Western Star (4 page)

“I don’t think the horse will care,” said Lisa. “And if I have to wait one more minute to get into the saddle, I’ll scream.”

“Then we’d better hurry,” said Kate.

The five girls scurried out of their cabin and headed for the corral, where their horses were waiting for them.

There was someone else waiting for them, too: John Brightstar. He was the son of the main wrangler at the Bar None, and about a year older than the girls. While he liked all of The Saddle Club, he and Lisa were special friends.

His face lit up when he saw the group.

“Hi, there, dudes!” he said, welcoming them. Stevie, Lisa, and Carole greeted him warmly.

“I heard you were coming, so I got your horses ready,” John said. The girls each had a favorite horse at the ranch. Carole rode a strawberry roan named Berry. Stevie’s horse was a skewbald cutting horse named Stewball. Christine’s horse, Arrow, was staying at the Bar None while she was there to visit The Saddle Club. Kate rode a gray mare named Moonglow. Lisa’s choice was a friendly dark bay mare named Chocolate.

“I gave Chocolate an extra serving of mash so she’d be ready for an extraspecial ride, just like you asked,” John said to Lisa.

If Stevie’s eyes hadn’t deceived her, she was pretty sure she’d just seen Lisa blush. And then she realized why. When John said that, it meant that Lisa had been in touch with him before they’d gotten to the Bar None, and that meant that the two of them must have been
writing letters to each other. That was fine. There was no reason why they shouldn’t. The curious part was that Lisa would be writing letters to a boy and not telling her two best friends about it! She and Carole exchanged quick looks. Carole had caught it, too.

“Hurry up, girls. It gets dark early these days,” Kate said. “We’ve got some riding to do!”

John had put out all their tack, so the girls quickly saddled up their horses. Minutes later they were ready to head out.

Kate led the way, cutting a trail through the powdery snow on the meadow. It wasn’t deep snow and it didn’t seem to bother the horses at all. There was just enough to remind the girls that it was winter.

Carole took a deep breath, welcoming the crisp air into her lungs. They were riding on the same land they’d traveled many times during the summer. She could see the same promontories and lush meadows, only now the grass poking through the snow was cold and dry, and there was barely enough to support the Devines’ livestock through the winter.

They passed the outcrop of land that lead to Parson’s Rock. Carole smiled, remembering summer trips there. On their first visit to the Bar None, everybody from the ranch had made the strenuous climb to the top, where they’d had a birthday cookout for Stevie. It didn’t look the same in the middle of winter.

“Hey, look! Horses have been on the ridge over there!” Christine said.

“Is that knowledge the result of your amazing tracking skills, inherited from your Native American forebears?” Stevie asked.

“No, I think it’s the result of being able to recognize hoofprints in snow,” Christine said, laughing.

Everybody looked where she was pointing. At the crest of a nearby ridge, there were clear indications of horses—a lot of horses.

“Come on, I bet the herd’s over there,” said Kate. “Let’s see how they’re doing in the snow.”

The Bar None’s herd varied in size, but there were generally about a hundred horses. The ranch regularly used about half the herd for their guests. Those horses were kept in corrals near the main house. The rest of the herd was allowed to roam the huge ranch, contained by the fences that marked the Devines’ property lines. Every year the Devines would cut out some of the herd, selling off extra animals and saddle training others. It was a good way for the Devines to assure themselves of a constant supply of horses. It was also a way for the ranch to give its guests an astonishingly beautiful view from time to time.

The herd was always a surprise for the Saddle Club. They all spent a great deal of time around horses and believed they knew them well, but it was only when they
came to the Bar None that they saw them in a totally natural state—roaming free and wild.

The girls rode to the crest of the hill and then stopped to watch.

Horses naturally form herds, which usually have a dominant stallion leading the mares, their foals, and miscellaneous geldings. The Bar None herd broke into smaller groups in the summer. In the winter, however, when food was scarce, the horses sometimes formed a single large herd that shared the meager resources. That was what the girls saw in the meadow below.

The afternoon sun had melted enough of the previous day’s snow to bare the winter grass. All around the meadow, horses bowed their heads to the shoots of green, munching carefully.

One horse raised his head and sniffed at the air. Lisa knew that was because the wind had shifted. He was smelling them. He looked up at the crest of the hill, staring intently for a moment.

“He’s checking us out,” Lisa said, pointing to the stallion. The girls smiled because Lisa was obviously right.

In a few seconds the stallion put his head down to the grass again, clearly satisfied that the riders represented no danger to his herd. None of the other horses even looked their way.

Kate clucked her tongue and gave Moonglow a little kick. The mare obediently moved forward. All five girls
rode closer to the herd. A few of the horses finally looked at them, without curiosity. Most simply continued eating.

On one side of the herd, two dun mares and a dark chestnut gelding seemed to be playing a game.

“Tag?” Carole asked.

Stevie looked more closely and shaded her eyes. One of the mares lunged at the other and then ran after the gelding when he fled, giving a small, frisky buck as she did.

“No, I think it’s more like touch football,” Stevie said after serious consideration.

Lisa laughed. The idea of horses playing a complicated game like touch football seemed silly, but as she watched she saw what Stevie meant. Maybe it wasn’t so outrageous after all!

“And the mares are winning!” Lisa said.

“Go for it, girls!” Christine added.

“Look at that one,” Carole said. She was pointing to a mare that wasn’t exactly up to playing touch football right then. She was a dark chestnut with white socks on her hind legs. She had a huge belly.

“She’s got to be due any day now,” Carole said. “Or maybe it was last week. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mare so pregnant!”

The horse lumbered uncomfortably. She seemed to make an enormous effort just to move a few feet to some fresh grass.

“The herd is definitely going to be larger soon,” Stevie said.

