Page 25 of Mine To Break
The dam crumbled to dust in his mind and he let out a long, heavy sigh. “The most important thing on a cattle ranch is the herd. You have to protect the herd at all cost. Especially the calves. If the calves die, that’s future profits dying, especially if it’s a heifer that could have had a dozen babies herself. Losses are part of the game, but we survived by minimizing those losses as much as possible.
“One of my earliest memories is riding a horse. Dad started us early and expected a full day’s work from all of us. We didn’t ride around in a ring for kicks and giggles, or go off to shows. We got up at dawn and rode out to the pastures. Checking fence, counting head, doctoring, in rain, drought, or even snow. Whatever it took. The herd came first.”
“How old were you when you started riding out like that?”
“I’m not really sure. Five or so. I started out riding with Dad, and then by eight or nine I had my own route to take every day.”
“On a full-sized horse?”
“We didn’t keep Shetland ponies, that’s for sure.”
“I’ve been on a horse once as an adult and I was terrified. A lot of it for me was the lack of control. Even with a tight grip on the reins, there really wasn’t anything I could do to stop that beast if it decided to run off or buck or simply stop and graze. And it was big. I didn’t like being that far off the ground with so little…”
“Control,” he finished, repeating the word for her. Yeah, he could see Mal having a problem with situations like that. “Let me guess—you have a manual transmission in your car too.”
She tipped her chin up. “Wouldn’t have it any other way. You don’t get to be the Mistress of Dallas by letting anything—man or machine or animal—fall to chance.”
“I wasn’t scared of falling off, or even riding. In the beginning, I loved being out on the range with Dad. We had some of the best talks on those rides.” If he closed his eyes, he could still hear the creak of the saddles and smell the hot sweat of his horse.
“So what changed?”
He took another drink of coffee, but the liquid didn’t want to slide down his throat, so he didn’t risk another. “Late one day, we came across a cow that’d fallen down in a ditch and couldn’t get up. It wasn’t that deep, but her head was downhill and she just couldn’t get herself up. She died, but managed to give birth to her calf first. The little heifer was still wet, so she hadn’t been born for long. Of course it was getting pretty late and we were still a good hour ride from home. Dad meant for us to take over the ranch for him, so he was real good about talking things through and explaining his reasons for everything. We could have carried that calf home and bottle fed it, but time was of the essence. She needed to be warm and safe and fed, and a hard bumpy ride might be enough to push her into shock and death. Plus we didn’t have a lot of time on the ranch to bottle feed a calf. We already did chores from dark in the morning until after dark at night and never had a shortage of things that needed doing.
“On the other hand, we’d just passed a smaller herd and found a yearling heifer with a stillborn calf. If we could get her to adopt the orphan, it’d be the best world for both of them.”
“Seems reasonable,” Mal said. “What happened?”
“He left me to guard the new baby and rode off to go rope and haul up that mama. He figured he’d be an hour finding her and dragging her back up to us. It ended up taking him three, because the cows had moved off further than he’d planned.”
“So it was dark.”
Colby nodded. “Very dark. Moonless night, I remember that. I had my horse for company but nothing else. Dad always had a shotgun in case we ran into any trouble, but he didn’t think to leave it with me. I probably wouldn’t have used it anyway.”
“You didn’t know how to shoot it?”
“Oh, I did. If we weren’t riding and working, we were learning how to shoot and fish and hunt.” Her brow wrinkled as she tried to figure out what had gone so terribly wrong with his story. “I fell asleep.” His fingers ached, and he made himself let go of the coffee cup before he busted it. “We’d been up since four and worked all day. I sat down for fifteen minutes and I was out like a light. I didn’t wake up until I heard hoof beats as Dad rode back to me, but it was too late.”
Mal squeezed his thigh gently. “What happened?”
“A coyote, maybe more than one. It’d dragged that baby off and tore her apart not even twenty feet away and I’d slept through it all. Maybe she didn’t put up much of a fight being a newborn calf, but I still to this day can’t believe I didn’t hear a thing. Not a bleat, a yip, a fight as they cleaned up the scraps. Nothing.” All these years later, he still felt a shudder ripple across his shoulders. The sinking pit of shame in his belly. The horror. “Dad didn’t say much. He didn’t have to. The look on his face was enough.”
“How old were you?”
“Six. Didn’t matter, though. I knew my job and I didn’t do it.”
“What could a child have done against a pack of coyotes? You’re lucky you weren’t hurt. You didn’t even have a gun.”
“Coyotes don’t mess with people much. I’d have to be injured and sick myself before even a pack of them would be tempted to come after me. If I’d stayed awake, I could have chased them off with a few rocks. I could have seen what was going on and brought my horse back up so shield us. She’d wondered off to graze and I hadn’t noticed that, either. I’m lucky she didn’t take off for the hills, because then I’d have had to ride all the way home behind Dad on top of everything else.”
Mal leaned closer, sharing the heat of her body against him. He closed his eyes, breathing in her scent, her presence. She didn’t have to say anything to make him feel better.
“It wasn’t ever the same after that,” he whispered. “Dad never could forget that I’d disappointed him, and I never could forget that I’d fallen asleep on the job. I’ve carried that with me all these years, but especially into my tours in Afghanistan. Even when it wasn’t my turn to stand watch, I often stayed awake, unable to sleep, terrified to sleep. Someone might die on my watch if I did. Someone did die. Henderson. Not on my watch, but right beside me. A land mine. Knocked my entire squad flat, but only he died. Somehow I always thought it should have been me, not him. Maybe I’d unconsciously pushed him off track, pushed him into harm’s way, made him walk into the mine that had my name on it, not his.”
“Is that why you haven’t been sleeping or eating much since you got home?”
“Maybe. Partly.”
She kissed his shoulder, a simple brush of her lips that made his knees quiver enough that he was thankful he was sitting down. “You know that if you’re home sleeping in your bed that it’s not your fault if Elias gets shot.”
