Page 17 of Forbidden Protector

"I'll take the dog."

Wyatt's chin comes up.

Every call I have ever made under load went through me first and came out my mouth second. This one goes the other way. It's in the air before I know what it's for.

"He knows the place," I say. "He knows the stock."

Both true. Neither one the reason.

Wyatt stands there in my headlights and looks at me for a long time.

He came up my drive with a bottle and an accusation, and the man he came to accuse just offered to keep his father's dog. I watch him try to make those two things fit in the same head. I watch him be too tired to keep at it.

"He won't come to you," Wyatt says finally.

"I know."

"He hasn't come to anybody." His mouth goes. "He sat in the barn all day yesterday. He won't come out of the barn."

"Then I'll feed him in the barn."

Wyatt looks at the ground. Then at the mountains.

"I'll bring him by in the morning."

"You can leave him. You don't have to come to the door."

"I know I don't have to." He picks up the bottle, because he was raised not to leave a mess on somebody's porch even on the day he buried his father. "If it was one of you," he says, "I'll find out."

"I hope you do."

He looks at me a second too long. Then he walks past my headlights and down the road toward his own house.

I watch him the whole four hundred yards.

The west fence road takes twenty minutes and I spend nine of them not thinking about her.

Wyatt came at me tonight with whiskey and history and got there in three days. She got there in ninety seconds with a pen, standing in the snow with Jacob under a sheet behind her, and turned the page so I could watch myself land on it.

I take the cattle guard too fast and the truck comes off it hard enough to rattle the rifle in the rack behind my head, and I think about the church.

I think about two inches of pine between my knees and her spine. Her hair up off her neck for the service, twisted and pinned and leaving the whole line of her throat out in the open where anybody could look at it. I looked at it, and she felt me do it and made herself sit there and take it.

She wore it down in the truck from the airport.

Then the corner post comes up at the top of the crest and I stop thinking about anything else.

The tape is tied at the third wire.

Orange. Surveyor's flagging, the roll kind, cut clean and knotted twice, hanging dead still in air that has nothing left to move it. Somebody put it there in wind and tied it to hold.

I don't touch it.

I leave the door open, the engine running, and read the snow first. Snow is the only witness in this valley that has never once lied to me.

Boot prints come in from the timber side.

Size eleven, maybe eleven and a half. The tread is a hiker's lug, flat and soft, no riding heel. Nobody who works cattle walks this land in those. He came on foot because he meant to, and he bought that sole because it goes quiet over rock. The stride never breaks. No hesitation at the wire.