“But not a minute too soon for that mare,” said Christine. “She
is
huge. I hope her delivery goes okay. But it’s amazing to me how horses seem able to have their babies without much fuss out here. It’s rare that we have to call the vet for a foal. I think this lady’s going to figure out how to get this done on her own, too.”

Christine turned Moonglow back toward the hill. “We should probably head back. It’s late and we definitely want to be home before dark. It gets fiercely cold once the sun goes down.”

As if nature had been listening, a cold wind swept the meadow. The girls turned their collars up and tugged their hats down against the gust. They turned their horses toward the ranch. Bundled up, they rode steadily and in silence, each remembering the remarkable sight of the herd, the playful threesome, and the pregnant mare.

“Whoa!” Kate called from the front of the line. The rest of the girls drew up to where she’d stopped.

Carole shaded her eyes to see what had stopped Kate. Two riders were coming toward them. Kate waved to the riders. They waved back.

“Must be some of our guests,” she said. “But I didn’t think anyone else was riding out today.” She clucked her tongue, and Moonglow started walking toward the pair. Kate was ready to greet them and suggest that they ride
back to the ranch together. “I wouldn’t want guests to get lost on a night like this one’s going to be,” she said.

But as they neared the pair, Kate realized that she didn’t know them and they weren’t guests of the ranch. One was riding a tall gray horse and the other a bay with white socks. The horses hadn’t come from the Bar None, either.

“Welcome to the Bar None,” Kate said. Stevie noticed that she didn’t sound very welcoming. In general, people didn’t ride across other people’s land without permission. It was possible they’d gotten permission from Kate’s parents. Until she knew what the situation was, it was wise to remain polite but cool.

“Oh, have we left the Westerlys’ property?” one of the men asked.

“Yes, you have,” Kate told him. “Their land ends at that fence over there. You’re on the Bar None now. It’s all fenced off. How’d you get here?”

“A gate,” the second man said.

“Gate?” Kate asked, raising an eyebrow.

He pointed behind him. There was no gate. There was only fence—except that the fence was broken.

“Oh dear,” said Kate. “We’ll have to get that repaired right away. In the meantime, you can use it to return to the Westerlys’.”

Lisa admired the way Kate spoke. She continued to be
polite, but she was firm. This wasn’t public land, and strangers weren’t welcome without an invitation.

“Isn’t there BLM rangeland over here?” the first man asked.

Lisa knew that BLM stood for the Bureau of Land Management. That was a government agency that controlled millions of acres of wild land.

“There’s no BLM rangeland anywhere near here,” Kate said. “Now, we’ve got to get back and I want to make a temporary repair of that fence. Why don’t you two go back the way you came so we can fix the fence behind you?”

“Okay,” the first man said, shrugging. The two of them turned around and rode back through the broken fence.

Kate watched them disappear over a hillside. “Dudes!” she said disgustedly. “They don’t know the first thing. Imagine not knowing the difference between a gate and a broken fence!” She dismounted and unhooked the rope from her saddle horn, then tied it around the standing posts, fashioning a temporary fence.

“Even the greenest dude should know the difference between a broken fence and a gate,” Carole agreed.

“Well, they’re gone and the fence is repaired. This should hold until John and his father can get out here to repair it. In the meantime, it’ll keep our herds on our land and keep Mr. Westerly’s herds on his land.”

She gave a final tug on the rope and, satisfied, climbed back into Moonglow’s saddle.

“It’s almost sunset,” Kate said. “Want to watch the sun go down from Parson’s Rock?”

That sounded like a wonderful idea.

“Race?”

She didn’t have to ask twice.

J
OHN AND
W
ALTER
Brightstar were waiting for the girls when they returned to the barn.

“It’s twilight,” Walter said. “You girls should have been back before now.”

“We were worried,” John said. He looked quickly at Lisa.

The expression on John’s face answered any questions in Carole’s mind about whether he was still interested in Lisa. His look showed genuine, total concern. Carole thought it was touching that he cared so much.

“We had to stop and fix a break in the fence,” Kate said, conveniently forgetting to mention the side trip they had taken to watch the sunset.

“Third one this week,” John said. “Must be the weather. So where was this one?”

Kate described the area to him as she and the rest of the girls dismounted and unsaddled their horses. Walter said he and John would go out first thing in the morning to make repairs.

Once the horses were taken care of, the girls returned to their bunkhouse to wash up and change for dinner. It had been a long day of traveling, by airplane and by horseback. They were tired and hungry.

“I’m not sure if I’m so tired I can’t eat or so hungry I can’t sleep,” Stevie said.

“Oh, I bet if you put your mind to it, you’ll be able to eat,” Kate said to her. “Particularly when I tell you that I heard a rumor that my mom has made her special Southwest stew for dinner—the one with the hint of mesquite. And I think I saw some wild rice.”

“I can always sleep later,” said Stevie quickly, pulling a sweater over her head.

The girls tromped through the cold night to the main house. The bright lights inside glowed warmly, welcoming the girls before they reached the porch. When the door opened, the rich scent of Phyllis’s stew wafted toward them. Stevie aimed straight for the dining room, but was sidetracked by a group of unfamiliar people.

“Kate, why don’t you introduce your friends to our other guests,” Frank said.

First the girls met Mr. and Mrs. Katz, who were staying in the main house. They were an older couple, perhaps in their sixties. The first thing Stevie noticed about them was that they both had really nice smiles, as if they were happy people.

“Oh, please call me Ellen,” said Mrs. Katz. “I’m not used to ‘Mrs. Katz’ yet; I may never be.”

“And I’m Fred,” said Mr. Katz, offering his hand. The girls shook it. “We’re on our honeymoon,” he explained. “That’s why Ellen isn’t used to being called Mrs. Katz.”