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Another check.

Then a bay mare moved into view with her head high and nostrils wide. Jodie recognized the narrow crescent-shaped scar on her right shoulder before she saw anything else.

“Mare seventy-two,” someone called.

Jodie’s pen stopped.

Sierra.

She knew that horse.

She knew Sierra had spent the last four years with Jet. She knew she’d lost a foal two springs ago and raised one successfully last year. She knew she liked the northern water hole and had a habit of standing hipshot in photographs as if every volunteer with a long lens was inconveniencing her personally.

And for days, nobody had seen her at all. Now here she was, alive and sound, and somebody was calling her by a number.

“Mare seventy-two,” the worker repeated.

Jodie wrote the number.

Then, beside it, she added:

72—SIERRA—bay mare, Jet band

She glared at the number and underlined the name once.

The horses needed numbers for the BLM. Horses changed bands. Names could be duplicated. Temporary holding required a system that every employee could follow without memorizing years of FHDH records.

Jodie understood every practical reason for the numbers.

She still hated it.

“Mare seventy-three.”

She looked up.

Who are you?

A buckskin mare entered the sorting lane. Jodie knew her before the number was finished—Selene. She wrote the name beside the number.

And the next.

And the next.

By late morning, dust coated her arms and had worked its way between her teeth. Her camera battery was down to forty percent. She switched to the spare before it became an emergency, drank half a bottle of water because Mac appeared beside her and handed it over without asking, then kept going.

He bent down close to her ear so she could hear him over the helicopter. “You okay?”

Jodie nodded without looking away from her list. “I’m working.”

He nodded. His hand touched the middle of her back for only a second before he moved away again.

She loved him for that. Loved that he completely understood that working kept the pain away.

Another group came through, smaller this time.

Jodie stood to get a better angle as horses entered the sorting alley. Sandra was farther down the observation line taking photographs with a long lens, staying well behind the marked boundary. One of the newer volunteers moved several yards to the right, trying to see around a parked stock trailer.

Harold spotted her immediately. “Ma’am. Back behind the marker, please.”