Chapter 18: Her Own Outfit

The old rancher's two colts came on Wednesday morning.

A pair of three-year-old sorrels, full brothers, with white socks and no manners.

"They've never had a rope on them," he said, leaning on my mother's round pen. "My grandson tried. Grandson's in a walking boot."

"What do you want them to be?"

"Ranch horses. Something a man can sort pairs on and not die."

"Thirty days," I said.

He laughed. "I'll give you sixty."

"Thirty," I said.

By noon the first sorrel was wearing a halter and following me around the pen.

By supper he'd let me lean across his back.

The old rancher stood at the rail the whole afternoon with his thumbs in his suspenders.

He didn't say anything until he was getting back in his truck.

"Your mother did that," he said. "Same thing, with her hand flat like that. I never knew how."

"Neither did she," I said. "She just did it."

He went home and made phone calls.

I know because on Thursday, three trucks came up the lane before nine.

A woman from Hudson with a palomino filly that had flipped over backward twice.

A father and his teenage daughter with a big gray gelding who wouldn't load.

A wheat farmer with a mule.

"I don't do mules," I said.

"Ma'am, nobody does this mule," the farmer said. "That's why I'm here."

I did the mule.

They were all humans. None of them knew what I was.

They just knew their horses stood still for me.

By Friday I had nine head in my mother's pens and a waiting list on the back of a feed receipt.

Six hundred a month a head for colt starting. Cash, checks, one Venmo I had to have the teenage daughter show me how to open.

I sat at my mother's kitchen table Friday night and counted it twice.

It was more money than I'd held in my own two hands in eight years.

I put half of it in an envelope.

I wrote BRIDGER, 9,000 on the front, for the grulla, and put it in the flour tin.

The hay came on Thursday too.

I heard the truck first, a flatbed grinding up the lane in low gear.

The four Bridger boys were on it, with two tons of good grass hay stacked and roped.

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