Chapter 16: The Rim

I didn't think.

I put my heels in Tonka and he went.

Not back. Forward, along the very lip of the rim, between the running cattle and the drop.

The snow there was blown thin, a crust over rock. I could hear his shoes ringing on it.

On my left, a wall of black backs and white faces and horns, coming like a flood.

On my right, the canyon.

The air out there was gray and empty all the way to the bottom.

"Stay off the edge!" somebody yelled on the radio. "Rawlins, stay off the edge!"

The foreman.

I didn't answer him. I didn't have a hand free.

The lead cows were thirty yards ahead of me, a big brindle and two blacks, running with their heads up and their eyes rolling.

They weren't running at the canyon. They didn't know it was there.

They were running away from the wolf, and the canyon was simply what was in the way.

Behind them came four thousand head who'd follow them anywhere.

Tonka gained.

Twenty yards. Ten.

His whole body was stretched out flat under me, ears pinned.

I could feel him reaching for every stride.

Then we were beside the brindle.

Then past her.

I swung Tonka left, hard, right across her nose.

She didn't stop.

A cow running scared doesn't stop for a horse.

But she would stop for something she was more afraid of than a wolf on a ridge.

I let my wolf come up.

Not a little. All of her.

My small, quiet wolf, the one Coy called useless for five years, came up into my skin and filled it.

I felt my teeth sharpen against my lip and my eyes go hot.

She didn't push.

She never pushes.

She just stood up, in front of that brindle cow, and showed herself.

Not as a threat. As a fact.

There's a wolf here too. And this one is between you and the edge.

The brindle cow planted her front feet in the snow and skidded.

The two blacks crashed into her and spun.

I held Tonka sideways across the trail, ten feet from the drop, with my wolf standing in my eyes.

The leaders swung uphill, away from me.

Away from the rim.

And four thousand head of cattle followed them, the way cattle do, in one long heaving curve up the sage slope, away from the canyon.

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