The Horse Whisperer

'What we're doing here A

He moved Rimrock in on them and lifted the flag sharply, making it crack in the air. The colts all broke away to the right and this time, instead of breaking left like before, Pilgrim went after them. As soon as he was clear of Tom though, he separated and again came to a halt on his own. Tom gri

The sun had long gone by the time they had Pilgrim back in his stall and it was getting cold. Diane called the boys in for their supper and Grace went in with them to pick up a coat she had left in the house. Tom and A

'We're branding here tomorrow,' Tom said. 'If you two want to come and give a hand.'

A

He shrugged. 'Maybe. But as long as you don't get in the way of the branding iron it doesn't matter too much. Even if you do, it's a nice-looking mark. Back in the city you might be proud of it.'

A

'Okay, why not?' she said.

He told her they'd be starting around nine the next morning but they could show up whenever they liked. Then they said good-night. As she pulled away up the driveway, A

Chapter Seventeen

Tom rode up one side of the valley and Joe the other. The idea was to pick up stragglers but the cows needed little more inducement. They could see the old Chevy down in the meadow where it always parked at feeding time and they could hear Frank and the twins hollering and banging the bag of cow cake on its lowered rear end for them to come and get it. They streamed down from the hills, calling in reply while their calves scrambled after them, calling too, anxious not to be left behind.

Tom's father used to raise pure Herefords, but for some years now Frank had raised a Black Angus-Hereford cross. The Angus cows were good mothers and suited the climate better because their udders were black, not pink like the Herefords, so they didn't get burned by the sun bouncing off the snow. Tom watched for a while as they moved away from him down the hill, then he turned Rimrock to the left and dropped over into the shaded bed of the creek.

Steam rose off the water into the warming air and a dipper took off and flew straight upstream ahead of them fast and so low that its slate wings almost skimmed the surface. Down here the calling of the cattle was muted then lost in the soft splashing of the horse's feet as he moved up to the top of the meadow. Sometimes along here a calf would get tangled in the thick willow scrub. But today they found nothing and Tom eased Rimrock back onto the bank, then loped him up into the sun at the top of the ridge and stopped.

He could see Joe on his brown-and-white paint pony way over on the other side of the valley. The boy waved and Tom waved back. Below, the cattle were fu

From this ridge you could see right down the valley to the ranch and the corrals to which the cattle were now being led. And as Tom looked, he saw what he realized he had been looking out for all morning. A

More than a mile separated him from the two figures that got out of the car. They were small and quite featureless. But Tom could picture A

The air over the corral hung heavy with dust and the smell of scorched flesh. Separated from their mothers, who kept up a constant calling, the calves were moved through a series of co

All of this was witnessed, with a lazy, regal disinterest by their fathers, five enormous Hereford bulls, who lay chewing in an adjoining pen. It was witnessed by A

Tom must have read this on A

'Our friendly neighborhood psycho,' Tom said.

'It's okay, I already ate,' Hank confided to A

As she got to work, A

Later, when she had a moment to look, she saw Tom had taken Grace right to the front line and had her wielding the branding iron. To begin with she kept her eyes closed. But soon he got her thinking so hard about her technique that all squeamishness vanished.