Bowman went out alone in pursuit of a stallion and found a pack two days later. He followed this pack for another day. He needed a well-built male, but with a character different to the one he already had. A strong horse with a calm temperament. A humble mustang, to balance the pride and arrogance of his first stallion.
This is what Jonathan Fitzpatrick had told him: You have to choose opposing characters, Mr Penders. To breed racehorses, you always follow the same line: size, muscles and speed. But to breed the best horse in the world, what matters is its character. So you have to build a personality. Pride, because that’s important, and also humility when necessary. You have to mix them, Mr Penders.
In the end, he chose an Appaloosa with a coat like the negative of a night sky: white with a scattering of black stars. Bowman watched it for another day, following its movements, memorising its reactions when the pack went into a gallop or went to drink or stopped to eat.
He waited until the end of the day. The pack had roamed a long way and the mustangs were tired. They were gathered in a little valley around a half-dry watering hole. Before the Appaloosa went over to drink, waiting its turn after the first males, Bowman galloped down the slope, hollering war cries.
The horse ran in exactly the direction he had anticipated and soon found itself separated from the other animals, galloping alone towards the mountain, with Bowman in pursuit.
The six horses followed the path without difficulty. Their riders tried to keep up a good pace to tire them out without exhausting them. That evening, when they stopped, all the mustangs cared about was eating and drinking.
When they reached Carson City after three weeks in the plains, the three of them stank as badly as old MacBain. Ervin and Vernon rode through the town like returning war heroes. Joseph had wanted to stop in a saloon to celebrate their success, but Bowman insisted that the animals get some rest as early as possible.
Ervin made do with buying whiskey in a shop where he already had a tab. They agreed to advance him the bottle when he told them he was the owner of half of everything that would be born from these mares’ wombs. Before the first mountain pass, he had drunk half the bottle and let his son taste some too. Vernon smiled and his father sang his head off. Bowman dropped them at their cabin, where Mrs Ervin welcomed home her men with a salvo of curses and sent them to take a bath in the lake.
When Bowman reached his camp, the stallion started whinnying and the new mustangs responded. He put the animals in the large enclosure and filled the two barrels with buckets of water. He let them drink, then led them over to the grass, where he tied them to trees. At nightfall, he took them back to the enclosure, went into his hut and fell asleep fully clothed.
The next morning, he swam across the cove to the place where the bottom fell away almost vertically, and continued into the dark water.
Bowman shaved in front of the mirror, smiling, regularly turning to look at the horses, which stared back at him while they waited for their food. Clean and changed, he went to visit Jonathan and Aileen’s grave.
“I can’t give them Christian names, otherwise I’d name them after you, the stallion and the first mare. But that’s not done. And besides, I wouldn’t really like that. So I thought of something else. The male, given that I’ve already got a mare called Trigger, I’m going to call him Springfield. They like each other. And for you, Aileen, I called the new mare Beauty.”
Bowman cared for the mustangs and started training Springfield. After three weeks, the stallion became resistant to the exercises. Then Bowman began to prepare for the impending autumn and winter.
In exchange for the cattle, the Ervin family had extended its vegetable garden, creating reserves of cereals and potatoes for Bowman. It was too late to reap fodder for the animals; this winter, he would have to lead his pack to lowlying pastureland. He still did not have many horses and there was enough food for them there. After that, he had to dry some meat, construct a stable, gather firewood, and build an oven and a fireplace in the hut. He also had to learn to fish on the lake. When the wild animals were hibernating under the snow, he would still be able to catch fish.
*
In early September, he had an oven and enough meat, so he started the construction of the stable. Beauty and two other mares were already in foal.
In three weeks, he built the framework, sometimes helped by Vernon and Joseph, sometimes by old MacBain. As they had neither the means to buy planks nor the time to saw them, they covered the building with bark and filled in the gaps with mud from the bottom of the cove. Bowman took two days to cut down a giant redwood and pull the chopped-up trunk to his ranch, then he hollowed out the blocks to make troughs. Hollowing out young pine trunks in the same way, he created gutters and diverted part of the stream to provide the building with water.
Before starting on his reserves of firewood, he hammered two stakes in the ground next to the northern boundary marker – the tree into which he’d fired a bullet. He split one last block of redwood and fabricated a thick, ten-foot plank, which he sculpted with a hatchet and on which he engraved letters with an iron heated up in the embers. Above the two stakes, high enough for horses to pass beneath, he fixed the sign for the Fitzpatrick ranch. The Ervins and old MacBain came to his place that evening to celebrate the official inauguration, five months after the arrival of the Fitzpatricks and the man they called Erik Penders. The old man brought a bottle of alcohol that he had distilled himself. No-one asked him for the recipe.
The next morning, Bowman took a bath and felt the cool air on his skin when he emerged from the water: the first shiver heralding the change of season. October began and the trees’ leaves turned brown and yellow. In front of the mirror, he rubbed soap on his cheeks. The horses now roamed freely around the ranch, going ever further to find grass on the ground. Beauty, for the most part, remained close to the buildings. The mare walked over to him, smelling his still-wet hair.
