Buffalo Summer. Nadia Nichols

pushed his glass with one finger, back and forth. “Can any of them ride a horse?”

      “They’re teenage boys. They can do anything.”

      “Then go talk to McCutcheon,” Steven said. “Sell him a package deal. He gets you, and for the same price he gets five more hard workers who would be really good at pulling down miles and miles of rusty barbed-wire fence. Tell him the truth about the boys, about how you’ve taken them in. Talk to him, Pony. He’s a good man. Go tomorrow morning, first thing. Now clean your plate, or I’ll send you to bed right after supper with no dessert.”

      She had spent the night at Steven’s little house and had risen before dawn to drive to Caleb McCutcheon’s ranch. The sun was just shy of peeking over the Beartooth Mountains when Pony turned onto the five-mile gravel road that headed into the foothills and ended at the Bow and Arrow. She downshifted and swerved to avoid a large pothole. She was nervous, and her driving reflected it. Caleb McCutcheon would look her up and down and try not to laugh. He would try to be polite, because Steven had said he was a good, kindhearted man. But he would think to himself, What’s this? A woman applying for a job managing a herd of buffalo? Ridiculous!

      And he would be right.

      CALEB MCCUTCHEON AWOKE in the early morning and lay in bed, hands laced behind his head, listening to the song of a white-crowned sparrow lifting sweetly over the rush of the creek. He thought about how much his life had changed. One year ago he hadn’t set eyes upon this place. He hadn’t yet met the full-blooded Crow Indian Steven Young Bear, the young conservation attorney who had introduced him to Jessie Weaver and had been instrumental in helping Caleb purchase her failing cattle ranch.

      One year ago he’d still been married to a woman who’d held his heart from the first time he’d set eyes on her, when he was full of fire and his career as a professional baseball player for the Chicago White Sox still sizzled. He had pledged his allegiance to this sophisticated woman who had shepherded his rise to fame and guided him along the complicated paths of stardom. She’d stood beside him when fate had dealt its untimely blow to his career, and he’d undergone multiple surgeries on his ankle, and then drifted off when his name faded into history to find a more interesting life for herself.

      Divorce was an ugly word, but he had never realized just how ugly until his wife had asked him for one. Their divorce this past November had been a staggering blow, although in retrospect he should have seen it coming. Rachael craved the bright lights and the big cities. Her life was lively and political and she traveled in the highest social circles, whereas he had followed his childhood dream into the backwater wilderness of Montana. It was here that they had parted company.

      The winter that followed had been long and dark, and Caleb had spent countless hours in this cabin on the edge of the Beartooth Wilderness reexamining his life. He had no regrets about being in this place. In spite of the loneliness that at times overwhelmed him, he never tired of this land and its many moods, the vast and palpable silence that dwarfed the imagination, the thundering wind that blew tirelessly, the crashing roar or the gentle murmur of the creek. He loved this old cabin, hewn of big-mountain cedar over a hundred years earlier. Caleb had never felt so much at home as he did here. In time, he supposed, he’d learn to live with the loneliness. He’d made some good friends. He counted Guthrie Sloane, his twenty-nine-year-old ranch manager and Jessie Weaver’s fiancé, as one, and of course Jessie herself. Steven Young Bear, café owner Bernie Portis, the old ranch hands Badger and Charlie…all good friends. A man could do much worse.

      Caleb’s lifelong dream of owning a ranch in the Rocky Mountain West had come true, but unfortunately the ranch hadn’t come with an operations manual, and his attempts to persuade Jessie Weaver to remain as manager were thwarted when she returned to veterinary school to finish her degree. It was Caleb’s great good luck that Guthrie Sloane, who had worked for the ranch and had loved Jessie Weaver since he was thirteen years old, had taken the job and was patiently teaching Caleb the ropes.

      Jessie and Guthrie’s long-awaited wedding would take place this coming September, and for months already it had been the topic of conversation in Katy Junction. Caleb could certainly understand all the buzz. It was reassuring to know that true love still existed.

      He rolled out of bed and walked barefoot into the kitchen, which was nothing more than a little nook off the living room. The cabin boasted three rooms: bedroom, bathroom and kitchen/living room. There was a sleeping loft above and a root cellar below. Though the place was simple and spartan, Caleb was very comfortable in these quarters and preferred living here than in the main ranch house. He put on a pot of coffee, threw a few sticks of firewood into the woodstove and opened the door to the porch. It was a few moments before sunrise, yet already he could feel the burgeoning energy of the season. The sounds and smells of springtime warmed his blood and charged his spirit.

      There was so much to do, and it was a solid, satisfying feeling to fill the days with activities that meant something. Just splitting firewood was a joy to him. He devoted an hour a day to the task, keeping his woodpile tidy and arranging the split wood by size so that he could easily grab what he needed when he needed it.

      But tending to his firewood was nothing compared to the daunting task of ripping down the cross fences that partitioned the land into separate pastures. The plan was to leave the pole corrals around the barns, the penning corrals and the boundary fences that would need to be strengthened to contain the small herd of buffalo that Pete Two Shirts had talked Caleb into buying last fall. All the rest of the barbed wire would be removed. The men would coil the wire as they took it down and reuse the newest of it to bolster boundary fences. Then they’d pull out the metal posts and cut the wooden fence posts off at ground level, so as to leave no holes for the animals to step in. It sounded simple, but there were over sixty miles of barbed-wire fence to deal with.

      The sharp fragrant smell of coffee tantalized him, and he returned to the snug warmth of the cabin, closing the door on the cool mid-May morning. He poured himself a cup and carried it with him to the chair beside the window. He opened his notebook and stared at the scrawl of figures on the page. Took a sip from his cup and felt himself frown as he studied his jottings. Lord, what a huge job he’d undertaken when he’d accepted Pete Two Shirts’s suggestion that they bring the buffalo back to their home range.

      Pete had assured him that the venture would be both environmentally beneficial and financially sound. But now that Pete had returned to his full-time job on the reservation managing the Crow buffalo herd, the project had suddenly become unwieldy. Huge. Almost terrifying. After all, Caleb was just a city boy—born and bred in the Chicago slums. What the hell did he know about two-thousand-pound animals that stood six feet high at the shoulder?

      Caleb lifted his mug of coffee for another appreciative sip. Maybe Guthrie would scare up someone who would be interested in teaching them how to manage the herd. After readily admitting his own ignorance in buffalo husbandry, Caleb’s ranch manager had put the word out, but so far there had been no applicants. Not a single one. Guthrie had cautioned him against impatience, but Caleb was beginning to wonder if this buffalo venture might not have been too ambitious for a greenhorn wanna-be rancher.

      Yet, as intimidating as the buffalo were, they had to remain. Somehow he had to make this plan work. There was bound to be some big, burly, ham-fisted, tobacco-chewing, burly buffalo-loving expert out there looking for a job in one of the prettiest spots in all of Montana.

      Bound to be…

      Caleb pushed out of his chair with a sigh and carried both the notebook and his cup of coffee as he left the warmth of his cabin and headed up to the main house.

      His cook and housekeeper, Ramalda, didn’t like it when he was late for breakfast.

      PONY CAUGHT her breath and hit the brake as the truck crested a rise. For a moment all she could do was stare as the sun’s first rays spilled over the rim of rugged mountains and laid their golden fingers across the valley floor. She’d learned about the history of the Bow and Arrow from Steven. The ranch had been around since the mid-1800s and was one of the longest surviving in Montana, an enduring testament to a Texan by the name of Weaver who had come here with a solid dream, a dream