Jed exchanged a sheepish look with Tessa.
“Okay, I grant you that,” he conceded, “but now that we’ve got that part out of the way, what d’ye say we get this show on the road?”
After Jed unloaded Bolt, Tessa handed him a pair of packed bags, like the ones already secured to her own saddle.
“Enough food in these to last us through, I reckon. Nothing fancy though.”
“You still keep a supply of canned goods and biscuit makings up in the cabin, don’t you?” Jed asked.
“Sure, but I never know if some poor lost soul hasn’t needed it. I’m usually left a thank-you note, but grateful words won’t fill our stomachs.”
“I’m sure we’ll do fine, Tessa. It’s not as if we were back in the greasy-sack days, with dried fruit and beans in one sack and sowbelly in the other.”
“Not hardly,” Garland chimed in. “Mom found these new packaged meals in the supermarket. All you have to do is stick the container in a pan of boiling water. Tonight we’re feasting on beef stroganoff.”
“Shoot!” Jed declared. “If I’d known that, I would have brought along a bottle of one of those good California cabernets.”
Tessa swung up into her saddle. “Will you listen to us?” she said as she gathered up the reins. “I swear, Jed, our fathers wouldn’t have believed their ears!”
“No point in suffering discomfort out of loyalty to the good old days,” Jed retorted. “Most of them were anything but good, and all the modern conveniences in the world can’t spare today’s pampered ranchers some hardship along the way.”
“I was just commenting,” she said blandly, “not judging.”
Jed slanted a wary look at her as he recalled using those same words in a different context a few days earlier.
“Considering that Mom bought a designer silk shirt last night with her credit card via an eight-hundred number,” Garland said, “I don’t think she’s all that hot about returning to the good old days herself.”
Jed grinned up at Tessa. “Silk shirt, huh? Doesn’t sound like something you’ll be wearing around the old campfire.”
“I wanted it for Scott Shelby’s housewarming next Saturday. Satisfied?”
“You don’t really expect me to answer that, do you?” He hoisted himself effortlessly into his saddle, every hard lean inch of him a cowboy for all times, all seasons. He grinned at Tessa. “You want to do the honors?”
Tessa grinned back and nodded.
“Oh God,” Garland groaned. “Not the Clint Eastwood bit again.”
“He wasn’t the Clint Eastwood then, Garland. Just that real cute sexy young guy on ‘Rawhide’ who always said— “
“ ‘Head ‘em up, move ‘em out!’ “the three chorused.
Even though the herd was small, Tessa knew that the calves, still scared and confused by their long trucked-in journey, would tend to scatter like beads from a broken string upon release from the enclosures. Banking on their instinct to follow mature animals, she added a few cows to preserve order, and sure enough, after two easily foiled attempts to bolt back to the railed safety of the corrals, the youngsters fell into line behind the large plodding shapes they dimly perceived as Mother.
Jed, Tessa, and Garland urged their horses into a long familiar pattern: Tessa to the left, Garland to the right, pressing the lead cows forward and chivvying the bawling babies into a compact column behind them. Jed brought up the rear, checking any impulse to break away.
Jed watched admiringly as Tessa’s horse, a gray mare named Mackerel, urged a balky youngster back into line. His own horse. Bolt, was one of her last foals, and since he was going on seven, Jed knew Mackerel must be in her late teens by now. Still had plenty of ginger, though.
Jed recalled how puzzled Barry had been by the name. “Why’d you want to name a nice horse like that after a smelly old fish?” he had complained. Tessa had patiently explained that in this case mackerel meant a cloud pattern, not a fish. You know, Barry, that dappled look telling you bad weather’s on the way?
All of Tessa’s horses had sky or weather-related names: Bolt, the horse she all but gave Jed; Garland’s chestnut mare, Sunset, and Rain, the buckskin she was finishing up now for his new owner.
“See the way his dark mane streams against his sandy hide?” Jed remembered her saying. “If you look at it a little squinty, it’s like the showers you see streaking down out of distant thunderheads.” She had a poetic streak, Tessa did, even though she’d be the first to deny it. She was like her mother that way, Jed thought.
