long for her to be mounted and riding away. Behind her, the sun wasn’t even yet a glimmer on the eastern rim of the Sangre de Cristos. She gave herself an hour to search for the truck, which wasn’t really a fair shake on ten square miles of land. But she couldn’t afford more time than that, or she might be discovered and made a prisoner in her own house.
She ruled out the Hub and the buildings closest to it. Levi wouldn’t have put her truck anywhere the other ranch hands might have found it. They’d only deliver it right back to her doorstep. She went instead to the more remote areas of the property that backed up into the foothills, which also had more trees, shrubs, and grasses grown tall and ungrazed through the summertime. As the morning sky shifted from its dark gray hues to pinkish reds, Beth and Hastings picked their way from north to south underneath a ledge of volcanic rock that hid them in its shadow.
There was no sign of her truck. No tire tracks, no foliage crushed by a vehicle passing through. Beth looked for two hours instead of one, and the August sun quickly grew warm even in the shade.
She drew Hastings to the creek for some water and let him drink. As he filled his belly, she turned her face westward. It might be possible to ride her horse to Burnt Rock; there were plenty of trails through these rugged mountains, trails used for more than a century by miners and prospectors, and then by ranchers and pool riders driving their herds uphill for summer grazing. She’d have to check the trail maps, because leaving a marked path in these lands would be idiotic. The map she carried, unfortunately, didn’t have these details.
It had been a long time since Beth had sat and listened to the sounds of the land. It was eerily silent this morning, with the cows miles away in the mountains and the hot morning air too still to stir the leaves or grasses. The water at Hastings’ lips was also quiet, trickling now at the end of summer. The noise of his drinking and dribbling was a pleasant disruption.
She heard a dog bark. A faraway yip of excitement. Hastings lifted his head and flicked his ears in the direction of the sound.
When Beth was a little girl, Rose had once tried to explain to her that mothers of mammal species were uniquely equipped to recognize their offspring’s cries. A cow could find its calf among thousands of cattle, even if separated by miles. A human mother was so attuned to her infant’s cries that the sound alone could cause her milk to let down. And not only did a mother recognize her child’s cries, but she could distinguish among these as well: the hungry cry from the sleepy cry from the sick cry, and so on.
Beth understood this on some level, because even though she wasn’t technically a mother, she had raised her dog, Herriot, by hand when the mother rejected the runt. She believed she could recognize Herriot’s bark and distinguish between the types: the get-along-dumb-cow bark, the intruder-alert bark, the boy-am-I-happy-to-see-you bark.
This distant bark belonged to Herriot, and it fell into the last category.
Beth nudged Hastings to cross the creek bed in the direction of the sound. She half expected Herriot to launch herself out of the shrubs and onto the horse’s back, clinging to Beth and washing her face with her thick tongue until both of them fell out of the saddle.
The grasping branches of a willow caught the corners of her eyes as Hastings came up the other bank. The horse seemed to sense what Beth wanted, and needed no guidance in following the happy noise, which repeated itself in more or less the same manner every few minutes.
After gaining some height and a slightly better view on the rocky slope, where the trees were fewer in number than they were at the creek, Beth thought it strange that Herriot hadn’t made any move toward her. Maybe the dog was captive, secured by a leash or a cage, and had merely caught Beth’s scent.
Hastings didn’t hesitate to go on, even when doubt crept across Beth’s thoughts. The second realization to trouble her was that the volume of Herriot’s bark hadn’t changed in the half hour she’d been pursuing it. Surely it should be growing louder. Even if the rocks and trees and slopes, now