Sixteen Horses

There was a ranch with a few horses, and plans for sixteen more plus sixteen foals.

It hadn't always had five. It had started with two, then three, then five, and the ranchers were proud of the growth. The herd was the business. More horses meant more money, more standing, more reason to keep going. They had ambitions for many more, and soon.

The ranch had two ranchers. Rancher A ran the day-to-day — he was the one out in the yard, making decisions, pointing at things, getting them done. He liked things finished. Rancher B was quieter. He built things. He'd taken to spending his evenings in the workshop with a new contraption, something he'd read about in a magazine, that promised to break horses faster than any cowboy ever could.

And the ranch had two cowboys. Cowboy A had been there the longest. He knew every fence-post, every soft patch of ground, every horse by the white on its forehead. Cowboy B was newer — still learning, didn't understand the horses, didn't understand the weather, didn't take into account the picture. She generally did what she was tasked with, as quickly as possible. She liked the well-done reward every time she finished a job quickly. It pleased Rancher A.

From the porch, the ranch still looked like a ranch.

The Boss was on the porch. He owned the ranch. He had owned it for a long time. He liked sitting on the porch in the afternoons with a cup of tea and looking out at the herd, because the herd was the thing he had built, and a man is entitled to look at the thing he has built.

Rancher A came up to the porch most afternoons to give him the report.

"Ranch is great, Boss. Horses are all looking good. And what Rancher B's working on is a real beauty — going to make us a lot of money and fix many of our current issues. Cowboy B's coming along well, great worker, gets things done really quickly. Makes Cowboy A look a bit slow these days. Leave it with me, Boss — you know I've done this for years and we're going to have sixteen horses out in the fields just in time to make the most from them."

The Boss would nod, and sip his tea, and say good work, because from the porch the ranch did look great. He could see horses standing in fields. He could see ranchers in motion. He could not see the cliffs from the porch, because the cliffs were on the far side of the ridge, and the ridge was there for the view.

He did not ask about the cliffs because he did not know there were cliffs to ask about.

One morning Rancher A said to Cowboy B: "Break these horses. We need them ready by Friday."

Cowboy B set to work. She tried what she'd seen done before. She got the horses to stand still, to take a saddle, to walk in a circle. By the end of the week she said "done," and Rancher A came out and looked at the horse and said "good work."

The horse stood there. It was a horse. It was wearing a saddle.

Nobody had ridden them through a storm.

While this was happening, Rancher B had finished his contraption. He brought out a new horse — one he'd worked on himself, alone, in the workshop, with the new method. It was beautiful. Glossy coat, perfect stance, looked stronger than any horse the ranch had ever owned.

Rancher A came over and whistled. "Nice horse, dude. Can we make it a little more powerful?"

"Sure," said Rancher B. "I'll get Cowboy B on it — she's out of jobs."

So while Cowboy B was working on the new, more powerful version of Rancher B's horse, Rancher A made a decision.

"These horses," he said, sweeping his arm at the corral, "need to be outside. Customers want to see them. The market is moving."

And he opened the gates.

The horses scattered.

Some stayed close. Some ran toward the water — fine, they'd come back when they were hungry. Some ran into the thick woods, where you couldn't see them and couldn't easily reach them, but they were probably alright. Probably.

And some ran toward the cliffs.

Rancher A watched them go.

"Ah, I hope they're okay," he said.

Rancher B turned to him. "We can't do that. We need to round them up. We need a lasso."

Cowboy B and Rancher A looked between them.

"What's a lasso?"

Cowboy A — who had been quiet all morning — sighed, fetched the rope from the barn, and started walking toward the cliffs.

He had been tracking down the horses, lasso in hand, three horses still loose ahead of him and two of them angling badly, when he heard the corral gate swing behind him.

He turned and watched as Rancher A opened the gates again, letting out Rancher B's supercharged horse — already galloping past, faster than any of the others, causing more damage to more things and heading to that cliff far faster than anyone had ever seen a horse go. Rancher A and Rancher B scratched their heads in surprise. "Well, I had no idea it would do that," they said. "It was looking better trained than any of the normal horses."

Cowboy A stopped.

He had three options.

