Ride the Thunder (3 page)

T
HE BIG BUCKSKIN
horse trotted across the high meadow with a free-swinging stride. Its golden coat was shaggy with winter hair. Its warm, moist breath formed clouds, twin spirals coming from its nostrils. The horse mouthed the metal bar, jangling the bit against its teeth. The leather saddle creaked beneath the weight of the horse’s rider, blunted spurs jingling on his boots.

He was a tall man with a rangy build that deceptively hid solidly muscled flesh. Relaxed in the saddle, he rode in a partly slouched position. Yet every movement of the horse was transmitted to him through the reins and the bunching muscles beneath the saddle. Beneath the indolent posture was a keen alertness.

His boots were dusty and dirty and worn down at the heels. The metal of his spurs had become dull with time. The faded but still serviceable Levis that covered the long length of his legs were patched at the knees and on the seat. A heavy suede jacket lined with sheepskin hung down to his hips. a slit at the back for easier riding. The hands holding the reins were gloved, the
leather worn smooth from much usage. The collar of his jacket was turned up against the breeze blowing down from the high mountains. A dusty felt Stetson was pulled low on his head. Dark coffee-colored hair grew thickly, its length curling into the collar of his jacket.

Hours in the sun had browned the planes and hollows of his face to a bronze hue. A full mustache grew above his mouth, a neatly trimmed brush of dark brown. His eyes were brown, a dry and dusty shade. The sun had creased permanent lines that feathered out from the corners of his eyes. His thick, dark brows had a natural arch to them. Strength, sureness, and stamina were etched in his features. He was a man others would go out of their way to avoid irritating. If the situation demanded it, he could be ruthless. Other times, simply hard with a trace of cynicism.

His keen eyes spotted something thirty feet to the right. With a twist of his wrist. Brig McCord reined the buckskin toward it. As the horse drew close, he slowed it to a walk. The spring grass of the mountain meadow swished against the buckskin’s black legs. Where the trees grew down to the meadow’s edge, patches of snow could still cling to their shadows, the remants of the last blizzard to hit Idaho in the spring.

The horse stopped of its own accord, snorting and tossing its head at the object near its feet. As the buckskin shifted sideways, Brig saw the skeletal remains of a calf, the bones partially covered by its red hide.

“Damn!” he swore softly at the sight. How many did that make? He’d lost count.

He looked away, his hard gaze sliding to the patches of snow. That spring blizzard had come at the worst possible time—calving time. He’d be lucky if forty percent of his spring calf crop had survived. One average year—that was all he had needed to get his head above water. Instead, he was going to be lucky if he didn’t lose the ranch. If he’d had some insurance . . .

“Hell, I couldn’t afford the premium!” Brig interrupted
that thought with a soft curse. Jabbing a spur in the horse’s ribs, he reined it away from the carcass the scavengers had already picked clean. The horse bounded into a canter and snorted a disgruntled sound. It fell into a tireless, ground-eating lope that it could maintain for miles. A complete survey of the losses couldn’t be made at that pace and Brig slowed his mount to a striding trot.

Two more calves were found. The carcass of a third was in the woods, dragged there by a scavenging predator. With each calf, Brig’s mind worked harder to find a solution to his problems. At a cold mountain stream fed by the snow run-offs. Brig stopped his horse to let it drink. His gaze lifted to the mountains. Maybe if the sheep market would hold together, as well as Jocko’s flock, he could recoup some of his cattle losses. The trend wasn’t good.

His gaze roved back to the meadow and the rocky escarpment rising on one side. A movement caught his eye. He focused on it. Grazing near the base of the rocks was a large, heavy-bodied animal. When it lifted its head. Brig saw the massive curling horns hugging close to its head then winging out to the sides.

“A bighorn sheep,” he murmured. “I wonder what it’s doing at this elevation.”

The buckskin shook his head sideways as if replying to the question. The leather and metal of the bridle rattled together. In a flash, the big ram took to the rocks, showing the distinctive white circle on its rump. Amidst the clatter of hooves striking stone, it scrambled to the safety of higher ground where its sure-footed swiftness gave it the advantage over predators.

