Page 23 of The Wrangler and the Tenderfoot

“Out of Houston, or out of the mess?”

He looked down and ran his thumb along the seam of the table. “Either.”

I finished my water and watched as a kid launched a snow cone at his brother across the next row of tables. “You don’t really get out,” I said. “You just learn to call it something else.”

He nodded, and for a while, we watched the world together. The crowd noise ebbed and flowed. “Want to walk?” he asked.

We did. We looped the perimeter, passing livestock pens and the makeshift stage where a teenage band was butchering Tom Petty covers for a crowd of three. We ended up at the edge of the parking lot, where the cars shimmered in the heat, and the sky pressed down so hard it made my head throb.

He leaned against the tailgate of an old Chevy. “You want to get out of here?”

Oh boy, did I. But should I go? It took me a second to answer.

He saw the hesitation and said, “Just for a bit. There’s a creek half a mile down the road. It’s cold, and nobody’s there this time of day.”

I weighed the options, how it would look to the town, to the Colemans, to myself. I said, “You always take girls to the creek on the first date?”

He shook his head. “Only the ones I can’t stop thinking about.”

It wasn’t a line. Reid wasn’t the kind of man to deliver lines.

The creek was more of a trickle, but the water was clear, and the banks shaded by low, gnarled trees. He found a flat rock, sat, and motioned for me to join him. I did. We took our boots off and dangled our feet in the water.

“Best way to cool down,” he said.

He didn’t reach for me, didn’t move closer, he just sat and watched the water.

I watched the way the light caught on his arms, the way the sweat beaded and ran in tiny rivers. I wanted to touch him but didn’t, because I wasn’t sure what would happen if I did. “Did you always know you’d stay here?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I used to think I’d leave and never come back. Thought there was something better, somewhere else.” He shrugged. “Turns out, there’s not.”

Sitting out here, feet in the water, listening to the rustle of some small animal, I believed him. We sat there until the heat started to fade, until the sounds of the rodeo came back on the wind, a distant echo of a world we’d both temporarily left.

When he drove me to the Colemans’, we didn’t talk. At the entrance, he stopped the truck, hands loose on the wheel. I just got out and shut the door behind me. I watched as he drove off, his taillights fading toward the gate.

Inside, the air was cool. The Colemans were in the living room, watching the local news, faces neutral. Cordelia noted my return, then went back to her knitting.

Nobody said a word about where I’d been. Nobody needed to. It was none of their damn business anyway. I went up to my room, peeled off my shirt, and stood in front of the fan. I could still feel the press of his hand against mine, the way he looked at me like I was the only thing in the world.

Chapter 9: Jennie

The next afternoon, I finally had time to open the drone. I pulled out my pocket knife and opened the box to find one fully-assembled BisonEye Ultra UAV, matte-black with anti-glare finishing, and an extra set of rotors in case the Hill Country crosswinds took their shot. It had encrypted transmission, satellite fallback, and real-time target classification by size and heat signature.

The only manual was printed on onion-skin paper, the pages stuck together with a faint industrial tang. I scanned it, then powered the unit. The status lights blinked a bored green. Good.

I toggled the interface on my laptop and dropped in the first set of coordinates, the north boundary, then the creek, then the Coleman edge that wedged against Maddox land. I set the filters for “large mammals, bipedal, and vehicle” and capped the alert protocol to avoid every flock of whitetails or errant coyote from blowing up my phone.

I headed out to my truck, then drove a little ways down the county road until I was butted up to Coleman land but out of sight of the main ranch. They didn’t need to know what I was doing. I set the BisonEye on the tailgate, checked the wind, then hit launch. The drone spun up, smooth as silk. It lifted straight into the blue and shot east, already mapping a grid.

On the screen, the world peeled open in high-contrast video. The drone went past the cows, flagging them. I pressed a few buttons on the app on my phone to tell it to ignore cows. Then it flagged the movement of a red F250 as it crept along the fence line west of the riverbed. For the next hour, I let the BisonEye sweep the ranch in concentric rings, each one tighter than the last, each pass dialing down the motion filters. It was the sort of obsessive overkill that made my brain relax. If I could make the machines do the watching, maybe I could stop waiting for the world to catch me sleeping.

A couple of times, the drone flagged a “possible human,” but each turned out to be a deer or a twisted fence post. Around noon, I checked the telemetry and found the drone was burning battery too fast. The July humidity turned the air into syrup and forced the unit to overwork to keep altitude. I set the drone to “glide-and-hover” mode, let it fall to standby, and called it back for recharge.

It came back over the ridgeline, silent and small as a vulture, then dropped onto the tailgate with a carefulness that made me think, not for the first time, that human pilots were about to be as useless as telephone switchboard operators.

I popped in the spare battery, which was thankfully fully charged, and fired off a test run along the creek. The drone hugged the terrain, capturing every gate, every possible crossing, every shadow cast by the live oaks.

Halfway through the next sweep, the drone flagged an anomaly, a heat signature, four legs, over seventy kilos. At first, I thought it was one of the horses broken loose, but the shape was wrong, and the movement too deliberate. I zoomed in, waited for the frame to resolve, and saw it, gray, low to the ground, moving in the hour before dusk with the certainty of a thing that belonged here. The wolf. I knew it was real!