Page 41 of Red Boar's Baby

“Don’t forget to keep an eye out for utility flags, especially along the boundaries of the ranch.”

They rode away from the corral on a trail that wound its way across the Costa ranch. It was a glorious day, the sun not too hot or strong, the sky flecked with clouds and the rugged landscape covered in new growth and fragrant flowers. Small streams were trickling with water from the hillside, and birds skimmed the air. In a month, it would all be sere and brown, drought reclaiming what was now a beautiful and verdant landscape. For now it seemed as if spring would never end.

As Diana had learned during her desert childhood, the secret to enjoying this landscape of extremes was to appreciate fully everything it had to offer at all times. The all-too-short spring, the fall that brought relief from summer’s oven, the rare and gorgeous dustings of snow during the winter. Even the baking misery of summer had its own charms, blue evenings filled with shadows and the vivid desert stars brighter and clearer than anywhere else on earth.

So she tried to be present in the moment, enjoying the sun on the back of her neck beneath her floppy-brimmed sun hat, the breeze and the spicy-dusty smells of the desert, the birds that rose up to swirl in the wake of the horses and then settled back down again on flower-dotted meadows that would be withered and yellow a few months later.

But for all her efforts to be there in her body, what she kept being drawn to instead was Costa’s straight back and smooth grace as he rode the horse on the trail in front of her. The flex of his shoulders, the rippling muscles of his back beneath a T-shirt already lightly dampened with sweat ... the firm curve of his ass seated squarely and competently in the saddle.

Diana wrenched her eyes away as a quail went up almost under her horse’s feet. Rabbit skittered sideways, and controlling her required Diana’s attention long enough to get her mind back on the business at hand, more or less.

They reached the edge of the flat-bottomed arroyo that separated the two sides of the valley, as well as separating the Costa and Reid ranches. For Diana’s entire childhood, she had looked across the shallow canyon at the Costa cattle and horses, at the threads of blue smoke from the fireplace in the main ranch house. She and Quinn had waved at each other from opposite sides, had crossed the arroyo a thousand times in all weather and all seasons.

Right now, the bottomland was as lush as it ever got. A thread of water coursed a winding path down the center of its wide, shallow basin, and on either side there was a spread of yellow-flowered brittlebrush, poppies, native grasses and flowering cacti. Pools of water supported flocks of waterfowl.

Diana had been told that many years ago, when their families first moved to the valley, the arroyo ran with water nearly all year long. Now it was rare to see it, only at the right times of year, when spring rains and runoff made the desert bloom.

“Want to go over?” Costa asked.

Diana hadn’t realized it was so obvious that she was gazing across the arroyo at the cluster of ranch houses and old fencing where she used to live. “Do you think it’ll be a problem? We’d be trespassing, you know.”

Costa shrugged and leaned one arm across his saddle horn, reins loosely looped in his big, capable hand. “Uncle Rod says they only come out for a few weeks a year, and they haven’t been around in months. No one’s going to know.”

“Amazing,” Diana muttered grimly. “Can’t even be bothered to appoint a caretaker. We’ll be lucky if the house my great-grandfather built isn’t all beer cans and graffiti by now.”

“My family keeps an eye on the place. I’m not saying it’s all right, but there haven’t been any teenagers throwing keggers over there.”

But the way Costa was looking at her was too sympathetic to bear. Spurred by that expression as much as anything else, Diana tugged on her horse’s reins, turning Rabbit’s head toward the descent into the ravine.

There were a number of paths going up and down the sides of the arroyo. Some had been used in the old days by the Costa family’s herd of cattle (now reduced to a couple of milk cows who kept company with the horses). These days, they were beaten down and kept in use by deer and other animals visiting the water holes at the bottom. The trails were scuffed with many small, precise hoof marks. Costa pointed out a flag beside one trail, so they took another one. Now that she was alert for it, Diana noticed several such flags scattered along the edge of the ravine.

“What is he worried about, exactly?”

“Who knows. Aunt Maura reassured me that it’s more along the lines of twine and sharpened sticks than land mines. He’s got a bunch of books on old Native American trap design and he’s having a great time. Every once in a while he traps a jackrabbit or a deer. I suppose there are worse things he could be doing with his retirement years.”

Perhaps catching their riders’ uneasiness, the horses were balky and uncooperative on the trip down to the arroyo. But the horses as well as their riders relaxed on the flat land at the bottom, where there was lush grass and a crisscrossing web of wild animal trails, neat lines of tracks leading to and from the stream and surrounding ponds.

It felt almost like being in a different place entirely. With the side of the arroyo hiding their view of the ranch houses, the cloud-dotted blue sky overhead, it felt as if they were the only two people for miles.

They let the horses pick their own route and pace. Both their mounts stopped occasionally for a mouthful of grass, and paused to drink from the stream. By habit, Diana glanced at the water for any signs of alkali that might poison an unwary animal, even though she knew that it had always been clear and fresh; there were too many springs in the desert that were unsafe to drink from, due to natural poisons in the groundwater as well as old mining contaminants.

Although it had looked flat from above, the channel was rough, crisscrossed with the braided courses of dry waterways and tangles of jammed-up driftwood and sand pushed into minor dams by flash floods. Diana glanced upstream and was aware of Costa doing the same thing. So far, the sky was clear except for scattered puffs of clouds. But this was the time of year when flash floods might happen, sweeping down the canyon and pushing a wall of mud, rocks, and anything unlucky enough to be in their path.

On a pleasant, clear day like this, however, there was little to worry about. They navigated the gully and found a path up the other side. Diana surged ahead, possessed by a breathless excitement that seemed to come on her all at once. Her horse lurched up the last unsteady part of the climb, and then she was on her family’s old property for the first time since she was in her twenties.

CHAPTER14

Costa followed Diana,hanging back a little, and not just because he didn’t want to risk getting Rabbit’s hindquarters in the face if the horse’s hooves slipped on the loose, sandy soil. Knowing Diana, he figured she was going to want a minute or two in order to get her emotions under control.

When his horse scrambled up to the level ground along the lip of the arroyo, he was confronted with a sight that took his breath away.

Diana was sitting still on her horse, looking toward the ranch house. Costa had no eyes for the ranch: only for her. Her hat had slid back, exposing her forehead, and wind had pulled her hair out of her braid and tangled it around her face. She was wearing a borrowed denim shirt from one of the aunts, with the sleeves rolled up, and she sat her horse’s back with casual self-confidence. Her face was nearly expressionless, eyes squinted against the brilliant sunlight on the ranch houses and the scrub and yellow rocks in the pasture behind it.

She made a stunning picture. For the first time in his life, he desperately yearned to be an artist, because he wanted to paint her in the golden light that flooded her, warming her tanned skin and outlining every hair blown wind-wild around her face. It was all he could do not to break the moment by pulling out his phone and photographing her—or pulling her down, drawing her to the grass, feeling her body against his?—

Diana broke the silence.

“They repainted the barn!”

---