“Come on, the car’s out front,” he’d said. “Let me help you with your stuff.”
Danielle told him they were starting to worry, and what the people at the airline counter had said.
He waved it off, saying, “That’s ridiculous. Obviously, I was on the plane. I’m here, aren’t I?”
They turned onto a dirt road by a brown National Park Service sign indicating the campsite and trailhead. Her father once again closed his window to prevent the roll of dust from filling the car. Gracie turned off her phone and put it in a side pocket of the door and made a mental note not to forget it when they returned. She watched as Danielle seethed-no signal at all-and finally snapped her phone shut.
“Great,” her sister said, “I’m completely alone in the world.”
“Except for your sister and your father,” her dad said with caution.
“Alone in Hell-o-stone,” Gracie mocked gently, “Hell-o-stone alone…”
Danielle mouthed Shut the fuck up, Gracie.
“That’s your second offense,” Gracie said, deadpan. “We may need to turn you in to the rangers.”
“We’re here,” her dad said with an epic flourish.
Gracie once again bounded forward and hung her arms over the front seat. They’d rounded a corner and could now see that at the end of the road was a very long horse trailer in a parking lot. People stood around the trailer in the sun; a couple were already on horseback. Gracie counted ten or eleven milling about. When she saw the horses her heart seemed to swell to twice its size.
“We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?” she said, reaching up and putting her hand on her dad’s shoulder. He reached across his body and put his hand on hers.
“It’ll be the greatest adventure of our lives,” he said.
“I’m taking my phone,” Danielle said as if talking to herself. “Maybe we’ll find a place with a signal somewhere.” Then: “Oh my God. Look at all the people! We’re going to be stuck for a week with them?”
9
Outfitter Jed McCarthy pulled back and tightened the cinch on a mare named Strawberry-she was a strawberry roan-and squinted over the top of a saddle at the car that had just rounded the corner on the side of the hill. It was a blue American-made four-door sedan. Nobody normal drove those, he thought, meaning it must be a rental and therefore the last of his clients to arrive.
“That better be the Sullivans,” he said under his breath to Dakota Hill, his wrangler. She was in the process of saddling a stout sorrel a few feet away.
“Is that the party of three?” she asked. “The father and two teenage daughters?”
“Yup.”
Dakota blew a strand of hair out of her face. “You know what I think about teenage girls on these trips.”
“I know.”
“I may have to kill one someday. Push her off a cliff. Damn prima donnas, anyhow.”
“I know.”
“Or feed her to some bears.”
“Keep your voice down,” McCarthy said. “Their money’s as good as anyone’s. And we’ve got a full boat of paying customers for this one. This keeps up, I can get that new truck. Life is good.”
“For you,” she said, tight-lipped. “Me, I get the same damned wages no matter what.”
“At least you did before you started getting under my skin,” he said, smiling his smile that he knew could be interpreted as cruel. “Besides, you got perks. You get to sleep with the boss.” He waggled his eyebrows when he said it.
“Some perk,” she grumbled.
“I ain’t heard any complaints.”
“You ain’t listening.”
Almost twenty-five, she’d grown up on ranches in Montana and drove her father’s pickup at eight years old and was breaking horses by the time she was twelve. She had a round open face, thick lips that curved quickly into an unabashed and purely authentic smile, naturally blushed cheeks, and dancing brown eyes. She’d attended a couple of years at MSU, but quit to barrel race and never went back. He’d met her when she delivered some horses to him two summers before. Her barrel horse had come up seriously lame just that day at the local rodeo. The horse would never run again and never earn any more money. She needed a job. He needed a wrangler.
He stepped closer to Strawberry so none of his clients could see him draw a laminated three-by-five index card out of his breast pocket. On it were the names of each of his customers for the trip as well as vital information they’d sent him regarding weight (to match them with a horse), age, riding experience, food allergies, dietary needs, and what they most wanted out of the trip, from fly-fishing opportunities to horseback riding to wildlife viewing to “being one with nature.” He made it a point of pride to know the names of everyone on his excursions from the initial introduction, and to constantly surprise his clients with probing questions about their personal needs and to ask them about their lives based on a short questionnaire he’d required them all to fill out and send along with their booking form. People liked that kind of personal attention, he’d found, and he was rewarded for it at the end of the week by the size of the tip. Sometimes they’d rebook a trip because of it. And despite Dakota’s grumbling, he knew it was vital to hook the teenage girls early. Usually, it was to match them up with a horse they’d fall in love with. He’d feed the girl some kind of backstory on the horse they were riding-sometimes it was even true-about how the animal was particular and only responded to people who were gentle and special. Then, a few miles up the trail, he’d remark how well-behaved the horse was and compliment the teenage rider for her prowess. Generally, that would do it: the girl would fall in love and never even consider how many other girls before her-and after-would have the same passionate relationship with the same horse.
He’d make sure to send a Christmas card to the girl from the horse, telling her how much her horse missed her and that she was the animal’s favorite human. Often, it resulted in a customer for life, because he’d found today’s parents did not deny their children anything. At two thousand dollars a client, it was important to know that.
This particular trip was full. There’d been no cancelations and everybody showed up at the appointed place at the agreed-upon time. With the arrival of the Sullivans, he had everybody.
Before gathering them together for an orientation, he walked along the length of his long horse trailer and looked at a reflection of himself in the passenger window of his pickup. He liked what he saw.
Jed McCarthy was a short, solid fireplug of a man with a gunfighter mustache, trimmed short beard, and blue eyes so pale they were practically opaque. He was a year shy of forty and he’d been running horse pack trips into the Yellowstone wilderness for eight years, one of only two licensed outfitters deemed worthy and compliant by the authorities at the National Park Service. He wore snug Wranglers and lace-up outfitter boots with heels for riding, a sterling silver rancher set for a buckle, and a leather vest with plenty of pockets to hold all the tools and small gear he needed. Around his neck was a red silk kerchief folded over and knotted in the cowboy style. His hair was thinning on top so he rarely took off his droopy brown Resistol hat. He knew from experience his clients spent a lot of time studying him. The women did it because he was interesting and exotic and a damned good-looking cowboy who was also sensitive, manly, humble, and mysterious. They’d likely read on his Web site he was a poet and painter as well as an experienced horseman and man of nature: a wilderness Renaissance man! The men studied him not only as a leader but as a rival. Some of them sucked up to him, trying to get his approval. Others shut up and conceded Jed was the boss because he was a man’s man and he was in charge of the outfit.