Snow before many days, he thought. Whatever the coulee held, they would have to fetch it out ahead of the weather — or nobody would fetch it at all.
Chapter 16 — The Ride Out
They left the farm in the gray hour before the sun, five riders in a line that did not look like any line Erik had ever ridden in.
He went first, because it was his ground and his truce. Nils came behind him with his rifle across his saddlebow and his jaw set the way it had been set since he was nine years old and losing an argument. Then Mato, riding the way the wind blows through grass, as if the horse were a rumor under him. Then the two militia men Alcott had sent — a broad Swede with a burned-red beard and a boy from over by Caledonia who could not have been twenty and kept touching his cartridge belt.
At the well, Gray Elk had stood with his blanket around him and said nothing at all. It was Mila who spoke, from the door of the sod house, her left arm bound close and her face still thin from the fever days.
"My brother," she said, in her own tongue first and then in English for the rest of them, "bring back the horses. Not the men. The horses."
Mato had nodded once, the way a man takes an order he has already given himself.
They rode east first, away from the coulee, because Erik would not have any man watching from a ridge read their errand plain. The frost had come in the night and the grass stood stiff and white, and the horses' breath went up in rags. It was cold enough that nobody wasted words for the first hour.
It was the Swede who started it, at the creek crossing, watching Mato water his horse downstream of the others, out of courtesy or out of something older.
"You ride like you was born doing it," the Swede said.
Mato did not look up. "I was."
Nils made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "So was I, near enough," he said. "Pa put me on a horse before I could walk straight. Didn't take, though. Erik says I ride like a sack of feed arguing with the bag."
That startled a laugh out of the Caledonia boy, and even Mato's mouth moved. Erik rode on and let it happen. A mile of easy talk was worth more than an hour of his preaching, and he knew it. Men who have laughed together in the cold are slower to reach for their rifles.
By mid-morning they had turned north, crossing the high dry table, and the talk died down into the work of riding. Mato rode ahead now, reading the ground the way Erik read his journal — page by page, nothing skipped. Twice he stopped, looking at things Erik could not see until they were pointed out: a line of trodden grass, a place where many horses had passed and the frost had not yet healed the print of them.
"They came this way," Mato said. "In the night, and not slowly."
"The herd?" Nils asked.
"Part of it. Or the part that lagged." Mato's eyes went to the north rim of a shallow draw. "Wait."
He was off his horse and gone into the draw before any of them could speak, moving the way smoke moves. They found him kneeling.
The mare lay in the lee of the bank where she had fallen, or been left, with the grass bent around her. She was a small bay, ribby with the drought, and her off foreleg was swollen thick at the fetlock where she had stumbled or been crowded in the dark. She was alive — that was the first miracle. Her eye rolled white at them, and her breath came quick and shallow, but she lifted her head when Mato spoke to her, low and steady, in the tongue Erik did not have.
"Easy, sister," Nils said, in Norwegian, which the mare did not have either, but it did her no harm.
Erik knelt on the other side. The leg was not broken. He had doctored enough horses to know a break by the way the whole animal agrees to die, and this one had not agreed. Sprained, torn up, left to the coyotes by men in too much hurry to finish her — and then Erik saw what Mato was looking at, and his hand went still on the mare's neck.
High on her hip, clear in the thin autumn coat, was the band's brand. Whole. Untouched. No running iron had been near it, no botch, no blur — the clean mark of the Red Willow people, burned in the spring and healed honest.
"They did not brand them again," Mato said. His voice was flat as a hand laid on a table. "Not one. Flint's men steal a whole herd and do not touch the marks on them. Why?"
"Because they meant to do it all at once," Erik said slowly, "after the first snow, when the work would not show fresh and the band would be gone to the agency and could not answer. Or because a brand is a slow job, and your horses were never the point. The land was the point. The horses only had to be gone."
Mato was quiet a moment. Then he stood, took his own water bag, and poured a slow stream into the hollow of his palm for the mare to drink, and she drank like the dying drink, and did not spill a drop.
They could not take her — a lamed horse would slow them and might cry out at the wrong hour. They did better. They built her a windbreak of cut brush on the lee side and left her the Swede's oat sack emptied into a pile within reach of her nose. If they came back this road, she would be gathered.