Moonrise Page 7

“There’s a fact of mustang life that’s not pretty.”

  Sam squared her shoulders. Did this have to do with the constant range battle between cattle ranchers and wild horses? Was Brynna, as a Bureau of Land Management employee, caught in the middle again?

  “And since you’ll be out alone in wild horse country for a couple days,” Brynna continued, “you should know about it.”

  She already knew about the food rivalry between cattle and horses. What could Brynna be talking about?

  Brynna knew Sam had loved horses forever. She’d read books about them and listened in on cowboys talking of horses for most of her fourteen years.

  Clearly, though, Brynna thought she was about to reveal something shocking.

  “I’m ready,” Sam encouraged her.

  “When stallions fight, they prove more than their dominance. They prove their right to father the next generation of colts.”

  “I know,” Sam said. “I was just thinking about that. Moon lost that fight we saw in Arroyo Azul because the Phantom was stronger and smarter.”

  “Right,” Brynna said. “So nothing really changed in the Phantom’s herd, but it might have. If Moon had won, he would have been the new boss at a time when mares were already in foal to the Phantom.”

  “So?”

  “So…” Brynna stretched the word out a little longer than usual. “The new stallion would have won the right to father the next generation.”

  Sam knew horses were smart, but what Brynna was saying seemed far-fetched even to her.

  “Would Moon actually know that?”

  “Somehow they seem to,” Brynna said. “And that’s not horse-lover talk, that’s science.”

  Sam took a gulp of tea and waited.

  “Sometimes the victorious stallion doesn’t want the other stallion’s foals around. He’ll be rough with the mares or run them too fast, too far, causing so much stress, the mares don’t give birth to the foals they’re carrying.”

  Sam stayed quiet, but she felt a wave of relief.

  The Phantom’s foals had already been born. The leggy colts and fillies were several months old. In the unlikely event that another stallion won against the Phantom, his foals should be safe.

  “This time of the year,” Brynna went on, “it can get even uglier.”

  “How?” Sam said impatiently. If Brynna had bad news, why didn’t she just spit it out? “I’m not a little kid, you know. Just tell me.”

  “A conquering stallion might kill the foals that aren’t his.”

  Without meaning to, Sam closed her eyes. She opened them just as quickly.

  “I think maybe Jake told me that,” Sam said. “But he doesn’t like mustangs as much as I do. I thought he was exaggerating.”

  “He’s not. Biologists used to think it was just an old cowboy story, but now there’s research to prove it.”

  Sam stared into her empty mug.

  Stallions wouldn’t kill foals out of spite or jealousy. It was Nature’s way of ensuring only the strong horses reproduced. But the why wouldn’t matter to the babies or their mothers.

  Distress showed in her expression, Sam guessed, because Brynna said, “It helps me to remember that wild horses wouldn’t have survived years full of snowstorms, droughts, and predators if the herds hadn’t been strong.

  “Wild animals didn’t need us until we started messing with their environment, bringing in highways and buildings and stuff.” Brynna shrugged. “It’s too late to go back, I guess, but there are some things they’ll do with or without our interference. This is one of them.”

  As she tried to process all Brynna had said, Sam felt tired. Not sleepy, exactly, but exhausted.

  “So,” she managed, “you think I might see another stallion trying to kill the Phantom’s foals?”

  “No. No stallion out there can match him—”

  Sam smiled, despite the somber topic. Her colt Blackie had grown up to be a king of wild horses.

  “—and that’s one reason I released him after he was brought in that day, last year. He’s an amazing example of what mustangs can be. He’s improving the herds’ bloodlines. But the Phantom steals mares from other stallions.”

  Brynna stared at her meaningfully.

  Finally, Sam understood. She held her breath until her lungs burned beneath her ribs.

  “Oh,” was the only word she could manage.

  Brynna was saying the Phantom might be a killer.

  Chapter Eleven

  In the kitchen’s midnight quiet, the refrigerator hummed. The cooling kettle pinged on the stove. Bedsprings creaked upstairs.