When the Hattons first came to Cottonwood, looking for land they could afford to buy with their precious meager savings, they had spent days in the saddle crisscrossing the valley. One day, lured into the high basins by the drifts of blue and white columbine they could see from the valley floor, Tessa’s mother had looked from the thirteen-thousand foot pocket of bloom-blanketed green to the snowy peaks jagging up around them and said it was like walking in the sky.
By then, although they had already chosen a parcel of prime grazing land below, Tessa’s father, moved by his wife’s wondering remark, impulsively extended his purchase to the skyline at an additional cost worth no more than a moment’s hesitation. In those days, the local cattlemen still considered the high grasslands fit only for sheep.
The Hattons named their spread Skywalk. Some of the old-timers sneered when they heard it, thinking it more suited to the dude ranches that even then were springing up down Durango way, but no one was foolish enough to say so in Amos Hatton’s hearing. Walt Bradburn might have, but by then the two men had already shaken hands on the sharing of the fence on Hayden’s Bald.
The riders wound their way through a rush of spring color. Blue iris spread like spilled sky across the valley’s damp flats; Indian paintbrush had begun to polka-dot the foothills with red, and the yellow flowers of Oregon grape-holly shone through sheltering clumps of sage.
Wild roses clambered on the banks of irrigation ditches, which by midsummer would be massed with watercress. Fruit-bearing shrubs added a froth of bridal white. Pointing to them, Garland smacked her lips noisily at Jed, pantomiming her anticipation of late summer berry-picking forays. Thinking of the sweet wine the berries would make, he winked and tipped an imaginary glass to his mouth.
They climbed steadily, hour after hour, twisting through the tormented trunks of piñon pine and juniper that studded the foothills’ flanks, into high meadows ringed by groves of arrow-straight aspens, whose pale leaves trembled in response to breezes the riders could barely feel. Although spring was less advanced here, the sun was hot. Melting snow water chuckled down the rocks and across the trail, leaving broad stripes of greasy scum that the calves had to be urged to negotiate.
Above them, the deeply drifted snow had already begun to shrink back against the cliffs, and in the distance splintered peaks jutted above basins so newly and brightly green, their eyes narrowed against the impact.
To the first settlers arriving from the east, the grass on the Great Plains had seemed limitless. But by the late 1880’s, the nearly five million head of longhorns driven north from Texas into Colorado had overgrazed the grasslands into desert, and ranchers again began looking westward toward the Rocky Mountains.
Walt Bradburn’s father had been one of the first ranchers to venture into the well-watered foothills, but as the population grew, attracted by reports of the scenic wonders and the tuberculosis cures effected by the clear dry air, he once again picked up stakes. Ignoring the pleas of his weary family, he set a merciless pace up the treacherous ridges, through the first snows of autumn and across to the western slope, where a lifetime of hardship was at last rewarded by Cottonwood’s lush meadow pasturage.
Jed suspected his adoptive father would have happily settled for his inherited lowland bonanza if it hadn’t been for Amos Hatton’s radical departure from the strongly held local cattlemen’s opinion that the high mountain grazing season was too short for anything but sheep.
Walt Bradbur
n knew it was unlikely Hatton was right, but once doubt intruded, it began nibbling away at him, and there was nothing he liked less than uncertainty. Besides, the high land was rock cheap and the Bradburns’ needs were few— Walt’s were anyway; Jed doubted he gave much thought to his wife’s. Years later, when the fattening of calves became a profitable sideline, the investment—which by then he attributed to his own foresight—paid off handsomely.
For Tessa, whose father’s purchase was larger to begin with, the return was even better. “Assuming we get the little buggers up there in one piece,” Jed muttered as he started after a calf who, deciding he’d gone high enough, began a stumbling descent into a rockfall.
Jed unhitched his rope, and with the easy skill born of long practice, sent a loop soaring down to settle over the startled youngster’s head. Knowing Bolt would keep the rope snubbed around the saddle horn taut, Jed made his way through the unstable shale, secured another rope around the calf’s hind legs, and with Bolt’s assistance hauled him back up to the trail, bones and fuzzy hide intact.
