The Hearts of Horses

Title Page

Table of Contents

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Copyright

Dedication

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON • NEW YORK
2007

Copyright © 2007 by Molly Gloss

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Visit our Web site:
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gloss, Molly.
The hearts of horses / Molly Gloss.
p. cm.
ISBN
-13: 978-0-618-79990-9
ISBN
-10: 0-618-79990-7
1.Young women—Fiction. 2. Horses—
Training—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3557.
L
65
H
43 2007
813'.54—dc22 2007008521

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Robert Overholtzer

MP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Ed, this last gift

I
N THOSE DAYS
, even before the war had swept up all the young men from the ranches, there were girls who came through the country breaking horses. They traveled from ranch to ranch with two or three horses they were taking home to break or with horses they had picked up in trade for work they'd done. Of course most outfits had fifty or sixty horses back then so there was plenty of work, and when the war came on, no men to get it done. Those girls could break horses as well as any man but they had their own ways of doing it, not such a bucking Wild West show. They went about it so quiet and deliberate, children would get tired of watching and go off to do something else. They were usually alone, those girls, but it wasn't like in the moving pictures or the gunslinger novels, the female always in peril. If they were in peril it wasn't from outlaws or crooked sheriffs, it was from the usual things that can happen with ranch work—breaking bones, freezing your fingers off—the kinds of things that can happen whether you're a man or a woman.

In November in that first winter of the war a girl named Martha Lessen rode down through the Ipsoot Pass into Elwha
County looking for horses that needed breaking out. She was riding a badly scarred mare she called Dolly and she had a couple of other horses towing behind her, which she had brought along just because she didn't feel she could leave them behind. At the upper end of the valley where the road first drops down along Graves Creek she saw a man out in a big fenced stubble field feeding about thirty cows and half a dozen horses and a pair of white mules. She called to him from the road, "Hello," and he stopped what he was doing and looked over at her. "If you've got any horses need breaking to saddle, I'll break them for you," she told him.

The daylight was thin, a cold and wintry light, and it pulled all the color out of the man's face. He stood up straight. The winter before, there had been a string of about a hundred days when the temperature never rose above freezing and some counties—Elwha, Umatilla, Grant—had piled up seven feet of snow. Deer had been driven down into the towns, and cougar had come into the pastures with the cattle. Starving horses had wandered into people's houses. But this particular winter, the winter of 1917 and 1918, would be an open one, and the day Martha Lessen rode down out of the Ipsoot Pass there wasn't any snow on the ground at all, although the stubble field the man was working in had been grazed off and the skimpy leavings were dark from frost-kill. He was feeding from a wagon drawn by a pair of black Percherons.

"Maybe I do," he said. "There's a couple could use working." He looked her over. "I guess you ain't no Land Girl." This past summer a lot of men from the ranches had gone into the army and quite a few town and city girls had come out to the countryside to fill in where they were needed—"Land Girls" the newspapers had begun to call them. Some of them had come to Elwha County with the idea of being cowboys, though mostly the work that needed doing was getting in the hay crop and the
wheat. Martha Lessen was the first girl he had seen advertising herself as a broncobuster.

"No I'm not," she said. "I've been riding and doing ranch work since I could walk. I can break horses."

He smiled and said, "I just bet you can," which was a remark about the way she was built, big and solid as a man and five-eleven in her boots. Or he meant something about her old-fashioned cowboy trappings, the fringed batwing chaps well scratched up and her showy big platter of a hat much stained along the high crown and the rolled edge of the brim. Then he said, not with serious misgiving but as if he had discovered something slightly amusing, "Breaking to saddle, so I guess that means you're not interested in breaking horses to harness."

She could have found plenty of work around Pendleton, where she had come from, if she had wanted to break horses to drive, so she said stubbornly, "I'd just rather train a stock horse than a wagon horse if I'm able to choose."

He considered this. "Well, go on up to the house and I'll be up shortly and we'll see about it." He went back to feeding hay.

She followed a line of telephone poles from the road back to the ranch house, which was a paintless tall box with skinny windows set among a scattering of barns and sheds and bunk-houses built variously of lumber and pine logs. A yellow dog scrambled out from under the porch of the house and barked once and then walked up and smelled of the girl's boot. "Hey there," she said, which satisfied him, and he walked off and flopped down in the hard dirt at the edge of the porch steps.

Elwha County was more than two-thirds taken up by the Clarks Range and the Whitehorn Mountains, with the towns and most of the ranches lying in the swale between. This house stood on the first moderately flat ground at the foot of the Clarks, its front windows facing south across the valley toward the Whitehorns. The girl wondered what sort of view could be
seen from those windows, and she turned in the saddle to look. There had been a little cold rain earlier in the day and the clouds were moving southeast now, dragging low across the pointy tops of the lodgepole and yellow pine stands in the far distance; there was no telling whether the serrate line of the Whitehorns might show in better weather. By the time she turned back toward the house a woman had come out on the porch and was wiping her hands on her apron. She was just about exactly the age of the man who'd been feeding cows, which was fifty, and she stood there in black high-top shoes and a long dress and a sweater with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, stood there wiping her hands and squinting at the girl.

Martha said, "I'm here to see about some work breaking horses. The man feeding cows in that field by the road said I ought to wait here till he came in to talk to me about it."