Brig watched until the wild sheep was out of sight, then walked his horse through the mountain stream. There had been a trophy pair of horns on that bighorn ram, a full curl or better. But he wasn’t interested in such things. He killed a couple of elk a year for meat, and a deer now and then for variety. Two years ago, a marauding black bear had ended up hanging on the wall in the ranch house. Shooting that ram for its
horns wasn’t reason enough for Brig. He’d seen and done enough killing in his life that he found no sport in it.

Funny, he hadn’t thought about those times in years, Brig realized. They belonged to another lifetime. This wild Idaho country had a way of fading memories. Either that or the fact that he was on the wrong side of thirty.

The buckskin had been wandering along without direction. A low-hanging branch took a swipe at his Stetson and Brig ducked at the last minute. He halted his mount and looked around. One corner of his mouth curled into his mustache. It had been ten years since he’d done more than pass through this area looking for cattle . . . before that, almost thirty years.

Taking a minute to orient himself, Brig kneed his mount to the right, where a tangled mass of undergrowth formed a dark mound about a hundred yards away. The trees were dense. The horse’s hooves made little sound on the thick carpet of pine needles. Hugging close to the horse’s black mane, Brig avoided the low branches that tried to sweep him off the saddle. When he reached the dark mass, encroaching on a small clearing, he dismounted and looped the reins over the buckskin’s head to lead it while he walked closer. The horse pricked its ears at the overgrown mound, snorting nervously and testing the air.

Beneath the tangling vines and bushes was the rusted hulk of a fuselage, all that remained of the private plane that had crashed here. Brig had been nine that summer. His gaze strayed to the tumble of small rocks on the far side of the clearing, rocks he had carried to cover the graves of his parents, who had been killed instantly in the crash. He had buried them himself, so that the animals would quit eating their bodies. Using the limb of a tree, he had scraped and dug two shallow graves in the rocky soil and mounded them with rocks.

Tipping his head back, Brig looked up. The branches of the trees formed a roof, a leaky roof that permitted
dappling rays of sunlight in. It had been almost as thick then, hiding the wreckage from the search planes. And a little boy was a mighty small object when viewed from two thousand feet above the ground.

It had been more than a week after the crash before the first plane had flown over. There had been several after that in the next three days, then none. Brig tried to remember the small, starving boy that had followed a bear around one whole day, eating what the bear ate. But he couldn’t remember how he had survived, what he had eaten, or how he had kept warm on the cold mountain nights.

For two months he’d lived here, alone, learning the laws of survival from the hardest teacher of all—nature. Then he’d stumbled into a shepherd’s camp, an uncle of Jocko—the man who looked after his flock of sheep now. He’d spent two weeks with the shepherd, who couldn’t leave his flock untended to return a small boy to civilization. In those two weeks, he had learned much about herding sheep and the shepherd’s simple philosophy. Then the rancher had come, bringing the shepherd’s supplies and taking the small boy back.

His unerring directions had brought the authorities to the crash site. Brig lowered his head to look at the rusted body of the aircraft, half-hidden by the weeds. The radio equipment, instruments, and all parts that were salvageable had been removed. His parents were no longer buried in the graves he’d dug for them. Their bodies had been exhumed and flown back East for a proper burial, and he’d gone to live with his grandfather, Sanger. But he’d never forgotten this place, this wild and free land.

When he’d finally come back fourteen years ago, at the age of twenty-four, he’d felt that he was coming home. He’d bought the section of land where his ranch house now stood and leased this federal graze . . . and struggled to make it pay. It had been rough. Most of the time he’d been lucky to break even. Then two bad years in a row had been followed by this spring blizzard that practically wiped out his calf crop. If the
future had looked bleak before, it was nothing compared to what he faced now.

Turning to the horse, Brig gripped the saddlehorn and swung aboard. He paused for a moment in the clearing, then rode back through the trees to the meadow. Wildflowers spilled over the high mountain valley, bobbing their heads in the nippy breeze. Before he’d lose all this, he’d eat a little pride and go to the Sanger’s for a loan.

A dozen head of Hereford cattle looked up as the shaggy-coated buckskin carried its rider toward them. Brig began hazing them toward the ranch headquarters. Maybe after the spring roundup was done, the calves branded and castrated, and the yearling bulls dehorned, he’d find out things were not as bad as they seemed now. He doubted it. Grim-faced, he rode on.