  “But the Phantom might not kill foals, even if they belong to other stallions,” Sam said.

  “You’re right. It’s not a rule in wild horse behavior,” Brynna agreed. “And if he did, it’s unlikely you’d see it. But if you do, I want you to understand.”

  And not blame him for it, Brynna’s tone implied, but her stepmother didn’t know Sam had been to the Phantom’s secret valley and watched the wild horses in their family group. Except for a few territorial squeals and kicks, it had seemed so peaceful. And when she’d seen the Phantom with a new mare—like Golden Rose, the Kenworthys’ lost palomino—she hadn’t seen any violence.

  Those two thoughts made her feel better. After all, even a biologist like Brynna had to admit not all stallions acted the same.

  Footsteps came down the stairs. Even at a slow, uneven pace, Sam recognized Dad’s approach. He didn’t come into the kitchen, though; he just called quietly from the stairs.

  “Everything all right in there?”

  “Fine,” Brynna answered.

  There was a moment of silence in which Sam felt Dad’s impatience to know what was going on.

  “You two down here eating up dinner leftovers?” Dad asked.

  Sam’s stomach wobbled at the thought of the red chili burritos. Her conversation with Brynna had squashed her late-night appetite.

  “We’re just having a cup of tea,” Sam said.

  She and Brynna smiled. Dad thought sipping tea was like drinking hot water. He sure wouldn’t come in to join them.

  “We’ll be up in a minute, Wyatt.”

  “Okay, then,” Dad said. “Sweet dreams.”

  Oh yeah, Sam thought as she stood and rinsed her mug out at the sink. Sweet dreams.

  Despite her misgivings, Sam slept like a stone.

  It was a good thing. Although he moved stiffly, Dad worked harder than usual and expected Sam to keep up.

  Even before they left the house at dawn, Dad served up a lecture with her breakfast.

  “First thing you need to know is, ranchers farm, but farmers don’t ranch.”

  Was that a riddle?

  Sam didn’t ask what he meant, but she stopped chewing and only recommenced as Dad explained.

  “We raise hay, but there’s no surplus. We raise it to feed our own stock. And all the agricultural kinda work we do—tending irrigation systems, fixing the baler, fussing over machinery—is just time robbed from our work with the cattle. Ross enjoys working on vehicles, so we’re lucky. But if you watch Pepper, you’ll see how he feels the difference between those chores.”

  Right away, Sam knew what Dad was talking about.

  “His hats,” Sam said, suddenly.

  “That’s right,” Dad said. “He wears his Cat hat—the cap he got from the Caterpillar Tractor sales-man—when he’s not on horseback….”

  “And his Stetson when he is,” Sam finished for him.

  “Now, a real buckaroo,” Dad said, “and there are still some around—Nevada being one of the last open-range states where not all cattle are fattened in crowded pens—won’t do the sort of work I ask of Pepper and Ross. Dallas, for instance,” Dad said, smiling. “Why, if I asked him to tinker with the engine on a tractor, he’d just pick up his saddle and head on down the road.”

  Sam laughed, but she could picture the white-haired, bowlegged foreman doing just that.

  After they walked out
side together and Dad told her what he expected, Sam decided she had the nature of a buckaroo, too.

  “First thing you’re gonna do is clean this whole yard,” Dad said.

  What? She’d rather work double hours, even triple, with cattle and horses.

  “Hey, you know what?” Sam blurted. “I don’t need to, because just last week the HARP girls picked up stuff. It doesn’t need to be done again already.”

  “I’ll show you where you’re wrong.”

  Dad motioned Sam to come along with him toward their flock of Rhode Island Red hens. Chirring and scratching, the hens watched them with suspicious yellow eyes.

  Dad couldn’t mean the hens were messing things up, could he?

  He pointed at the smallest of the rust-red hens. As Sam and Dad watched, the little hen hopped, flapped her wings, then tipped over.

  “Is she injured?” Sam asked.

  “Keep watching,” Dad said.

