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“Where’d he go?”

Willow lowered her binoculars. “I lost him.”

Jodie lifted hers again, scanning the haze. Horses appeared and vanished as the dust shifted. A palomino. Two bays. A paint. With all the dust, she couldn’t be sure who was who. But no sign of the foal.

Where are you?

Then a small dun shape burst out from behind two mares and cut across the group.

“There.” Jodie pointed. “There he is.”

Willow found him at the same moment. “He’s back with her.”

Jodie picked up her chair and sat down again because her knees had become unreliable.

Do your job.

She marked Bramble and Frost on her sheet.

The rest of the herd moved closer. Now Jodie could identify more of them without binoculars.

“Jet. Black stallion. Confirmed.” She checked his name and raised her camera long enough to take several shots.

Willow called, “Red paint mare, coming left.”

“That’s Marbles.” Jodie found her on the list. “Pepper’s band originally, moved to Jet in June. Confirmed.”

Another check, another photograph.

A chestnut mare came through behind her with a foal glued to her flank.

“Cider. Confirmed.” Jodie lifted the binoculars. “And her colt.”

Then the dust shifted, and she saw the second one.

He was on Cider’s off side, half a length back, running in her shadow the way a foal runs in his mother’s. He was smaller than the colt at her shoulder. He was all ribs showing through a dull coat that should have been slick as a seal in August.

“Willow.”

“I see him.”

Two months of head counts. Jet’s band, approx. fourteen, one mare possibly w/ two foals, distance too great for individual ID. Jodie had never once entered it as confirmed, and she’d told herself that was discipline.

It wasn’t. It was her refusing to give up hope.

Because a bay foal at four hundred yards through heat shimmer and dust could be anything. And as long as it could be anything, Luna could still be standing in some drainage ditch nobody had run yet, fat and bored and wondering what all the fuss was about.

Now her foal was close enough to count.

“Echo,” Jodie said. “Luna’s colt. Confirmed.” Her own voice sounded like it came from somewhere else.

A mare doesn’t leave her foal.

She’d known that since she was six years old. She’d watched her father pull a colt out of a wash at two in the morning with the dam standing over the hole screaming at him the whole time, because that was what they did, they did not leave, they did not ever leave⁠—

Jodie wrote ECHO—bay colt, Luna’s—w/ Cider, poor condition, and then had to put the pen down and press the heel of her hand hard against her mouth before she could pick it up again.

A mare doesn’t leave her foal.