whipping with nothing to hold. Then the leather gave, and I was free, hitting the ground hard on my left side, rolling instinctively to get clear of the hooves.
My ankle folded under me. Wrong angle, full weight, and the pain was immediate—white and electric, a spike driven through the joint. I heard myself cry out and hated the sound.
The mare bolted. Two hundred yards of open ground covered in seconds. Gone. And with her, my rifle—strapped across the saddlebags, now disappearing at a dead run.
I was on the ground. Sixty yards from the nearest rider. With a sounder bedded somewhere in the brush line ten feet to my left.
And the silence was absolute.
I drew my sidearm. The .357 on my hip—six rounds. Which sounded like plenty until I remembered a boar's skull plate could deflect a handgun round like a pebble off a windshield. I needed heavy rifle rounds to drop a boar. Center mass, close range, and even then, sometimes they didn't stop.