  Making a low complaining sound, the hen fluttered upright, strutted along awkwardly with the rest of her flock, then fell again.

  This time she beat her wings wildly, causing the others to cackle, scatter, and leave her all alone.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Sam wanted to help, but she couldn’t see how to do it.

  “Guess if you’re the rancher and you want to keep having eggs for breakfast, you’d better figure that out.”

  Sam watched the little hen jostle with the others for room in Gram’s garden.

  Gram must have opened the gate to her rabbit-proof fence earlier, because the hens were already pecking and scratching.

  Gram complained about cut worms and grass-hoppers and other insect invaders that couldn’t be fenced out, but she didn’t like spraying poison to protect her crops.

  It looked like the insects that were pests to Gram were delicious breakfast treats for the hens.

  But that didn’t solve the mystery of the falling fowl, so Sam moved closer.

  The little hen pecked, but she didn’t scratch in the dirt. Maybe something was wrong with her feet.

  Now that the hens were penned on three sides, it should be easy to catch and examine the one that kept tipping over.

  It wasn’t as easy as it looked.

  As Sam maneuvered her boots between sprouting cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions, the hens skittered among the plants, digging in their delicate claws like the spikes of track shoes, moving out of reach.

  She got close enough to see what was wrong with the hen, though. A white string, like the ones pulled loose to open a sack of feed, was wound around the hen’s legs like a hobble.

  “All I have to do is take it off,” Sam muttered. Then, closing in behind the hen, she grabbed. “Gotcha.”

  She’d been pecked a few times as she reached under the feathers of a setting hen for an egg, so she wasn’t afraid of the hen’s sharp beak or the menace in her tiny yellow eyes. In fact, for just a second, the hen’s downy softness was wonderful to hold.

  Then, wings flapped wildly. The panicked hen struggled and defended herself with beak and claws.

  “Ow, ow, ow!” Sam finally held the hen with one arm, blinking against the wings in her face as she leaned close to see how to untangle the string.

  At last, Sam got it loose.

  “Go, already,” she said, setting the hen on the ground.

  With an insulted cluck, the chicken hurried off to look for bugs, leaving Sam to inspect her long red scratches.

  “Not too grateful, is she?” Dad said, laughing, when Sam finally returned to where he stood near the barn.

  “No,” Sam grumbled. “But I got this.” She presented Dad with the string. “That’s what was making her trip.”

  “Now where do you suppose that came from?” Dad asked, and Sam explained her feed sack theory.

  “Good eye,” he congratulated her. Then, before she could feel proud, he asked, “What are you gonna do about it?”

  “I think she’s okay,” Sam said, looking back at the hen. Now that she was feasting alongside her sisters, Sam couldn’t tell the hen from the others.

  “For now,” Dad said. “But there’s a lot of little trash around this yard that could hurt her or the other animals.”

  This wasn’t what most people thought of as ranching, Sam thought.

  She spent two hours picking up sticks and branches that had blown down in the summer wind. She raked up leaves, weeds, little scraps of paper, and more bits of string.

  With her sweatshirt tied around her waist, she was deciding whether to return to the house and change into shorts when Dad pointed out empty feed sacks that had accumulated, and told her they should be burned.

  Dad didn’t have to tell her to be careful.

  She’d had close encounters with both snakes and fires. Each time she picked up anything that could hide a snake, she moved gingerly. She cleared a huge space before starting the fire.

  Sam was wiping her forehead with the back of her hand and standing guard over the fire when Dad asked, “Makes a smoky fire, doesn’t it?”

  Sam gave him a sideways glance. “Yeah,” she agreed.

  “Once you’re done, go ahead and break for lunch. After that, Jake should be here. Once you’ve had some practice with the rope, we’ll talk about branding.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. She watched Dad walk toward the barn and wondered if he really expected her to squeeze all that into a single day.

  Soon Dad released Sunny and Tempest into the barn corral. I can do that, Sam thought. When she saw him checking the water troughs and spreading something on a fence rail where Sunny had been cribbing, chewing out of boredom or nerves, Sam knew she could do that, too.

