Nicholas Evans - The Horse Whisperer

'What we're doing here Annie, is trying to get him to learn how to be a horse again. All the others already know, see? That's how they are in the wild, herd animals. When they've got a problem, like they have now with me and this flag, they look to each other. But old Pilgrim here has plum forgotten. I'm the rock and they're the hard place. He thinks he hasn't got a friend in the world. Turn 'em all loose in the mountains and these guys would be fine. Poor old Pilgrim though, he'd be bear bait. It's not that he doesn't want to make friends, he just doesn't know how.'

He moved Rimrock in on them and lifted the flag sharply, making it crack in the air. The colts all broke away to the right and this time, instead of breaking left like before, Pilgrim went after them. As soon as he was clear of Tom though, he separated and again came to a halt on his own. Tom grinned. 'He'll get there.'

The sun had long gone by the time they had Pilgrim back in his stall and it was getting cold. Diane called the boys in for their supper and Grace went in with them to pick up a coat she had left in the house. Tom and Annie walked slowly over to the Lariat. Annie felt suddenly very aware of their being alone together. For a while neither of them spoke. An owl flew low over their heads toward the creek and Annie watched it melt into the dark of the cottonwoods. She felt Tom's eyes on her and turned to look at him. He smiled calmly and quite without embarrassment and the look he gave her wasn't the look of a virtual stranger, but of someone who'd known her for a very long time. Annie managed to smile back and was relieved to see Grace coming toward them from the house.

'We're branding here tomorrow,' Tom said. 'If you two want to come and give a hand.'

Annie laughed. 'I think we'd just get in the way,' she said.

He shrugged. 'Maybe. But as long as you don't get in the way of the branding iron it doesn't matter too much. Even if you do, it's a nice-looking mark. Back in the city you might be proud of it.'

Annie turned to Grace and could see she was keen but trying not to look it. She turned back to Tom.

'Okay, why not?' she said.

He told her they'd be starting around nine the next morning but they could show up whenever they liked. Then they said good-night. As she pulled away up the driveway, Annie looked in the rearview mirror. He was still standing there, watching them go.

Tom rode up one side of the valley and Joe the other. The idea was to pick up stragglers but the cows needed little more inducement. They could see the old Chevy down in the meadow where it always parked at feeding time and they could hear Frank and the twins hollering and banging the bag of cow cake on its lowered rear end for them to come and get it. They streamed down from the hills, calling in reply while their calves scrambled after them, calling too, anxious not to be left behind.

Tom's father used to raise pure Herefords, but for some years now Frank had raised a Black Angus-Hereford cross. The Angus cows were good mothers and suited the climate better because their udders were black, not pink like the Herefords, so they didn't get burned by the sun bouncing off the snow. Tom watched for a while as they moved away from him down the hill, then he turned Rimrock to the left and dropped over into the shaded bed of the creek.

Steam rose off the water into the warming air and a dipper took off and flew straight upstream ahead of them fast and so low that its slate wings almost skimmed the surface. Down here the calling of the cattle was muted then lost in the soft splashing of the horse's feet as he moved up to the top of the meadow. Sometimes along here a calf would get tangled in the thick willow scrub. But today they found nothing and Tom eased Rimrock back onto the bank, then loped him up into the sun at the top of the ridge and stopped.

He could see Joe on his brown-and-white paint pony way over on the other side of the valley. The boy waved and Tom waved back. Below, the cattle were funneling down to the Chevy, flooding around it so that it looked from here like a boat on a seething pool of black. The twins were tossing out a few pellets of cake to keep the cows interested while Frank clambered back into the driver's seat and started to pull slowly away back down the meadow. Lured by the cake, the cattle surged after it.

From this ridge you could see right down the valley to the ranch and the corrals to which the cattle were now being led. And as Tom looked, he saw what he realized he had been looking out for all morning. Annie's car was coming down the driveway, leaving a low, gray wake of dust. As it curved in front of the ranch house, the sun flashed on its windshield.

More than a mile separated him from the two figures that got out of the car. They were small and quite featureless. But Tom could picture Annie's face as if she were beside him. He saw her as she'd been last evening, as she watched the owl, before she sensed him watching her. She had looked so lost and beautiful that he'd wanted to take her in his arms. She's another man's wife, he'd told himself as the Lariat's tail-lights went off up the driveway. But it hadn't stopped him thinking about her. He nudged Rimrock forward and moved off down the hill to follow the cattle.

The air over the corral hung heavy with dust and the smell of scorched flesh. Separated from their mothers, who kept up a constant calling, the calves were moved through a series of connecting pens until they found themselves in a narrow chute from which there was no return. Emerging from here, one by one, they were clamped and lowered sideways onto a table where four pairs of hands went immediately to work. Before they knew it, they'd been given a shot, a yellow insect tag in one ear, a growth pellet in the other, then a burn on the butt with a branding iron. Then the table went vertical again, off came the clamp and suddenly they were free. They tottered off in a daze toward the call of their mothers, at whose udders, at last, they found comfort.

All of this was witnessed, with a lazy, regal disinterest by their fathers, five enormous Hereford bulls, who lay chewing in an adjoining pen. It was witnessed by Annie with something approaching horror. She could see Grace felt the same. The calves squealed terribly and got what little revenge they could by spurting shit down their attackers' boots or kicking any careless shin they found. Some of the neighbors who had come to help had brought children along and those big or bold enough were trying their hand at roping and wrestling the smaller calves. Annie saw Grace watching them and thought what a terrible mistake it was to have come. There was such an extreme physicality about it all. It only seemed to make the girl's disability more blatant.

Tom must have read this on Annie's face because he came over and quickly found her a job. He put her to work in the feeder pen to the chute alongside a grinning giant with reflector sunglasses and a T-shirt that said Cereal Killer . He introduced himself as Hank and gave Annie a handshake that made her knuckles crack. He said he came from the next ranch down the valley.

'Our friendly neighborhood psycho,' Tom said.

'It's okay, I already ate,' Hank confided to Annie.

As she got to work, Annie saw Tom go over to Grace, put his arm around her shoulders and lead her off, though to where, Annie had no time to see because a calf trod on her foot then kicked her hard on the knee. She yelped and Hank laughed and showed her how to shove them into the chute without getting too bruised or shat upon. It was hard work and she had to concentrate and soon, what with Hank's jokes and the warm spring sunshine, she started to feel better.

Later, when she had a moment to look, she saw Tom had taken Grace right to the front line and had her wielding the branding iron. To begin with she kept her eyes closed. But soon he got her thinking so hard about her technique that all squeamishness vanished.