The snow came out of the Pryor Mountains sideways, the way it does in Montana Territory when October forgets itself, and by the second hour Wesley Harlan could no longer feel the reins.
He knew he was holding them only because he could see them, two dark lines running from his fists to the bit of a sorrel gelding named Deacon, who had gone lame in the off fore an hour after noon and was now walking the way an old man walks on ice. The cattle Wes had been sent to find were somewhere ahead of him, or behind him, or had never been on this side of the reservation line at all. He no longer cared. He cared about the creek he had been following, because a creek ran downhill and downhill was where the cottonwoods were, and cottonwoods meant shelter, and shelter meant he might see November.
He was twenty-eight years old. He had come up the Bozeman Road in '79 with a Texas herd and stayed because the grass was tall and the wages were steady, and in four winters he had learned to respect this country the way a man respects a horse that has thrown him once. He had stopped expecting to love anything after June of 1881.
The cold got into his jaw first. Then his shoulders. By the time the light began to go the color of dishwater, he was shaking so hard that his teeth clattered like dice in a cup, and he could not have stopped them with a gun at his head.
That was how they found him: a white man on a lame horse, shaking in the saddle as if a fever had hold of him, with a rifle he could not have drawn and a coat crusted to the elbows.
He heard the horses before he saw the riders. Five of them came out of the white, spread wide the way men ride when they are not certain what they have found, and Wes had just enough sense left to keep his hands where they could be seen. Ransom Pike had told him a good deal about the people whose land this was. Pike said they were thieves and beggars both, that they would smile at you over your own coffee and steal your horse while you drank it, that the agent at Absarokee was the only thing standing between decent stockmen and ruin. Wes had never been sure how much of it to believe. Pike said a good many things.
The riders wore buffalo coats and blanket capotes, and two of them had their hair swept up in the high pompadour he had seen on Crow scouts at Fort Custer, stiffened and standing above the brow. One carried a Winchester across his saddle. The one in front was smaller than the others and rode a tall blue roan mare with a white splash on her hip, and when that rider pushed back the hood of a capote, Wes saw a woman of perhaps twenty-five, with a strong jaw and a straight, considering mouth, her braids wrapped in otter fur.
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at his horse's foot.
"That sorrel will be dead by morning if you keep him walking," she said, in an English that was plain and clear and only a little careful at the edges. "And so will you."
Wes opened his mouth. What came out was the word "ma'am," broken into three pieces by his teeth.