Nobody's Angel Read Free Page A

a copper dun that had been rolling in alkali dust, then run for a mile until the color started through once more.
Grulla
was Spanish for blue heron. Grullas had better feet than claybanks and were said to stand the sun well. This far north it didn’t matter. Patrick irrationally believed that anything dun, claybank or buckskin had more cow sense.
    He saddled the mare with two Mexican blankets. You had to kind of rub the blankets up onto her or she’d try to pull the hitching rack out of the ground. She was young. And when he pitched the saddle up on her, he held the cinch, girth and billets so that nothing would slap and start her pulling back. Today he tried her in a grazing bit to get her nose out a little; he had been riding her on a higher-ported bit, and she was collecting her head too much, tucking it up like some fool show horse from California. Patrick liked them with their faces out, looking around, their feet under them, not like something in front of the supermarket that takes quarters.
    This mare was searching for a reason to be a bronc, as perhaps they all were; so Patrick walked her in a figure eight to untrack her, stood in one stirrup for a moment, then crawled on. By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.
    Then a half mile in deep grass and early light, time for a smart young horse to have a look around, scare up some meadowlarks, salivate on the copper mouthpiece, get a little ornery bow in her back and get rid of it. Patrickchanged his weight from stirrup to stirrup, felt her compensate, then stopped her. She fidgeted a moment, waited, then let the tension go out of her muscles. He moved her out again to the right. All she gave him was her head; so he stopped her, drew her nose each way nearly to his boot, then made a serpentine track across the pasture, trying to get a gradual curve throughout her body in each of her turns. The rowels on his spurs were loose enough that they chinked with her gaits. Patrick used spurs like a pointing finger, pressing movement into a shape, never striking or gouging. And horseback, unlike any other area of his life, he never lost his temper, which, in horsemen, is the final mark of the amateur.
    Patrick broke the mare out into a long trot, dropping her back each time she tried to move into a lope. She made one long buck out of irritation, then leveled off like a pacer eating up ground and slowly rotating the cascading hills, to Patrick’s happy observation. I love this scene. It has no booze or women in it, he rejoiced.
    He set the mare down twice, liked her stops, then blew her out for half a mile, the new fence going past his eyes like a filament of mercury, and let her jog home while he told her continuously how wonderful she was, what a lovely person she was becoming.
    Black coffee and a morning breeze through the paper. Martinsdale Hutterites had recalled three hundred contaminated chickens. Cowboys for Christ was having a benefit. Billings fireman captured with three pounds of methamphetamines. Poplar man shot to death in Wolf Point; Bureau of Indian Affairs investigator and tribal police arrested two men as yet unnamed. Half million in felonious cattle defaults. Formerly known as bum deals,thought Patrick. A new treatment center for compulsive gamblers. Lives shattered by slot machines. Wanted or for sale: TV stand, green-broke horse, ladies’ western suits, four-drawer blond dresser, harvest-gold gas range, three box-trained kittens, nonleak laundry tubs, top dollar for deer and elk hides, Brown Swiss, presently milking, Phoenix or Yuma to share gas. When Patrick’s father went down testing an airplane, fast enough that its exterior skin glowed at night from the friction of the air, the hurtling pulp which had been his father and the navigator and which had passed through the intricate molecular confusion of an exploding aircraft at its contact with eastern Oregon, the paper identified