Bowman caressed her head, waiting for her to go away so he could shave.
“Leave me in peace. I’ll cut myself.”
The mare retreated. He opened Penders’ razor, lifted up his chin and put the blade to his throat. The mare pricked her ears and suddenly turned her head, knocking Bowman’s hand. The blade nicked his throat.
Bowman leaned down to the water, rinsed off the soap and stood up in front of the mirror. It was a deep cut. He pressed his fingers to it firmly.
“Shit! Look what you made me do!”
The mare was staring at the entrance of the ranch. Bowman followed her gaze.
On an uncovered cart, a driver and his passenger were approaching. As if to signal her presence, the traveller lifted a hat. A bright spot of colour shining in the sunlight. Bowman walked to meet the carriage without bothering to put his shirt back on. The driver pulled on the reins and froze, seeing this big, half-naked man standing there, covered in scars and with blood pouring down his chest.
Alexandra Desmond got down from the carriage, shook the dust from her dress, and moved towards him.
“Were you afraid I’d be more interested in the landscape than in you, Mr Bowman?”
Putting a hand to his throat, Bowman stammered:
“It was Beauty. She nudged me.”
“Beauty?”
“The new mare.”
The driver cleared his throat.
“I have to get going now. Shall I leave your things here, ma’am?”
She turned towards him.
“Yes, you can unload them.”
While she spoke to the driver, Bowman lost sight of Alexandra’s eyes and his heart almost stopped. He shivered when she turned back to him.
“Let’s go and clean up that wound. And you can tell me what I don’t know yet.”
Naked, Alexandra came out of the hut, walked past the horses’ enclosure and entered the lake. Her hair floated on the surface for a moment like red seaweed and then she dived under the water.
With a blanket on his shoulders, Bowman approached the cove.
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She swam far off towards the deep waters and lay on her back, letting the current take her for a moment before coming back towards the shore. Her wet hair fell over her shoulders and her breasts, water ran down to her belly, and she stood there looking at Bowman. She waited for him to smile before she emerged from the lake. Bowman opened up the blanket and she pressed herself against him, streaming with cold water. They lay on the grass and let the sun warm them up.
“Alexandra?”
She turned onto her side and leaned her cheek against his chest.
“I know this is probably a stupid question, or one I shouldn’t ask because it’s not very nice, but I wanted to know if you’re going to stay here.”
“Arthur?”
He looked down at her.
“What?”
“I’d like you to ask me.”
“I already asked you.”
She smiled. Bowman stroked her hair with his three-fingered hand.
“Alexandra, do you want to stay here with me?”
“Yes. On one condition.”
“What?”
“That you tell me what you wrote to me.”
She leaned away from him and rested her head on her arm. Bowman rolled onto his side and looked her in the eyes.
“Are you afraid it was just a soldier’s letter?”
“No. I just want to hear it from your own lips.”
“Why?”
“So that this place becomes the place I dreamed about.”
“I’ve loved you since I first saw you.”
She put her hand on his cheek.
“Where was that?”
“On the staircase of the hotel in Fort Worth.”
“That’s not true.”
Bowman reflected for a moment, staring into her grey eyes.
“Yes, it is. But I didn’t realise it straight away.”
“When did that happen?”
“Later, when you opened the door of your room to that young man.”
She smiled.
“You saw me?”
“I was downstairs, in the restaurant.”
“Why at that moment?”
“Because you saw me too, before you let that man in, and we both thought the same thing.”
She burst out laughing, pushed him over onto his back and lay on top of him, slowly rubbing her breasts and her belly against Bowman’s body.
“Do you need me to love you?”
“No.”
“Alright, so I won’t tell you when it happened for me.”
“I know.”
She sat up, putting her weight on his belly, and with her fingertips she stroked the wound on his neck and the scars on his chest.
“You can’t know.”
“When I went inside Kramer’s house. To chase the ghosts from your town. I opened the window and you were standing on the other side of the street, in front of the black barn.”
She stopped stroking him.
“I didn’t understand straight away.”
Bowman put his hand out towards her breasts. Alexandra’s belly tensed. He caressed her thighs and her buttocks, she lifted herself up on her knees, took his erection in her hand, guided him inside her and slowly slid down on him, her eyes never leaving his.
“There won’t be any more ghosts.”
“Just one.”
Alexandra closed her eyes and bit her lips as she lifted herself up and slid back down him.
“Your name?”
“Arthur Bowman no longer exists for anyone but you.”
4
Bowman ordered a branding iron from the forge in Carson so he could brand his horses, and another, bigger one for marking the boundaries of his property. Alexandra Desmond and Erik Penders bought land and received their ownership deeds from the town’s Territory Office. The Fitzpatrick ranch extended from the shore of Lake Tahoe to the border of the Ervins’ property, one mile wide and just over four miles long in an eastward direction. Over two thousand acres, stretching from the low prairies in the foothills, above Carson City, to the lake, including a wooded peak. The boundary markers were put up at the end of the autumn. Next to each stake in the earth, they made a fire to heat up the large branding iron and burn the sign of the ranch into the wood. A vertical diamond, with its top and bottom crossed by a line. Two As, reflecting each other.
