They stopped in the heat of the midafternoon and watered the horses at the same pool as before. They ate a simple meal she had brought, of crusted bread and cheese and oranges. She peeled hers deftly in one unbroken curl and laughed when he tried to do the same and failed.
They crossed the plateau where the flowers had begun to fade and this time rode together to the crest of the ridge beyond. They startled no deer but saw instead, maybe a half-mile on toward the mountains, a small band of mustangs. Tom signed to Annie to stop. They were downwind and the mustangs hadn't yet sensed them. It was a family band of seven mares, five of them with foals. There were also a couple of colts, too young yet to have been driven away. The band stallion Tom had never seen before. 'What a beautiful animal,' Annie said. 'Yeah.'
He was magnificent. Deep-chested and strong in the quarters, he weighed maybe more than a thousand pounds. His coat was a perfect white. The reason he hadn't yet seen Tom and Annie was that he was too busy seeing off a more pressing intruder. A young stallion, a bay, was making a bid for the mares.
'Things get kind of heated this time of year,' Tom said quietly. 'It's the mating season and this young fella thinks it's time he had a go. He'll have been trailing this band for days, probably with a few other young studs.' Tom craned in the saddle to peer around. 'Yep, there they are.' He pointed them out to Annie. There were nine or ten of them another half-mile or so to the south.
'That's what they call a bachelor band. They spend their time hanging out, you know, getting drunk, bragging to each other, carving their names on trees, till they're big enough to go steal some other guy's mares.'
'Oh. I see.' Her tone made him realize what he'd said. She was giving him a look but he didn't return it. He knew exactly what the corners of her mouth would be doing and the knowing of it pleased him. 'That's right.' He kept his eyes firmly on the mustangs.
The two stallions were standing nose to nose, while the mares and foals and the challenger's distant friends looked on. Then suddenly both stallions exploded, tossing their heads and squealing. This was when the weaker one would normally concede. But the bay didn't. He reared up and screamed and the white stallion reared too, but higher, and thrashed at him with his hooves. Even from here you could see the white of their bared teeth and hear the thwack as their kicks struck home. Then, within moments, it was over and the bay scuttled off defeated. The white stallion watched him go. Then, with a glance at Tom and Annie, he ushered his family away.
Tom felt her eyes on him again. He shrugged and gave her a grin.
'You win some, you lose some.'
'Will the other one be back?'
'Oh yes. He's gonna have to spend some more time at the gym, but he'll be back.'
They built a fire by the stream, just next to the place where they had kissed. They buried potatoes as before in its embers and while these cooked they made a bed, laying their bedrolls side by side with the saddles for a headboard then zipping their two single sleeping bags together. An inquisitive huddle of heifers stood with lowered heads on the other bank to watch.
When the potatoes were done, they ate them with sausage fried in an old iron pan and some eggs Annie thought would never survive the journey. They mopped the dark yolks from their plates with the rest of the bread. The sky had clouded over. They washed their plates in the moonless stream and laid them on the grass to dry. Then they took off their clothes and, with the flicker of the fire on their skin, made love.
There was a gravity to their union which seemed to Annie somehow to befit the place. It was as though they'd come to dignify the promise here witnessed.
Later, Tom sat propped against his saddle and she lay folded in his arms with her back and head against his chest. The air had grown much colder. Somewhere high on the mountain above them there was the yip and wail of what he told her were coyotes. He draped a blanket over his shoulders and drew it around them, cocooning her against the night and all encroachment. Nothing, Annie thought, nothing in that other world can touch us here.
For many hours, staring into the fire, they talked about their lives. She told him about her father and all the exotic places where they'd lived before he died. She told him about meeting Robert and how he'd seemed so clever and dependable, so grown up and yet so sensitive. And he was still all of those things, a fine, fine man. Their marriage had been good, still was, in many ways. But looking back now, she realized that what she'd wanted from him was actually what she'd lost in her father: stability, security and unquestioning love. These Robert had given her spontaneously and without condition. What she had given him in return was loyalty.
'I don't mean by that I don't love him,' she said. 'I do. I really do. It's just that it's a love that feels more like, I don't know. Like gratitude or something.'