Linda Miller - Always A Cowboy

She was peering through a pair of binoculars, having taken no apparent notice of Drake, his dogs or his horse. Even with the rain pounding down, they should have been hard to miss, being only fifty yards away.

Whoever the lady turned out to be, he wasn’t giving her points for alertness.

He studied her as he approached, but there was nothing familiar about her. Drake would have recognized a local woman. Mustang Creek was a small community, and strangers stood out.

Anyway, the whole ranch was posted against trespassers, mainly to keep tourists on the far side of the fences. A lot of visiting sightseers had seen a few too many G-rated animal movies and thought they could cozy up to a bear, a bison or a wolf and snap a selfie to post on social media.

Some greenhorns were simply naive or heedless, but others were entitled know-it-alls, disregarding the warnings of park rangers, professional wilderness guides and concerned locals. It galled Drake, the risks people took, camping and hiking in areas that were off-limits, walking right up to the wildlife, as if the place were a petting zoo. The lucky ones got away alive, but they were often missing the family pet or a few body parts when it was over.

Drake had been on more than one search-and-rescue mission, organized by the Bliss County Sheriff’s Department, and he’d seen things that kept him awake nights, if he thought about them too much.

He shook off the gruesome images and concentrated on the problem at hand—the woman in the rain slicker. Wondered which category—naive, thoughtless or arrogant—she fell into.

She didn’t appear to be in any danger at the moment but, then again, she seemed oblivious to everything around her, with the exception of whatever it was she was looking at through those binoculars of hers.

Presently, it dawned on Drake that whatever else she might be, she wasn’t the reason his big Appaloosa gelding was so worked up.

The woman seemed fixated on the wide meadow, actually a shallow valley, just beyond the copse of cottonwood. Starburst pranced and tossed his head, and Drake tightened the reins slightly, gave a gruff command.

The horse calmed down a little.

Once Drake cleared the stand of cottonwoods, he stood in the stirrups, adjusted his hat and followed the woman’s gaze. Briefly, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, after days, weeks and months of searching, with only a rare and always distant sighting.

But there they were, big as life; the stallion, his band of wild mustangs—and half a dozen mares lured from his own pastures.

Forgetting the rain-slicked trespasser for a few moments, his breath trapped in his throat, Drake stared, taking a quick count in his head, temporarily immobilized by the sheer grandeur of the sight.

The stallion was magnificence on the hoof, lean but with every muscle as clearly defined as if he’d been sculpted by a master. His coat was a ghostly gray, darkened by the rain, and his mane and tail were blacker than black.

The animal, well aware that he had an audience and plainly unconcerned, lifted his head slowly from the creek where he’d been drinking and made no move to run. With no more than a hundred yards between them, he regarded Drake for what seemed like a long while, as though sizing him up.

The rest of the band, mares included, went still, heads high, ears pricked forward, hindquarters tensed as they awaited some signal from the stallion.

Drake couldn’t help admiring that four-footed devil, even as he silently cursed the critter, consigning him to seven kinds of hell. The instant he pressed his boot heels to Starburst’s quivering sides, a motion so subtle that Drake himself was barely aware of it, the stallion went into action.

Nostrils flared, eyes rolling, the cocky son of a bitch snorted, then threw back his head and whinnied, the sound piercing the moisture-thickened air.

The band whirled toward the hillside and scattered.

The stallion stood watching as Drake, rope in hand and ready to throw, drove Starburst from a dead stop to a full run.

Before Starburst reached the creek, though, the big gray spun on his hind legs and damn near took wing as he raced across the clearing and up the slope.

Drake and his gelding splashed through the narrow stream, and up the opposite bank, the dogs loping alongside.

But hard as he rode, the whole experience felt like a slow-motion sequence from one of his brother Slater’s documentaries. He and Starburst might as well have been standing still for all the progress they made closing the gap.

The stallion paused at the top of the ridge, he and his band sketched against the stormy sky. Time seemed to stop, just for an instant, before the spell was broken and the whole bunch of them vanished as swiftly as if they’d melted into the clouds.

Drake knew he’d lost this round.

He reined Starburst to a halt, grabbed his hat by the brim and slapped it hard against his left thigh before jamming it back on his head. Then, still breathing hard, his jaw clamped down so hard that his ears ached from the strain, he recoiled his rope and fastened it to his saddle.

Harold and Violet were at the foot of the ridge by then, panting visibly and looking back at Drake in confusion.

He summoned them back with a shrill whistle, and they trotted toward him, tongues lolling, sides heaving.

Only when he’d ridden across the creek again did Drake remember the woman. Coupled with the fact that he’d just been outwitted by that damn stallion—again—her presence stuck in his hide like a burr.

She stood watching him as he rode toward her, her face a pale oval within the hood of her slicker.

With bitter amusement, he noticed that her feet were set a little apart, as in a fighter’s stance, and her elbows jutted out at her sides. Her hands, no doubt bunched into fists, were pressing hard into her hips.

As he drew nearer, he noted the spark of fury in her eyes and the tight line of her mouth.

Under other circumstances, he might have thrown back his head and laughed out loud at her sheer audacity, but at the moment his pride was giving him too much grief for that.

He hadn’t managed to get this close to the stallion—or his prize mares—for longer than he cared to remember. While he hated letting them get away so easily, he knew the dogs would be run ragged if he gave chase, and might even end up getting their heads kicked in. They’d been bred for herding cattle, not wild horses.

They were disappointed just the same and whimpered in baleful protest at being called off, which only made Drake feel like more of a loser than he already did.

Harold and Violet, named for two of his favorite elementary school teachers, ambled over to him, tails wagging. They were drenched to the skin and getting wetter by the minute, but they were quick to forgive, unlike their human counterparts, himself included.

Just then, Drake’s chestnut quarter horse, a two-year-old mare with impeccable bloodlines, caught his eye, appearing on the crest of the ridge. Hope stirred briefly, and he drew in his breath to whistle for her, but before he could make a sound, the stallion came back, crowding the mare, nipping at her flanks and butting her with his head.

And then she was gone again.

Damn it all to hell.

“Thanks for nothing, mister!”

It was the intruder, the trespasser. The woman stormed toward Drake through the rain-bent grass, waving the binoculars like a maestro raising a baton at the symphony. He’d forgotten about her until that moment, and the reminder did nothing for his mood.

He was overreacting, he knew that, but he couldn’t seem to change course.

She was a sight, he’d say that, plowing through the grass the way she was, all fuss and fury and wet through and through.