  But Sam didn’t pout.

  I can put up with anything for a couple days of freedom.

  While she poked at the last burning scrap of gunnysack, Sam heard Sunny trotting around the barn pen.

  Was the mare remembering last night?

  Sam hoped she’d scared Moon enough that he wouldn’t return. If he had mares of his own, he probably wouldn’t risk the threat of humans. But if he was alone, he might decide Sunny, Strawberry, or Penny would relish an escape.

  And what about Tempest?

  Would he welcome her into his band? Or punish her for being the Phantom’s daughter?

  Sam couldn’t help remembering what Brynna had told her about the way rival stallions treated each other’s foals.

  She tried to block the image of Moon kicking the black filly.

  Don’t think that, she ordered her brain.

  It didn’t help.

  Memories of her own skull’s collision with a hoof rushed over her. Sam recalled an impact so strong it lifted her head and shoulders from the dirt. Then dizziness had come and with it the sound of hooves moving away, growing fainter, as Jake shouted her name.

  Sam shook her head, almost expecting it to hurt. It didn’t, of course, but it reminded her that her head injury had been an accident. Blackie, her own hand-raised colt who’d grown up to be the Phantom, had run away and his hoof had just happened to graze her head. A kick that was aimed and intentional would be much worse.

  And Tempest was so small.

  As she stared into the twists of orange flame, Sam heard a gate latch clank behind her.

  Come to think of it, the sound of metal on metal had been going on for a while. Sam turned to see Ace at the gate of the ten-acre pasture.

  He must be itchy, because it looked like he was scratching his chin on the wooden fence. She’d started to look away when she realized the bay mustang was lipping the lock.

  “Hey!” she shouted. Ace backed away from the fence, but when she didn’t leave the fire to come after him, he lowered his head and set to work on the lock again.

  It wasn’t the first time Ace had pulled this trick. Sam remembered a day when Karla Starr, an unscrupulous rodeo contractor, had been at the ranch sizing up Popcorn as a bucking horse.

  Ace had come ambling up to Sam, having somehow released himself from his stall. He’
d known how to open that latch. And just the other day, all the saddle horses had escaped. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Sam used her rake to scatter the ashes of the fire. It wasn’t likely to burn out of control, but she was taking no chances.

  She dropped the rake and ran toward the pasture.

  Throwing his head high, eyes rolling in mock terror, Ace backed away from the gate again.

  “You won’t fake me out this time,” Sam said.

  The clever gelding must have understood, because he bolted into a run, swiveling his heels toward the fence.

  “At least they didn’t escape,” Sam told Dad when he came up to find her checking the lock.

  “They might have gone farther this time,” Dad said.

  Sam nodded. With Jake on his way here for roping lessons, she wouldn’t have had time to catch the horses and do everything that Dad wanted done.

  “So what are you gonna do about it?”

  “Do?” Sam asked.

  It was the second time Dad had asked the question this morning. Of course, she’d understood something had to be done to keep the hobbled hen from becoming easy prey for a coyote. But this was harder.

  “I caught Ace in time and yelled at him. I don’t think—”

  Liar, Sam silently interrupted herself. Catching Ace in the act of picking the lock on the gate wouldn’t stop him from another attempt, and she knew it.

  The next time Ace was restless and bored, he’d try again.

  Stalling because she didn’t know what to do, Sam glanced over at the smoldering ashes.

  “Is that going to be okay?” she asked.

  Dad gave an infuriating shrug. Sam gave a too-loud sigh, then stalked back to the ashes.

  It looked okay to her, and Dad had said Gram had some garden use for cold ashes.

  What was it?

  Sam was trying to remember, when the lock clinked again.

  “Fire’s out,” Sam said as she jogged back. “Ace, stop that!”

  She clapped her hands to drive him back. He retreated a few steps, swished his tail lazily, and nickered. He wasn’t a bit frightened by her warning. He was having fun.

  Sam considered the bolt on the gate. “I could padlock it,” she said, eyes checking with Dad.