“Way to go, Jed!” Tessa shouted at him, punching her gloved fist skyward.
All in a day’s work, Jed thought as he coiled his rope back into a series of neat loops, but if Tessa wanted to make something of it, well, hell, who was he to complain?
The midday sun scorched through his jacket. He rolled the rope up, tied it behind his saddle, and rode on, trying to ignore his hunger pangs. Just about the time his stomach decided to call a strike. Garland rode back beside him. “I’m the lunch wagon, Uncle Jed. You’ve got two choices: ham and swiss or roast beef and nothing. Both are on those nice big deli rolls.”
From Nellie’s Delly? Jed wondered. Somehow he doubted it. “Hard to choose . . . they both sound mighty tasty to me.”
“Why not one of each?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, snatching the offered packets before she could change her mind.
Garland fished in her backpack for a can of iced tea. “To wash them down with. I’m afraid it’s not cold anymore.”
“Long as it’s liquid.” He popped the tab and took a long gulping drink. “Ahh-h-h, just what the trail boss ordered. Thank you, honey.” He snugged the can into his shirt pocket. “Enjoying yourself?”
“Oh yeah! This is my favorite event of the year. Gav might have bowed out a couple of years back, but I just keep on counting the days. I think of it as a sort of ceremony, you know what I mean?”
“The turn of the ranch year?” She nodded. “I do, too. Garland, but what I was asking about is life in general.”
“Oh. Well, working up in Telluride is, uh, I don’t know that I’d call it fun, exactly, but it sure is eye-opening. Promotionwise, it’s pretty disorganized. I mean, people keep getting these ideas, but the events seem to come off okay, so who am I to criticize?”
“You see much of Scott Shelby?”
Garland dropped her eyes. She traced her finger around the saddle horn. “Some. He’s been very, uh, helpful, but . . .” She shrugged. “No, I can’t say I’ve seen him all that much.”
Jed couldn’t tell whether that meant she wished she’d seen less of him or more of him. From the way she sort of oozed around the subject, he suspected—and regretted—the latter.
Tessa’s yell drew their attention. They couldn’t make out the words, but her rolling of eyes and rubbing of her stomach vividly conveyed the message.
“Uh-oh, Mom’s chomping at the bit. You got a place to stow your sandwich wrappings?” Jed nodded. “See you later then!”
Jed extracted a generously stuffed roll from its plastic baggie and watched, munching, as Garland guided Sunset slowly through the herd, clucking reassuringly at the calves as she made her way towards her mother. Their hat brims touched as, heads bent, they discussed sandwich and beverage choices. Serious business concluded, they smiled and parted, the two bobbing heads serving as place markers— one covered in fawn-colored felt, the other in airy straw—on either side of the herd.
Jed swiped the back of his hand across his mouth. By God, they could have been mine.
It wasn’t the first time he’d thought it; he knew it wouldn’t be the last. But was it what he really wanted? About Garland and Gavin he had no doubts: he’d been more of a father to them than Barry ever was, but Tessa?
It wasn’t a question of whether he loved her or not, that was a given in his life. He always had; always would. But at fifty, she still didn’t know what the hell she wanted, and he wasn’t sure he had the patience to wait her out. He wasn’t even sure he still had the inclination.
The trail steepened and narrowed. The calves, expecting disaster to overtake them at every corner, rolled their eyes and edged unreasoningly towards the steeply receding hillside. Knowing their horses could not follow if they bolted down it, the three riders worked in concert to contain them, their grim silence broken only by yowls of frustration as one calf, then another, made a break for it. Jed leapt off Bolt and scrambled down after them, falling, swearing, and finally waving the spooked youngsters back up into the herd with wide sweeps of his hat. Two long hours later, as the late-day light slanted into their bleary eyes, they reached the wide gate marking the boundary of the Hatton high pasture lands. A mile or so beyond it, nestled into an aspen grove rimming the largest of the basin’s meadows, Tessa’s cabin beckoned.