Tired and thirsty after the long drive from the ranch to town on a graded track that didn’t deserve the term road, Brig parked his four-wheel-drive pickup in front of a building where an unlighted neon sign in the window advertised Coors. His dusty brown eyes lingered on the suitcase sitting on the seat beside him, his mouth tightening into a thin line.

With a yank of the handle, he pushed the truck door open and stepped out. He glanced around, separating the tourists on the sidewalk from the townfolk of Salmon. As he walked to the entrance of the bar, he knocked the dust from his hat and brushed at his clothes. They’d been clean when he started out this morning.

The interior of the bar was dark after the brilliance of a July sun. Brig paused inside the door to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The juke box in the corner was playing a country song about a man who kissed an angel every morning. Tables and chairs were scattered around the room, empty of customers. Two men were sitting on stools, leaning their elbows on the carved oak counter bar. They gave him a sidelong look and resumed their conversation.

Brig walked to the far end of the long bar and slid onto a stool, resting a boot on the brass foot rail. There was no one behind the bar although there were sounds coming from the back room. Pushing his hat to the back of his head, he shook a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. Without removing the match from its book, he snapped it against the sandpaper-rough strip. There was no breeze but he cupped the flame to his cigarette from habit.

Centered in the shelves of liquor behind the bar was a clock with a slowly rotating series of advertisements on one side. With each quarter turn, a new advertisement slid into place. Brig read the ads for the local funeral home and the bank. As the one for the insurance company fell into the slot, a woman emerged from the back room carrying a half-dozen bottles of liquor to restock the shelves.

Her hair was bleached to a brassy shade of blonde. Blue eye shadow coated her lids above a heavy line of black eyeliner and lashes matted with mascara. The excessive use of make-up gave her a hard look, but it didn’t cover up the vulnerable softness of her red-painted lips or the open honesty of her blue eyes . . . or the wrinkles collecting around them. Her full figure was edging toward the plump side. The plain white blouse she wore was unbuttoned to expose the cleavage of her abundantly round breasts. The black straight skirt was stretched like a second skin across her hips, defying the strength of the stitching. The effect was crudely suggestive. Brig felt the stirring in his loins from an abstinence forced on him by the endless demands of the spring ranchwork—and the knowledge that the woman was good in bed.

Intent on her task, the brassy blonde didn’t see him sitting at the dimly lit corner of the counter. “Hello, Trudie,” Brig spoke to draw her attention.

She stopped and turned abruptly. Her widened eyes found him in the shadows, her look of surprise changing to one of delighted recognition. Then it became
masked slightly with an attitude of coyness that bordered on provocative.

“Well, well, well. The old lobo wolf has finally come down out of the mountains,” she declared and hurriedly set the liquor bottles on the work counter behind the bar. “I was beginning to think you had moved on to parts unknown.”

“And leave my favorite girl behind? I wouldn’t do that, Trudie.” His gaze was deliberately suggestive, running over her figure with a lusting look.

“Favorite girl? Hah!” she laughed aside that remark, but it started a warm glow of pleasure that spread through her expression. “What’ll ya have, Brig?”

“Beer.”

“On tap?” At his affirmative nod, she drew him a glass, letting a head form on the pale gold liquid.

“How’s tricks?” Brig sipped at the beer and wiped the foam from his mustache with the back of his hand.

“Not bad since the tourists hit town for the summer float trips on the ‘River of No Return’ ” Her emphasis made fun of the phrase. She changed the subject then. “I suppose you’re in town to pick up supplies. What’s this—your last stop before heading back to the ranch?”

“This is my first stop. I sent Tandy Barnes in last week for a month’s supplies,” he explained, referring to his wrangler and all-around ranch hand.

“What brought you to town then?” A puzzled frown followed the lines already stamped in her forehead. Immediately she added, “And don’t say ‘me,’ because I won’t buy that.”

“I’m headin’ into Idaho Falls to catch a plane for New York.” He swirled the beer in his glass and watched the dissipating foam. For all the indifference in his tone, there was a flat, dry look to his eyes.