They Ran Me Dry in the Desert, So We Came Back for the Whole Rim novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Whistle
Ximena wakes at a Rim branding fire three months before the Count that killed her, sees the Warden gone gray, and demands to know why he carries her whistle.
The last water I ever drank was a swallow from a warm canteen, in a dry wash, on the second mile.
I tasted it again before I opened my eyes.
In that life, Tammy read my name out of the roll and told eight packs I had poisoned their spring.
I had not.
The horn blew, and I ran down the mountain with the whole pack behind me.
Ramiro Cota ran the first mile at my shoulder and never said a word.
I died on the third day in a dry wash, with a mesquite whistle in my fist.
Then a calf bawled somewhere close, and I opened my eyes.
I was sitting in the bed of my father's pickup with a paper plate of beans on my knee.
The air was April cold, the kind that comes down through ponderosa and finds the back of your neck.
A branding fire burned in a ring of stones in front of me.
It smelled of scorched hair and mesquite smoke.
Forty people stood around it with plates and coffee, and I knew every one of them.
I was twenty-four years old, and it was three months before the Count.
My vaccine bag sat between my boots.
I had spent the afternoon giving shots to sixty calves.
The Rim pack paid cash for a vet tech, and my father could not say no to cash.
I put the plate down on the tailgate before my hands shook it off my knee.
My father stood at the fire with the other elders, his hat held against his chest.
He was alive, and he was twisting the brim in both hands.
In my last life I had never seen him stand again after the Count, and my eyes stung.
Across the fire, the alpha of the Rim sat on a hay bale and told the circle a story.
He was sixty-one, silver-haired, in a white Stetson, and he told it in the soft voice of a patient father.
Everyone leaned in to hear him.
I did not listen.
I was looking at the man standing alone at the edge of the firelight.
Ramiro Cota had a plate in his hand and had not eaten from it.
He was thirty-one, lean and dark, with a gray streak at his left temple that I did not remember.
His face had lost all its color.
He was looking at me, and he was not looking at me the way a Warden looks at a tenant's daughter.
He looked at me like a man who knew he had already lost.
I stopped breathing.
In the first life, he had never looked at me at all.
He set the plate on a fence post, very carefully, and walked around the fire.
People turned their heads to watch him come.
The Warden kept the fire and the Count, and he led the first mile of every dry run, so nobody was easy when he walked.
He stopped at the back of my father's truck, a long arm's length from me.
He did not come closer.
"Miss Salcido," he said, and his voice was steady, though his hand was not.
"I need to borrow your father's truck."
The fire popped.
A few of the families stopped talking, and then more of them did.
I looked at him, and I saw what was hanging from the pocket of his shirt.
It was a leather thong, and at the end of it hung a short piece of mesquite.
The wood had a flat mouth and three notches cut in a row.
My father had taught me that cut when I was seven.
Every wolf on the desert floor carved one in the week before the Count, to call her people home.
I had not carved mine yet.
I would not carve it until July.
And it was the whistle I had died holding.
I knew those three notches by feel, because my thumb had been on them when I died.
My chest went tight, and I thought about the easy thing to do.
I could hand him the keys and say nothing.
I could be the quiet daughter who vaccinated calves and let the Kimbroughs have the Rim.
I had done that for twenty-four years, and I had died of it.
I stood up in the bed of the truck.
My father turned his head and said my name, low and worried.
I did not look at him.
The whole fire was watching me now, and I wanted it to be.
"You can have the truck, Warden," I said, loud enough to carry past the stones.
"I'll even drive you."
Lyle Kimbrough's story stopped in the middle of a word.
"But first you tell me," I said, "why you are carrying my mesquite whistle in your breast pocket."
Nobody moved.
My whistle was not in my hand, and I had not carved it yet.
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