He could drop the current chase and go after the new horse. The first three would reach the cliff.

He could finish the current chase. The supercharged horse would be over the horizon by the time he turned.

He could stand still and shout. Nothing would get rounded up. From the porch it would look like he wasn't doing his job. The horses he had been chasing would scatter further.

There was no fourth option. Not on foot. Not alone.

Nobody had thought to ask what would happen when the next supercharged horse — the one still being built, the one after that, and the sixteen after that — went wrong not out in the fields but here, inside the ranch itself.

Outside, a horse that went wrong was a loss. A real loss, a painful one. But the other horses kept grazing. The water still ran. The gates on the other corrals still opened. You counted what you'd lost and you carried on.

But Rancher B's horses hadn't been built like the others. They had been built faster, by a contraption that had read about horses but never smelled one. And they were connected — by design, because that was the clever part — to everything. The water supply. The fencing. The feed. The gates on all sixteen corrals at once.

If one of them went wrong inside the ranch, it wouldn't go over a cliff.

It would go through the middle of everything.

Water down. Fencing down. Every gate on every corral open or locked simultaneously, nobody sure which. Sixteen horses loose or trapped at the same moment, on the same morning, with one man and one rope.

And the contraption that built it standing silent in the workshop, unable to explain what it had made or how to undo it. Because contrivances don't explain themselves. They just build what they're asked to build, and move on to the next one.

Cowboy A had been saying this for months, in the only language available to him — which was the language of not yet, and not like this, and we need to check that first. It had made him look slow. It had made him look like a man who didn't want the ranch to grow.

He had never stopped wanting the ranch to grow. He just knew what it was built on.

There was one other thing worth noting about the ranch, though nobody had ever written it down.

When Rancher A's own horses went lame — his horses, the ones he'd broken, the ones he'd put his name to — he would first consult a book. If the book didn't help, he would try another book. He was not a stupid man, and sometimes the books were right, and the horse recovered, and that was the end of it.

But when the books weren't enough, there was a call. Always the same call, always to the same person. Cowboy A, at whatever hour it happened, with whatever else was already in his hands.

Rancher A never mentioned these calls on the porch. By the time the afternoon report came, the horse was walking again, and a walking horse is not a story worth telling.

The Boss heard about a lot of walking horses.

He never heard about the calls.

A few moments later, the Boss came out onto the porch with his tea and saw Rancher A walking up from the yard with a rifle.

"Everything alright?" asked the Boss.

"Few of the horses got out," said Rancher A. "Some of them went bad. Had to shoot a couple before they caused damage."

"Shoot them?"

"Nothing else for it. They were running into things. Hurting themselves. Hurting the herd's value."

The Boss put his tea down slowly. "How did they get out?"

"Cowboy A," said Rancher A. "He couldn't control them and he's been too slow tracking them down. This is quicker." With a raise of the shotgun he gestured to three dead horses. "And Rancher B — well, his one was built wrong, if I'm honest. Looked good but wasn't sound. Cowboy B helped me deal with the worst of them. She's been very good about it, just jumped in and did what I said. Think she's shot five horses so we've got eight already."

The Boss looked out at the fields.

There were fewer horses than there had been on Monday. Fewer horses, less money, and one hell of a mess to clean up with eight dead horses laying around.

"And the rest?" he said. "The ones still out there?"

Rancher A followed his gaze. "Most of them are fine. Some are in the woods. We'll round them up."

"With what?"

Rancher A did not answer immediately, because he did not know the word for what they would round them up with. He had never needed the word. The word had always lived with someone else.

After a moment he said: "Cowboy A is on it."

The Boss picked up his tea again. It had gone cold.

He did not say anything for a while. He was thinking about the fact that he had been told, every afternoon for months, that the ranch was great, and the horses were all looking good, and they were going to have all the horses ready by spring. He was thinking about the fact that nobody on his porch had ever once used the word cliff.

He was thinking about the fact that a man can own a ranch for a long time and still not know what is happening on the far side of his own ridge.

Cowboy A stayed up all night tracking and saving what horses he could.

The ranchers were still proud of the growth. The herd was still the business. More horses still meant more money.

They had plans for eleven more.