She had not meant to. She had meant only to go out and see to the wound, which was cooler already, the swelling down by half, the hole beginning to close at its edges in a ring of clean pink. But when she had finished he did not walk away from her. He stood with his head low and one hind foot cocked and his lower lip loose, the way a horse stands when it has decided nothing more is going to happen to it today, and she stood beside his shoulder with her hand on his mane and thought: now, or not at all.
Eli was sitting on the wagon tongue by the barn with a cup of Ab's coffee, watching. He did not say anything. That was one of the things she was beginning to know about him.
She led Gideon to the fence and climbed to the second rail. He watched her do it, one ear back. She leaned her weight across his back, well forward of the wound, belly down, the way you'd lie across a log, and stayed there. He shifted his feet. She stayed. After a while she swung her leg over, slowly, and sat up.
He was very still under her. She could feel his heart through her knees. She could feel him waiting for it, for the bite that had come every time, for three weeks, the instant a weight settled on him, and she sat as light as she knew how, her weight back toward his loins and away from the place, and nothing bit him. Nothing at all. He turned his head around and looked at her foot, as if to ask whether it was really there.
"I know," she said. "It's only me."
She touched him with her heel. He walked. Once around the corral, the length of his stride rolling under her like a boat on a slow river, and then again, and on the third time around he blew out a long breath through his nose and his back came up and softened under her and his head swung low and easy, and she felt the thing go out of him, the thing that had been held in every muscle of him since the twentieth of August. She felt it go as plain as she'd ever felt anything.
When she slid off, Eli was standing at the fence. He'd set his cup down somewhere.
"I've shod horses for twenty-two years," he said. "I never seen that."
"My father used to say the hardest thing in the world for a horse to learn is that it's over."
"Is it?" said Eli. "Over?"
She looked toward the road, where the dust of Bannock and the others coming back from Ferris was just beginning to show above the sage, pink in the low sun.