Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

The only problem with this setup was that no vendor in the world would deliver packages to the minehead, and so almost every day he had to drive down the valley to High Noon to collect stuff he’d ordered online. One morning he was doing that, passing along right next to that low grassy patch, when two horses galloped across the road. It all happened fast. But he could have sworn that one of the horses was bloody.

He pulled up and got out to have a look around. Sure enough, there was blood on the grass next to the tracks that their unshod hooves had made in the dust. Unshod because, of course, the only horses you were going to see running around loose in a place like this were mustangs.

Then he heard an all too familiar noise: the squealing of a wild pig, not more than a hundred feet away.

His view was blocked by a swell in the ground, but when he vaulted up into the bed of his truck he was able to look over that and see another horse engaged in battle with a foe who was so low down that it could only be glimpsed through the grass and the thorny undergrowth. But Rufus knew what it was.

He jumped down into the cab and pulled the truck off the road and up onto that little rise. Then he took his rifle out from behind the seat, climbed up into the back of the truck again, and chambered a round. From this vantage point he could clearly see the wild boar, maneuvering around the mustang, trying to get one of its tusks into the horse’s leg. The horse, of course, was having none of that and kept rearing up to strike down with front hooves or spinning round to kick out with rear. Both animals were mud-spattered. It could be guessed that they were disputing possession of a water hole. This pig had probably been wallowing down in one of those hidden wet places when the horses had come upon it hoping to get a drink.

They had been conducting these hostilities for a while. Both animals were tired. From time to time they would just stop and watch each other. During one of those intervals, Rufus put a .30-caliber slug through the boar’s heart and dropped him like one of those stray boulders that sometimes peeled off the canyon wall. He might have expected the mustang to bolt at the sound of the gun. It startled, but it did not run. Rufus was able to get a good look at it through his scope and saw that it was a gelding. A very uncommon thing among wild horses, who generally were not big practitioners of surgical castration on the open range. Moreover, he was wearing a halter. Old, filthy, and tattered, but definitely a halter. And that was a shame because it could have got tangled on something and condemned this animal to a long slow death.

Rufus knew better than to try to approach it. Instead he got back in his truck and drove away. But to his list of errands he added a new item, which was that he made a detour to a part of the ranch where ordinary livestock operations were still underway and picked up some bales of hay. On his way back to the marble mine, he kicked one of these out of the truck and left it on the road just near where he had shot the wild boar. The horses were not in evidence, but when he came back the next day he found that they had demolished it. So he left another bale a few hundred yards farther up the road, trusting them to find it, which at least one of them did.

A week of this led to a moment when Rufus and the gelding came in view of each other, just a short distance down the road from the marble mine. Rufus avoided making eye contact, which only would have ruined everything, but instead turned his back and went quietly about his business, letting the animal understand that Rufus and his truck were the source of this incredible bounty of fodder.

Within forty-eight hours of that moment, horse and man were quietly and peaceably co-occupying the cool shady refuge before the opening of the mine, and Rufus was trying to figure out how he was going to supply this animal with water. He was going to need a bigger tank.

The horse seemed indifferent as to whether it would live the life of a wild mustang or hang around with Rufus. It was a pinto, mostly chestnut but spattered with white on the legs and belly. Mexicans, Indians, and horse fanciers had complicated names for different kinds of pintos, depending on the pattern of the spots, but Rufus had never made a study of it. A freeze brand—a row of white hieroglyphs on the left side of the horse’s neck—marked him as a formerly wild horse that had at some point been rounded up and auctioned. A second brand on its shoulder marked it as property of one of the three older ranches that T.R. had, in the last few years, bought up and lumped together to form the Flying S. This animal must have got loose at some point during the merger and returned to its wild ways. The lack of shoes, and the condition of its hooves, suggested that it had escaped at least several months ago.

A good thing about horses, as opposed to some other domestic animals, was that they did not insist on being entertained. As long as they had food and water they would contentedly pass the time of day. So getting this animal put to rights was a side project that Rufus was able to prosecute in his spare time over a couple of weeks. He arranged for a farrier to come up and see to its hooves and get it shod, and for a vet to give it the recommended shots and pills and to care for some wounds it had presumably sustained during the conflict with the late boar. The ranch possessed a surfeit of saddles and other tack that was no longer being much used. This was made available to him when he let it be known that he had become the trustee of this particular animal. Online shopping caused a few other necessaries to show up at his locker down at High Noon. Once he had given the horse a day or two to get used to the look and the smell of the tack, he bridled and saddled him, whereupon he gave every indication of having been ridden in his past life.

Before mounting up for the first time, Rufus considered what the animal ought to be named. The Lone Ranger’s horse had been Silver, but this creature was mostly brown. He considered “Copper.” That, however, seemed like what a twelve-year-old girl would name her horse. Eventually he settled on Bildad, who in Moby-Dick was one of the three owners of the Pequod . In the Bible, he was one of the friends of Job, who came to him in the wilderness to lay a guilt trip on him.

T.R. had the habit, always surprising to Rufus, of shooting him a text message—usually swine- or drone-related—every couple of weeks. Most of these were just links or pictures. Rufus did not dare to suppose that this made him in any way special. He had sort of assembled the picture in his mind that he might be one of several hundred people in T.R.’s mental Rolodex who would occasionally be so favored, and that T.R. probably sent out dozens of such messages on every occasion when he got a snatch of time on the throne or whatever. Rufus was pretty sure that to send a whole lot of messages back the other way would get him blocked, or even fired. So he mostly kept his mouth shut. But a decent respect for another man’s property did place him under an obligation to document Bildad, so he fired off a couple of pictures detailing the brands, as well as a few more intended to convey the general idea that the animal was safe and well cared for at the marble mine. T.R. seemed pleased by that out of all proportion to the actual monetary value of one stray horse. Rufus remembered their conversation about the importance of having good people on the property who could make decisions and manage things, and he reckoned that this was an example of that, and that, to the extent T.R. ever thought of him at all, it was now in a favorable light.

All pretty normal as Texas ranch management went, but with T.R. there was always some kind of extra, weird twist. One day in early October the peace and quiet of the marble mine were shattered by the strains of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,” which was the ringtone that Rufus had assigned to T.R., and only T.R. It was a video call and so Rufus propped his phone up against a stack of drone batteries on his worktable.