A Cowboy Followed His Horse Into the Mountains—Then Discovered a Woman Everyone Thought Dead

Chapter 6

Wyatt stayed quiet, letting her talk, because he understood that a woman who’d held her story inside herself for ninety days needed to let it out or be consumed by it. He’d seen the same thing in horses caught in fence wire — sometimes the only thing that kept them alive was somebody standing still and listening while they fought themselves loose.

“I dragged myself out,” Clara said, her breath coming in shallow hitches. “Found a stick. A good one, thick. Used it like a crutch. Kept walking. The water kept rising, so I climbed. I just kept climbing. Away from the river, away from the noise, up into the rocks where the water couldn’t reach me.”

Her hand found his forearm, and her grip was shockingly strong for a woman so close to death. Her fingers dug into his wrist like the roots of an old tree.

“I thought Tom would come,” she said. “I thought — everybody was out looking, right? The whole county. I kept telling myself that. Every morning I’d wake up and I’d think, today. Today they’ll find me. I’d sit there and I’d listen for horses, for trucks, for anything. Just noise. Just people.”

Wyatt swallowed. “He looked, Clara. Tom looked. We all looked. For weeks. The river washed the banks clean, and everybody figured you were swept down into the deep reservoir. Nobody could find a trail. The flood took everything with it.”

“Ate bark,” she said, and a tear leaked from the corner of her eye, cutting a clean line through the grime. “Ate bugs. Found a dead bird once, mostly frozen. I ate it anyway. I got so hungry I would have eaten my own boots if they’d tasted like anything at all.”

“When the snow started,” she went on, “I thought I was dead. I really did. I thought, this is it. This is where I lie down. I built this cave up best I could, stacked rocks, made this little fire, but I knew. I’m dying, and nobody’s going to find me up here, and Tom’s going to spend the rest of his life not knowing what happened to me. Is that worse, Wyatt? Not knowing? I used to lie awake and think about which was worse. Him thinking I drowned, or him knowing I starved to death alone in a cave.”

“You ain’t dead,” Wyatt said firmly, because there was nothing else to say, because the arithmetic of it demanded a different answer. “You ain’t dead, Clara. You’re here, and you’re talking, and in about eight hours we’re going to walk this mountain down and get you to a doctor who’s going to save that leg.”

She looked at him, and for a moment the ferocity came back into her eyes, the wolf-look, the thing that had kept her alive through ninety days of hell. Then she nodded, a tiny, jerky movement, and took the piece of jerky he pressed into her hand.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the stick of heavily salted beef jerky, dipped it into the hot coffee to soften it, and handed it to her.

“Chew on that. Don’t swallow it whole. You’ll thank me later.”

Clara took the jerky with both trembling hands and gnawed at it with a desperate, animal hunger that made Wyatt look away. He sat back against the cold rock wall, pulling his knees up to his chest, and threw another piece of wood on the fire.

Outside, the wind screamed, a high, tearing sound that shook the very foundations of the mountain. Snow drifted into the mouth of the cave, piling up in thick white mounds. They were trapped in a bubble of smoke, horse heat, and sheer luck.

Wyatt looked at Adrien, watching the firelight dance across the animal’s closed eyes.

He knew something about horses. Not the way you know something from reading about it, but the way you know it from thirty years of feeding them, doctoring them, sitting up with them through foaling and dying. Horses were prey animals. Every instinct they had was built around flight, panic, the avoidance of blood and death. A horse would cross a river a hundred times rather than smell rot on the wind.

Yet something had overridden a million years of evolution in this one animal.

The horse had smelled a fading heartbeat on the wind — Wyatt was sure of it now, sure the way he was sure of frost in January — and he had decided to climb a mountain.

“You’re a good boy, Adrien,” Wyatt muttered into the dark.

The horse’s left ear flicked back, acknowledging the praise, but he didn’t move. He just kept keeping the woman alive.