Chapter 1 — The Flood
The rain came up the canyon after midnight, not falling so much as arriving, the way a herd arrives, all at once and from everywhere. Wade Mercer woke in his tent with water already moving under the bedroll, cold as iron, and by the time he had his boots in his hands the wash behind the camp was making a sound he had heard only twice in his life — a low, rolling grind, like the earth clearing its throat.
He got out through the tent mouth with the water at his knees. The moon was gone behind the storm. Somewhere up the dark the horses were screaming.
He had camped the way a careful man camps: tent on the high gravel, wagon drawn up beside it, the remuda held in a rope corral strung between two cottonwoods above the wash's ordinary bed. Forty horses, all his, every one wearing the Bar M, gathered over three years of Texas buying and meant for the Army contract that would finally put him ahead of his debts. The flood did not care how careful he had been. The water coming down the canyon that night was not the wash risen; it was the mountain itself, draining.
The first surge took the wagon. He saw its shape go past in the black, lantern still burning in its box for one strange second under the water, and then the corral rope sang and parted and the remuda broke all at once, forty horses pouring past him in the dark water, blowing and striking, their eyes showing white. A shoulder hit him. He went under.
What happened after that he would never have in order. He remembered the taste of mud. He remembered catching a root or a branch — something that held for a breath — and losing it. He remembered his lungs burning and a resolve, quiet and stupid, that he would not die in water six feet deep in his own camp like a green hand who had pitched his tent in a ditch. He remembered being thrown once against rock, hard enough to crack the dark into sparks, and after that the current took him the way it had taken the wagon, downstream and under and down.
He woke because the sun was on his face and because breathing hurt.
He lay on a gravel bar at the canyon's bend, half in and half out of the shallows, one boot gone, his shirt torn half off him, his mouth full of grit. The water beside him had already fallen to a brown, muttering stream, cluttered with wreckage: a shattered crate, a drowned saddle blanket hung on a bush, cottonwood limbs stripped white as bone. The canyon steamed in the morning light. He could hear birds. It seemed indecent, the birds.
Wade tried to sit up and managed it on the second attempt. His ribs complained down his whole left side. His head was thick and far away. He spat grit and river weed and looked for his camp, and could not find it, because there was no camp. There was the gravel flat where it had been, scoured clean as a table, the tent pegs standing in a row like the stubs of teeth. The wagon was gone. The cottonwoods stood, barked and leaning, hung with debris at the height of a man's shoulder — the height of the water that had passed over the ground where he had slept.
He counted what he had, the way a drowning man counts breaths. One boot. A knife still in its sheath at his belt, the sheath full of mud. His hat gone. His money belt gone, with the contract papers and two hundred dollars and the bill of sale for every horse he owned. He laughed once, at that, and it hurt, and he stopped.
The horses were simply not there. Not one. He whistled through cracked lips — the whistle they knew, low and falling — and the canyon gave him back nothing but the sound of water and a raven's remark from the rim. Forty horses did not vanish. Forty horses went somewhere, down water or up side canyons or standing belly-deep in some flooded pocket waiting for a man to come and think for them. He had to stand. He had to walk. He had to find them before the sun did its work on him, because he understood, with the clarity fever's edge gives a man, that he was hurt worse than the pain was yet saying — the thickness in his head was not only the blow against the rock.
He got to his knees. The gravel bar tilted. He got one foot under him — the bare one — and stood swaying in the wet light like a man on a boat deck, and took three steps up the bar toward the cottonwood where a red blanket hung at shoulder height, dripping, not his blanket, somebody's lost goods washed down from some camp above.
Three steps was what he had. The world went the color of the inside of a shell, the birdsong stretched and thinned, and the gravel came up to meet him almost gently.
He did not hear the horse. He did not see the rider come down through the broken water, reading the wreckage as she came. What Wade Mercer knew, afterward, was only this: that when the dark took him the second time, it was morning, and the flood had done its worst, and he was, though he did not know it yet, already found.
Chapter 2 — The Woman Who Found Him
He came back to himself in pieces, and the first piece was motion — a slow, rocking rise and fall that he took, in confusion, for the water again, and fought against with a weak thrashing that nearly unseated him before a hand came back over his shoulder and took hold of his shirtfront with unhurried strength.
"Be still," a voice said, above and behind him. "You will put us both in the river, and I have already had my bath this year."