“None too soon,” Jed muttered to himself as he paused to secure a second, smaller gate behind him. In truth, it had been an easy day as cattle drives go, the calves being too small and too few to present major problems, but the responsibility he felt for the women weighed on him more than he would ever admit. Sure, they were strong and healthy, and as skilled riders as any man he knew, but as he unsaddled Bolt and turned him loose into the meadow, he felt contentment flow through him like a golden stream.
He stretched, then flicked his hat up from his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. “Well, whadaya know,” he said to no one in particular, “we made it!”
Hearing him, Tessa paused on the second of the three log steps leading to the wide rustic porch. She turned, eyebrows raised, jaw thrust out. “Did you have any reason to think we wouldn’t?”
The memory of other drives, other riders, flashed through Jed’s mind. Choking dust and jostling red backs. A brassy sun assaulting them by day; cold night winds knifing through their mackinaws. And in the lead, always in the lead, Walt Bradburn, hunched stiff and stolid in the saddle. A human metronome swaying hour after hour to his pony’s plodding gait, alert to the first whiff of impending danger. He never expected more of his riders than he did of himself, but for most— including me, sometimes— that was more than they could deliver.
“Well? Did you?” Tessa demanded.
Her imperious tone riled Jed some, but he was damned if he’d give her the satisfaction of showing it.
Should he tell her this was more like a day’s outing than a cattle drive? Ten easy hours in the saddle, with a cozy cabin and two good-looking women to keep him company at the end? He met her impatient blue eyes. Uh-uh.
“Why no, Tessa,” he drawled, “no reason at all. Just glad to be here.”
Chapter Ten
The kerosene lamp cast a golden glow on Tessa’s face as she leaned back against the pillows propped against the slatted wooden frame of her armchair.
She’s still beautiful, Jed thought. More than ever, in fact. Was it because life’s trials had honed her girlish softness into intriguing planes and hollows? Hadn’t he always found the stark lines of winter trees more interesting than summer’s bland, billowy greenness? More interesting, yes, but not as comforting.
They sat, all three, in companionable silence, drinking coffee from the crudely glazed mugs that Garland had made years before in a summer art program given by an eager but not very talented potter.
“Wow,” Garland said, running her finger around the chipped rim, “they really are ugly, aren’t they? No wonder you snuck them up here.”
“Now, Garland,” Tessa rep
roved. “I love them because you made them for me. Besides, they serve a good purpose up here. Sort of like your Uncle Jed,” she added slyly. “Him and his secret thoughts.”
Jed grinned, feeling much too relaxed to protest. The packaged beef stroganoff had been surprisingly good, and Garland had brought dessert from a Viennese bakery newly opened in Telluride.
“I’ve heard about puff pastry,” Tessa said, popping a last bit of it into her mouth, “but this is the first time I’ve actually experienced it. What did you say this was again?”
“Strudel, Mom. This one’s apple. They also have almond and apricot, and when I told the proprietor about our August crop of wild raspberries, he got very excited.”
“Just thinking of them makes me feel faint,” Tessa admitted. “Is there anything as wonderful as our native raspberries? That and the mushrooms.”
Garland frowned. “I really wish you’d leave the mushrooms be, Mom. That botany course I took last semester? I learned enough about fungi to make me vary wary. In their immature stages it’s really very hard to distinguish between some of the edible varieties and their poisonous look-alikes.”
“I know all about that,” Tessa replied. “If you know what to look for— “
“Those word-of-mouth guidelines of yours allow about the same chance as Russian roulette.”
“I’m still here aren’t I? But just in case . . .” She knocked on the chair’s wide arm.
“I wish you wouldn’t make fun of me like that,” Garland muttered.
“I’m not!” Tessa exclaimed, sitting up straight. “No more than you do of me, anyway. It’s called tit for tat.”
“Me make fun of you? Why, I never—”
“All the time, Garland. It’s Boulder this, and the university that—”
“If memory serves,” Garland broke in, sounding haughty but looking hurt, “you’re the one who was so all-fired anxious for me to go, and-”
“Hey, hey, hey!” Jed exclaimed. “Seems like what we’ve got here is a classic bit of generational conflict.”
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