“Slide your heels back in the stirrups so just your toes are in. If the horse trips you’ll need to jump out quickly.” That’s the only advice I got crossing rocky pockmarked terrain for the first time, driving cattle around the furthest end of a foot-deep lake. The salty clay deposits plumed under hoof. Every time my horse lost his footing my stomach dropped—must jump!—and when he regained it I grinned because I didn’t have to. It was fifteen degrees when we headed out and past noon before we saw the sun. My feet were so numb I had to keep checking if my toes were even in the stirrups at all.
At some points I was riding, herding, and leading another horse over bogs and morasses and loose sloping ground. Two of us were sent to regather a few stragglers far off. We stayed far to their right and parallel, came around the back, and started pushing them back in the direction we came. They knew the path from having done the same route over the years. I was really following them.
In the paddock I’m always too preoccupied by what’s going on with the horse; I’m always thinking about the act of riding and what I should be doing. But when forced to really just look at cows—to notice the cow’s posture, where it looks like he might divert from the herd, to stay on the right side of him—I stopped thinking about the fact that I was on the horse. My thought was the response, and we did the job together.
We yelled out to each other: “Fill my gap!” “Hold my reins for a minute!” “Move up on the left!” “Watch that big red one!” We yelled at the cows: “Andele!” “Come on, cows!” “Move it, move it!” We shushed and clucked and brayed and bellowed.
I fell asleep that night to someone reading Genesis to me. And when I woke up the next day it had snowed and the whole sky was white. My first desert snow. It only takes a few minutes of sun for the snow to melt here. As the sun crosses the range, the peaks turn from sharp to opaque as the snow mists up and everything turns white again. The mist rolls through the valley and presses up against the window. The desert floor soaks up the needed moisture and the peaks come slowly back into focus. And everything is a little less white.
