the other.
He kept looking at the horse and feeling the old, mostly forgotten tug at his gut. The roan thundered by them again.
“Leave him,” Micah called over the noise. “You kin start on him tomorry.”
Tomorrow. Would he stay here? On the Splendid Sky?
Surely not. But maybe so. Hadn’t he been headed here anyhow?
He didn’t want to think about it. He turned away, went back to the trailer, stepped up onto the fender, and jerked the halter loose from the rail where it was tied.
He stepped down.
“I’m gonna have to try him now,” he said. “Open the gate for me.”
Micah did.
“This here pen’s built like all the old-time ones—with room for a man to roll out under the bottom log,” he said. “Git out if he takes after you. He never done that ’til he’d been to Little Creek.”
The warning pricked at Blue’s brain, but instead of thinking of himself facing the danger of a charging stud horse, he imagined Micah. The old guy had guts, crippled up as he was, to even try the colt.
Blue walked through the gate and toward the center of the pen. The roan colt blew by behind him, sticking close to the wall. He circled the pen twice more, then half again, slowing, slowing. He started trotting back and forth on the west side, his dappled hide shining in flashes as he went in and out of the sun. Then he came down to a walk.
He knew Blue was there but he wouldn’t even glance in his direction.
Blue walked toward him. His fingers tightened around the halter strap as he coiled the rope. Sweat broke out across his back. How could he have sense or skill enough to connect with a terrified horse on this day?
In this place?
But he knew how to go about trying it, and that was all he did know.
The roan stood still and turned his hindquarters to Blue.
On the outside of the pen, Micah was pacing Blue.
“What all has this horse gone through?” Blue called.
“I ain’t sure. Them Little Creek bastards say sell ’im to the rodeo.”
“So,” Blue said, watching the colt refuse to look at him, “how come you still have him?”
“I know different,” Micah said, and the swift certainty in his tone made Blue smile a little. “That bunch of no-counts couldn’t tell a good horse from a mountain goat in the bright light of the Judgment Morning.”
Blue glanced at him, then back at the roan. The old man was something else. You had to hand it to him.
“So you’re hell-bent on dragging somebody in here that can ride him?”
“I reckon you’re that somebody,” Micah said, with a satisfied chuckle.
A troubled horse would spend a great deal of energy avoiding even eye contact with a human being, and this one was surely troubled. Much more so, without a doubt, than if he’d never been tried by anyone but Micah.
Micah read that thought in Blue’s head from outside the pen.
“I hate I ever sent him over there,” he said.
“Water under the bridge,” Blue said.
He bit his tongue. What was this? Keep it up and he’d be as big a chatterbox as Micah. Although, truth to tell, he probably needed to learn to talk again he’d been silent so long.
The prick of pity he’d felt for Micah being too old to ride this colt wasn’t excuse enough to try to please him by fixing the horse. He would help this horse for the horse’s sake. He was trying to see if he wanted to buy him, that was all.
When he got close enough, still holding on to the end of the rope, he threw the halter onto the ground behind the horse. Instead of shifting his feet away from it and moving forward as Blue hoped, the roan kicked at it.
Blue took in a deep breath and then another, forcing them out through his mouth, trying to blow the tension out of him so the horse wouldn’t feel it. He reeled the halter back in and threw it again.
The roan started backing up, fast as thought, straight toward Blue, kicking, kicking higher as he came. Blue got out of his way and he kicked the fence with a blow that rang through the air. That settled him down a little bit. He whirled to put his head to the fence again and his butt to Blue.
Blue threw the halter. The colt kicked at it again.
Blue pulled the halter to him and threw it again. The colt kicked.
They did that over and over, until Blue lost track of time and of everything except the fact that this horse was so troubled and so defensive that he did not make one forward movement. Until he did, Blue was not going to quit.
Life narrowed down to that one fact and the sun on his back. Time vanished.
Horses knew no time. All they knew was rhythm, the rhythm of the days, and the waxing and waning of the moon. All Blue knew was the look of this horse and the motion of his own arm, the twist of his wrist.
Throw, reel in, throw, reel in.
The breeze picked up and blew on his skin through the sweat in his shirt. The horse’s shadow shifted to a different angle. A hawk flew over and tilted its wings into the wind. Blue and the roan colt kept at it.
It took a long time. Dimly, Blue realized that the afternoon was passing faster and later he saw that Micah was perched on the top log of the pen, over by the gate, but he and the roan didn’t let that bother them. The colt quit kicking but he didn’t move forward.
Blue changed to his left arm to spell the right one, but he did not let up. Finally, the colt took one forward step. One. And that was all.
At first, Blue wondered if he had imagined it, but no. The kicking had stopped. He switched back to his right arm and threw the halter. Reeled it in. Threw it again.
It took a while. The sun was definitely dropping lower in the west when he reeled the halter in again, threw it again, and the horse took three or four steps forward, one more, a few more and then, like held water flowing over a dam, Blue was driving him around the corral.
The roan let himself be driven but he didn’t acknowledge Blue in any other way.
Blue didn’t care. If they did nothing but this today, it would be a great victory. He let the rising excitement inside him come a little higher and he stayed with the colt.
The roan chose a deliberate pace and stayed with it, and the energy driving the world became the lub-dub, lub-dub sounds of his hooves on the ground. Blue’s heart fell into that same beat.
The smell of the horse, the fragrance of manure and stirring dirt, the faraway cry of a bird he couldn’t name all filled the old round pen. Still, Blue could see nothing but the horse. The horse and the hope