Young Vernon Ervin was hired as a farm boy and, before the first snowfall, Bowman went off on a three-week expedition in the plains of the Utah Territory, this time with six men recruited in town. To the initial group of seven horses, another twenty new mustangs were added.
Joseph Ervin was, in turn, hired by the Fitzpatrick ranch as a foreman, with his son the only other employee. Dividing his time between the ranch and his leatherwork, he began to draw up plans for a large tannery. The ranch, in exchange for a two-year employment contract, advanced him the money he needed for the creation of this new building.
The construction of an enclosure and a temporary shelter, on the eastern prairies, was the last the thing they were able to accomplish that winter before the earth began to freeze. In early December, they had a thousand dollars remaining from Captain Reeves’s fortune. The cove iced over. Alexandra and Bowman spent their first winter together in the hut. Bowman’s reserves of food, insufficient for two, obliged them to make several trips into town. Thankfully, that year, there was not too much snow. From their territory, it took them three hours to reach Carson.
The Fitzpatrick ranch quickly acquired a strange reputation. Mrs Desmond’s appearance as she rode her mare, dressed in men’s clothing, her long red hair falling down over a fur coat – not to mention her arrival in the region with so much money – set tongues wagging. She sometimes went to visit Henry Mighels, in the office of the Carson Daily Appeal, and it was said that she met the journalist to order books and have discussions with him.
On two occasions, she also went into town accompanied by Bowman. When he rode beside her, they were greeted with the respect due to such wealthy owners. Equal partners in the ranch, they lived, it was said, in a house too small to contain two beds. And they weren’t married.
No-one knew anything about them and, despite the immorality of their conduct, they paraded shamelessly through town, her with her hair worn long and him with his distant gaze, his broad shoulders, and the scar in the middle of his face. Their stud farm in the mountains was another topic of discussion, this time in a comic vein. No-one wanted that land for farming of any kind, least of all a stud farm. The winters were too harsh. It was a place for trappers, tanners and reed-eating Paiutes. The men who had participated in the capture of the twenty mustangs told people how Penders had chosen the horses for their “personalities”. No-one had ever heard such ridiculous nonsense. Others said that Penders and Desmond were not mad at all, and that the slopes of the ranch made good pastureland. It was even admitted, in the end, that the Fitzpatrick ranch was not such a bad piece of business. The land was three times cheaper than that around Carson City, and in the long term, the ranch might even prove profitable. Some swore they would never work there, but already certain builders had signed contracts to construct buildings there in the spring.
When, in February 1861, on his way through town, Bowman was greeted by Abraham Curry, owner of the Eagle Ranch and founder of Carson City, the negative comments about the Fitzpatrick ranch were toned down definitively. Not to mention that none of the town’s eight hundred inhabitants had any desire to get on the wrong side of Erik Penders.
“I saw him trap a stallion on his own, and believe me, that horse was fierce. I wouldn’t have gone near it till I’d put two bullets in its head, and another one in its heart, just to make sure.”
If the redhead had been a witch, even in the old days, they would have hesitated to burn her for fear that the flames would have had no effect on that devil Penders.
*
In November, the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected the new president of the United States. Very soon, South Ca
rolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas seceded from the Union. In February, the Confederate States of America were officially formed. Lincoln took power in March, and in April a civil war blew up between the North and the South.
The first three foals on the Fitzpatrick ranch were born as the new government in Washington was initiating a system of conscription to raise an army of eighty thousand men. Alexandra went to Carson City every week where she met Henry Mighels of the Daily Appeal in order to keep informed of events.
Abraham Curry of the Eagle Ranch and other influential figures in Utah decided that the western part of the Territory should secede, creating the new Nevada Territory and thus freeing it from the authority of the Mormons of Salt Lake City. The American troops stationed in Utah, called away for the conflict in the South, left behind them a void that the Mormons filled in order to re-establish their authority over the promised land of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Rumours of Indian attacks on the California road, no longer protected by the army, grew stronger and stronger in Carson City.
In May, the builders erected a large construction on the eastern prairies, capable of sheltering about thirty horses and reserves of feed for the hardest winter months. In early June, Bowman hired a dozen men for another expedition on the plains. He had to offer bonuses to overcome their fear of encountering Indians. They left Carson heavily armed and returned to Fitzpatrick at the end of that month with thirty mares and seven stallions.
All of the first batch of mares had given birth to foals, in addition to the progeny of Trigger and Springfield, and of Beauty and the Appaloosa. Bowman began selecting the stallions and females, reserving enclosures in different parts of the ranch for each of the males, and, with Alexandra, sketching the beginning of genealogical trees, noting down the dates of coverings, spotting the mares and choosing the right stallions for them on the basis of character and morphology. In July, three more men were hired; they established their seasonal camp in the forest, on the eastern border of the land.
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