until Blue lost track of time and of everything except the fact that this horse was so troubled and so defensive that he did not make one forward movement. Until he did, Blue was not going to quit.
Life narrowed down to that one fact and the sun on his back. Time vanished.
Horses knew no time. All they knew was rhythm, the rhythm of the days, and the waxing and waning of the moon. All Blue knew was the look of this horse and the motion of his own arm, the twist of his wrist.
Throw, reel in, throw, reel in.
The breeze picked up and blew on his skin through the sweat in his shirt. The horse’s shadow shifted to a different angle. A hawk flew over and tilted its wings into the wind. Blue and the roan colt kept at it.
It took a long time. Dimly, Blue realized that the afternoon was passing faster and later he saw that Micah was perched on the top log of the pen, over by the gate, but he and the roan didn’t let that bother them. The colt quit kicking but he didn’t move forward.
Blue changed to his left arm to spell the right one, but he did not let up. Finally, the colt took one forward step. One. And that was all.
At first, Blue wondered if he had imagined it, but no. The kicking had stopped. He switched back to his right arm and threw the halter. Reeled it in. Threw it again.
It took a while. The sun was definitely dropping lower in the west when he reeled the halter in again, threw it again, and the horse took three or four steps forward, one more, a few more and then, like held water flowing over a dam, Blue was driving him around the corral.
The roan let himself be driven but he didn’t acknowledge Blue in any other way.
Blue didn’t care. If they did nothing but this today, it would be a great victory. He let the rising excitement inside him come a little higher and he stayed with the colt.
The roan chose a deliberate pace and stayed with it, and the energy driving the world became the lub-dub, lub-dub sounds of his hooves on the ground. Blue’s heart fell into that same beat.
The smell of the horse, the fragrance of manure and stirring dirt, the faraway cry of a bird he couldn’t name all filled the old round pen. Still, Blue could see nothing but the horse. The horse and the hope for him to leave his fear behind.
Finally, he let him stop.
He tried to walk up to him, but the roan would have none of that. He reared and offered to strike.
Don’t come any closer, man. Keep your distance.
Blue drove him some more. He caused the horse to move and then set his own movements in harmony with him. Slowly, finally, their lone dances began to form a bond between them. Both of them relaxed into the rhythm. They stayed the same distance apart—the roan seemed comfortable with exactly that amount of space—and they moved together.
At last, the roan began to acknowledge Blue with his ears, his eyes, and his arched rib cage curving away from him. Blue smiled so wide it felt like he hadn’t used those muscles for years. He took a deep breath and moved, this time farther away from the roan.
The colt followed him. The skin on Blue’s arms turned to gooseflesh, as if the animal had already come close enough to blow his breath down the back of his neck.
The farther he went, the more the horse closed the gap between them. He had hooked on. Blue made himself take another deep breath. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.
He walked toward the middle of the pen. The roan stayed with him. He stopped. The horse came closer, then he stopped, too, ears pricked, watching Blue.
The colt stood still and let him walk up to him.
The old thrill rose in Blue’s blood and, with it, memories of other days, other places, other horses. They galloped back to him, flooding through his mind. So many horses and so many days and weeks and months and years without any of them in the flesh.
He still had trouble believing that this was real. It was.
And now was the test of this invisible connection. Now was the time to make it physical, to make it so it would be true and lasting.
Murmuring to the colt, Blue laid a hand on him. He started rubbing him along the top of his neck. He watched both ends of the horse at once and he knew that he could keep touching this colt only if he did it in a way that was fitting to the roan.
That way was going to be very, very carefully. A wrong move could get him a kick in the belly or a hoof upside his head, but if he listened to what the horse had to say to him, that wouldn’t happen. He pinched along the roots of the colt’s mane as another horse would nibble him, and used the coiled lead rope to rub him, too.
The roan said it felt good. Very, very good. He let his head drop and his eyelids droop. Blue rubbed his back and his flanks and went back to his neck again.
One more time, then he let the halter and rope fall to the ground. He laid his hand on the sweaty withers and let his weight lean on the colt while he held his other hand out for the horse to take in his scent. Slowly, the colt swung his muzzle around, snorting lightly, scattering drops of moisture into Blue’s palm like fresh rain.
They settled there. Their breathing fell into an identical, untroubled pattern, in and out. With their warm flesh and blood pressed together, the thunder power living under the hide of the horse flowed through Blue—into his arm and through his heart down into the Mother Earth beneath his feet.
MICAH HELD to the old cowboy custom of eating in silence and that was a relief to Blue. He was able to pick at his food and drink the hot coffee but he couldn’t think about anything except the colt and he sure as hell didn’t know what to say. He really didn’t want to ever talk about it, even if he knew how.
He’d held himself apart, kept himself isolated, breathed and thought and eaten and stayed alone for ten long years, and an outlaw horse had breached the wall. Being connected to another living being, human or horse or dog, was something so new now that he could barely recall how to deal with it.
As soon as they pushed back from the table and started clearing away, Micah’s flood of words started again just like somebody had turned on a faucet.
“Tell you the truth,” he said, as he limped to the sink with his plate and the skillet, “I ain’t never seen nobody git his hands on a horse by throwing a halter at him all day.”
He cackled in delight, shaking his head.
“Them boys over at Little Creek wouldn’t believe it if they seen it with their own eyes. I’m near eighty years old and I never seen nothing like it.”
“I can’t take credit for the horsemanship,” Blue said. “Buck Brannaman gave a demonstration in Tulsa one time when I was a teenaged kid. He worked ’em horseback, too.”
He set his plate on the counter by the sink and carried the remains of the loaf of bread in its plastic sack to the battered cupboard where Micah got it. It all felt strange. A kitchen was a foreign country to him now.
“I heard that name,” Micah said. “They say he’s a hell of a hand with a horse.”
“He is.”
Blue glanced around the room after he closed the antique cupboard. He slid his fingertips over its punched tin door as if he were reading Braille.
Any part of a home was unknown to him now. This one smelled rich and ripe with age, with the ghosts of long-dead wood fires drifting out of the chimney and the gleam of low lamplight in the front room.
It recalled Auntie Cheyosie’s cabin way back in the woods in Oklahoma. Way back in another life. Way back when Tanasi Rose was alive. She had taken him with her to see the wise old woman many times during his childhood.
Rose wouldn’t have killed herself, maybe, if Auntie Cheyosie had still been alive. Or if Dannie had been.
But he had been.
Yeah, Bowman,