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“He’s nobody’s horse. Scary, isn’t it?” she taunts, mocking me. “Why not? You have guns in the truck.”

McCord and I find each other’s eyes, if only to affirm that we’re the grown-ups here, not about to be manipulated by an overly indulged runaway brat. What, exactly, does she wish to kill? And what does she know about the acrid smell of the aftermath?

“Taking a life is serious business,” says McCord, and then I am certain of what I have suspected: that he’s been the places I’ve been.

“The horse is going to be blind the rest of its life,” says Sara with disdain. “What’s the point?”

The look between us deepens, not over the suffering of the child or the animal, but something much more tender and sad. McCord and I both know that way out here in the wash there are no landmarks beyond a yellow fire hydrant and a concrete bunker with some pipes in a mesh cage. This is where your heart is exposed, or where it’s buried.

He does not wait, but climbs the ridge.

“Sara!” I am giving orders now. “Get in the truck and go with Sterling.”

McCord looks down from the top of the embankment.

“Sara? Come on now. Come with me.”

And he holds out his hand patiently until she finally scrambles up. He pulls her over the top and the truck disappears.

Space unrolls in every direction. I take a breath full of sage. I sit beside the foal and sponge the blood off its face. Please don’t be in pain. Please forgive me.

The bees hum like a plucked string. I sit beneath a dead oak, against a mud bank where the broken root system is exposed. There are holes and burrows in the mud and it is stained with dried-out algae, like the cross section of a melted civilization. The smell of deadness is rank. The sky is white and far away, the sun a burning locus. Here at the bottom of the riverbed, the lives of the foal and I are as inconsequential as the flash of a mirror in a very great plain.

Hundreds of miles to the north, across a harsh volcanic basin, wild mustangs forage freely, fight, and play—until they are betrayed by the Judas horse for a bucket of grain. I remember how the captured mares would circle the corral, lost in silence, all the subtle scent and body messages with their babies and the stallions snapped.

Beneath my hands, the tiny horse is laboring to breathe. I stay with him, dabbling water with the blood-soaked cloth, as if I could accompany his sightless soul into the greater darkness. I feel a deep and wordless kinship, as if we are bound by some transparent force of kindness. I will not abandon you.

Am I the Judas horse, cynical and beaten? Or the innocent foal?

After a very long time, the amber lights of the veterinarian’s truck show above the ridge.

Twenty-two

July. Intruders are everywhere.

False dandelion invades the perfectly swept orchard floor, no matter how often Stone drives the flail, or makes us rake by hand. We are halfway through the development of the hazelnuts, and tiny larvae of the leaf-roller moth have appeared on the new clusters. Bad news. The larvae cause nut abortions, not a pretty sight. In the still heat of the afternoon, I am up on a ladder setting insect traps, using the work as a cover to check in with Donnato.

I have discovered that poking around the topmost branches of the hazelnuts is an excellent way to conduct a covert conversation. For one thing, it’s great up there. You see things differently, like opening a secret hatch to a world of sky. Rooftops and mountains become your ground—and unlike hiding out in Sirocco’s stall, if Dick Stone ventures into the orchard, you would be the first to know.

“The fifty-caliber casings you found are a match to the slug that killed Sergeant Mackee,” Donnato is saying from L.A. “The shooter is the same as the one at the BLM corrals.”

“What about the Native American we took into custody?”

“He had a pretty good alibi. At the time of the shooting, he was in a local emergency room being treated for ulcers. Now we need the weapon.”

“The sniper rifle that matches the casings,” I agree, watching a white butterfly skimming perfectly through