"Well it's cold," the woman said. "You can put up those horses in the barn and then come in and have a cup of coffee. He'll be a while." She went back inside the house.

Martha watered her horses and led them over to the barn but she didn't put them up. She left them standing saddled in the open runway, out of the wind, then walked back to the house. The dog met her again and smelled of her boots and her chaps up to the knees and she patted him on the head and went past him onto the porch. When she rapped lightly on the door the woman inside called out, "You'd better just come on in." She tucked her gloves into her belt, scraped her boots as well as she could on the porch boards and stepped inside. The dim front room ran the width of the house and was furnished more elaborately than Martha was used to, with upholstered chairs, carved end tables, Turkish rugs, kerosene lamps with elaborate glass shades. Thick draperies closed off the windows, which might have been to keep the heat inside; but Martha felt if
there was any chance of seeing the mountains she'd have left the windows open to the view.

She crossed the room and went through a doorway into the kitchen where the woman was pouring coffee into heavy china cups. This room was bare of the fussy furnishings at the front of the house. The long pine table and chairs and two kitchen cupboards were painted white, and the windows were tall and narrow and curtainless. The day's gray brightness flooding through those panes of glass made the room seem clean and cold. From this side of the house you could see some trees, but the house was too close to the Clarks to get a view of their snowy peaks. The girl took off her hat and held it in her hands.

"What's your name, dear?" the woman said.

"It's Martha Lessen."

"Well my goodness, I have a sister and a cousin both named Martha, so that's a name that will come easy to my lips."

She put the coffee cups and a pitcher of cream on the kitchen table and sat down in a chair.

"If I was to pay you for it," the girl said to her, "I wonder if I could later on give my horses a little bit of your hay."

The woman made a dismissive gesture with one hand. "Oh heavens," she said, as if that was just the most outrageous idea. "You help yourself. A horse has got to have something to eat. Sit down now and drink your coffee." Martha sat in a kitchen chair and put her big hat in her lap and poured as much cream into her coffee as the cup would hold.

"You talked to George, did you?"

"I didn't get his name. He had on overalls and a brown coat."

This amused her. "Well of course every man in this part of the world is wearing overalls and an old brown coat," she said, "but I guess it was George Bliss who is my husband and I am Louise Bliss."

She then started right in telling Martha how they were Old Oregonians, both she and her husband, children of first comers, and how this house they were sitting in had been built from trees cut and milled right here on the ranch by her husband's daddy right after the Indians were driven off, and how her own granddaddy had fought in the Civil War and then come up to Oregon with one of the first big trail drives out of Texas and bought half a dozen cows with his wages, and by the time he died owned almost two hundred head of cattle and eight hundred acres of Baker Valley pastureland. She spoke as if the girl had asked for every bit of their family history but it was just that she had immediately taken Martha Lessen for a certain kind of ranch girl, the kind that followed the seasonal work traipsing from ranch to ranch; and Louise had known such girls to be shy as the dickens and indisposed to talk. She felt it would be up to her to fill the silence, and Martha's old-time cowboy trappings seemed to make her a perfect audience for romantic pioneer stories.

When George Bliss came in through the back porch he poured himself some coffee and stood there drinking it without sitting down at the kitchen table. His wife wasn't saying anything he didn't already know. She and George had brought four children into the world, she was telling Martha, and one had died shortly after being born but they had a boy who was now in Kansas preparing to fight in France and another who was at college up in Pullman, Washington, with the intent to learn veterinary medicine, and a girl, Miriam, who was married and living with her husband's family on a ranch up around Pilot Rock. George stood there drinking his coffee quietly and letting Louise go on talking without interrupting her, and it was the telephone that finally broke the thread of her story and made all three of them jump. It wasn't the Blisses' ring—theirs was
two longs and a short, this was three long jangles—but Mrs. Bliss went to the telephone anyway. In those days there were seven ranches on the party line at that end of the valley and they listened in on each other's calls without a bit of apology.

George took his opening to say to Martha, "I've got a couple of likely-looking three-year-olds, or I guess they're four-year-olds now, that haven't never been broke. They're halter-broke more or less, and I suppose I could get a saddle on them if I was determined about it, and I suppose if I was truly determined I could stick on and ride them out. But they ain't been finished and I haven't got the time to do it now that my son has gone off to fight. I've got just two hands I've been able to keep this winter. Henry Frazer, who was my foreman, has left me and gone over to help out the Woodruff sisters since all their hands joined up, and one of the two I got left is a kid who I expect will be joined up as soon as he turns eighteen and anyway ain't had much experience bucking out horses. I hired him mostly as a ditch walker and for moving the gates on my dams and so forth in the summer, and I'm trying to teach him cowboying but he's not the best hand I ever had in the world; and the other is a fellow with a bum arm that keeps him out of the army and also keeps him from doing any kind of roping, and which is a disadvantage, I guess you know, if you're trying to break broncs."

The usual method of broncobusters in those days was to forefoot a horse with a catch rope, which brought him right to his knees, and then wrestle a saddle onto him while he was on the ground, climb on and buck him near to death. Martha Lessen was a terrible hand with a lariat and horses hardly ever bucked when she rode them the first time but she didn't say any of this to George Bliss. "I'd like to break them out for you," she said. "I can gentle most anything that has four feet and a tail."

"What would you want for the two of them?"

"I could do them for ten dollars apiece."