I’ve watched this woman for eight years. Yet, I haven’t, in eight years, sat in the same dirt with her at six in the morning while she read a book.
The mustang takes a step. One step. Toward her.
The first step toward a human being he's taken in six weeks.
She doesn't react. Doesn't look up. Doesn't even acknowledge it.
She turns a page and the mustang takes another step.
I sit on my bucket and I watch a wild thing decide that this woman is safe to walk toward, and I think—for the first time clearly that she knows what she's doing.
This ismymethod.
She sits the way I sit. She breathes the way I breathe.
She doesn't ask the horse for anything because she knows the horse doesn't have anything to give yet, and asking is the thing that keeps a wild horse wild.
She didn't learn this from Banshee. Banshee doesn't sit at dawn.
Banshee works horses in the afternoon when the heat slows them down.
He's said it a hundred times at church. I get them tired before I get them quiet.
I get them quiet first.
She closes the paperback an hour and four minutes after she opened it.
The mustang is fifteen feet from her now. Not fifteen feet from the rail. Fifteen feet from her body.
He's never been that close to a human since he came off the trailer six weeks ago.
She doesn't look at him. Just stands up. Slowly.
The kind of slow you stand up when you've been sitting cross-legged for an hour, and your knees crack, and your hip catches.
She picks up her coffee, walks toward the gate and walks past me.
Close.
Too close—the round pen is wide, she has thirty feet of dirt on either side of me, and she walks within a foot of my shoulder on her way to the gate.
Her arm brushes mine.
Just the brush. Just the friction of cotton on denim.
It hits me in the femur.
I don't move. Don't turn my head. Don't let any part of my body think about the contact on the outside.
But on the inside, it hits.
She stops at the gate and looks back.
Not at me. At the mustang.
The mustang has come three more steps closer to where she was sitting.
He's standing there in the middle of the pen like a horse confused about why his territory has changed.
