The Wranglers had a painted sign:
WE RIDE THE WIND. WE ROPE THE SKY.
Dot kept a smaller notice folded:
Thirty cattle. Deliver by July.
She’d hired these famous riders
for an ordinary summer drive.
At dusk they stopped above a gulch
with all their paid-for beasts alive.
Willy combed his celebrated whiskers.
Hap had fixed their wagon wheel.
Len finished mending Kit’s loose straps
and packed away his awl of steel.
Kit watched the far horizon.
He’d asked for wages on the day
they reached the buyer’s northern pasture.
He wanted work that didn’t sway.
A man stood down below them
where the fallen corral lay.
His coat showed stars straight through it.
“I’ve a herd,” they heard him say.
“We lost them in a whirlwind
on the night my outfit died.
Bring them home, I’ll pay you handsomely.
The deed’s here at my side.”
“A deed to what?” asked Dot.
The foreman pointed at the ground.
Willy said, “Property! Our fortune!”
and rode the stony track around.
Dust hung where his horse had stepped.
Inside it, horns and bodies shone.
When the drifting dust had settled,
every shining steer was gone.
Dot left the live herd with a local hand
who’d joined them near the spring.
She paid him for the extra watch.
“We’ll see what this job brings.”
Kit asked the foreman, “Must we?”
“No,” the foreman said. “You may.”
Kit nodded once and stayed above
to watch the track they’d come that day.
Hap had roped the wind in posters
with a hidden length of wire.
He cast his loop through dusty cattle.
It caught no hide. The loop fell clear.
He dragged a branch to raise more dust,
but galloped where the cattle stood.
They scattered toward the cliff edge.
“A lively lot!” he said. “That’s good.”
Len claimed to terrify a storm
with powder in a battered tin.
He lit his showman’s noise at dusk.
The cattle fled the cracking din.
Willy charged to head them off,
his coat streaming like a banner.
He brought them back across Hap’s track
in no particularly ordered manner.
“Our methods have impressed them,”
Willy said, as dust fell flat.
Dot saw the settling line bend left
where nothing visible had sat.
Something blocked the falling powder:
a moving back, a muzzle low.
She watched a ghost turn from her horse
where an ordinary steer would go.
She rode away a little,
turned and gave the creature room.
It stopped its hurried circling.
Another shadow left the gloom.
“They still behave like cattle,”
she said. “You rush, they spread.
Let’s move them down toward the corral.
It’s where he wants them led.”
The foreman raised his transparent hand
toward the broken gate.
“Through that gap,” he said. “Before
the wind’s too high. They cannot wait
when the dust blows out of the gulch.
They’re carried with it till next year.”
Above the western ridge a column
rose in daylight’s last red smear.
Kit came down to join the others.
“Not this,” he said. “I’ll mind the real herd.
You owe my day’s pay first, Willy.
We agreed on work, not on your word
that death’s a tolerable customer.”
Willy started, “Our reputation—”
Dot paid Kit what he was owed
and asked him to take the other station.
Kit rode back up to relieve the hand.
That left no rider on the slope
to keep the ghosts from turning outward.
Hap gathered his theatrical rope.
“I’ve no use for sky tonight,” he said.
“But I can pull those deadfall limbs.”
He cleared a path below the cliff
where Dot could follow close to him.
Len had good lungs, for all his thunder.
He called out where the dust rose dense.
He’d spent the morning mending saddles;
now he tied cloth strips to fence
posts along the last straight approach.
Dot saw their streamers through the grit.
Willy held his steady horse
where the herd would otherwise split.
The whirlwind entered by the south wall.
They could not rope it, beg or boast.
Hap braced the gate’s cracked hinge post
with a plank from the old loading post.
The gate still swung. He kept it open,
watched the post and held his prop.
Len shouted counts through flying sand.
Dot moved slowly with the mob.
A pale calf turned toward Willy.
He had a splendid speech prepared;
he held his position without giving it,
let the calf see the opening there.
It followed the last cow through the gap.
The dust thinned to a little sheet.
Hap dropped the gate behind them.
The foreman walked into his beasts.
He set a folded paper
on the loading post’s flat head.
The cattle faded round him
and the wind crossed an empty shed.
There was no shining sack of silver,
no hatful of enchanted ore.
The deed named this derelict patch of land,
its well, its walls and nothing more.
Willy read the list of boundaries
with his whiskers full of grit.
“An estate,” he said at last.
Len said, “We’ll need to shovel it.”
Hap put his plank beside the gate.
“We could fix it over winter.”
Willy said the famous Wranglers
could not be seen as mere fence menders.
Dot measured the gap with her riding line.
The gate would need new hinges, too.
She’d finish her contract with the live herd
before she told them what she’d do.
Above, Kit called that supper waited.
Willy took the deed in hand.
“We might hold legendary gatherings.”
“Bring a shovel,” Dot said. “And a plan.”
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