Buffalo Summer. Nadia Nichols

Canada, to live on a Cree reservation where the wife had blood relatives. They had taken the younger children with them. Roon had stayed with Pony, and she did not have the heart to displace him.

      But would he work willingly for Caleb McCutcheon? That, and so much more, remained to be seen. She would tell the boys about the job, and if they didn’t want to go to the ranch, they could return to their own families for the summer. That was fair.

      But the boys were not at Nana’s place. “They took your uncle’s old truck,” Nana said, sitting in her rocker and smoking one of her acrid-smelling hand-rolled cigarettes. “Went back home.”

      “But none of them can drive. None of them even have licenses!”

      Nana shook her head, her deeply wrinkled face impassive. “They went home.”

      Pony drove the five miles to her little house much too fast, but the tribal police were not on patrol. She spied no wrecked vehicles along the way, and was relieved to see Ernie’s truck parked safely in her yard. She ran up the steps and burst into the kitchen. The boys, four of them, were crowded around the table, eating peanut butter sandwiches and drinking cans of soda.

      “Where’s Roon?” she said.

      “In the back room,” Jimmy replied, mouth full of sandwich. “Nana gave him a book to read.”

      “Who took Ernie’s truck? Who drove here?”

      “Dan did,” Jimmy said. “Nana said we had to leave.”

      Pony looked at Dan. “Why?”

      Dan’s dark eyes dropped and he lifted his shoulders. Pony looked at Joe. “Why did she tell you to leave?”

      “We took her tobacco,” he said. “We told her we’d replace it.”

      “Yes, you will,” Pony said grimly. “Right now. Let’s go.”

      “We already smoked what we took,” Martin said, staring at her ruefully through his thick glasses. “It’s gone. But we’ll get her more. Don’t worry.”

      “How? By stealing it from someone else? You promised me you wouldn’t smoke, but I never thought I would have to make you promise not to steal.” Pony sat down and dropped her head in her hands. There was a long moment of quiet around the table. She raised her head and studied each boy in turn. “Right now I think I should open the door and ask you all to leave. Right now I feel as if all of you have betrayed me.” She drew a deep steadying breath. “Right now I am very angry, so I am going to take Ernie’s truck back to Nana’s and then walk home. That will give me some time to think about things.”

      She stood up from the table and left her little house and the silence of the four boys that filled it.

      THE SECOND WEEK in June came faster than it should have, and Caleb glanced at the calendar on his way out the kitchen door. He paused, coffee cup in hand, to look at the scrawl that was written on this date. “Five boys/Pony” was a memo that he had made, but in another hand was written, “Day I quit!!!” The word quit was underlined strongly three times. He glanced to where Ramalda stood at the kitchen sink, washing the breakfast dishes. The brightly colored bandanna she always wore covered most of her white hair, but a few strands lay on her shoulders. A wave of affection warmed him, and he shook his head with a faint grin and pushed through the door, stepping onto the porch where his ranch manager waited patiently. He looked for the little cow dog who was never very far from Guthrie Sloane.

      “Where’s Blue?”

      “Left her to home. Figured you’d be wantin’ to ride after the buffalo.”

      “You figured right. There are ten old cows and one huge bull out there, and we have no idea where they are. It would be nice to be able to tell my buffalo expert that they’re still on the home range, but for all I know they’re halfway to Canada.” The sun wasn’t up quite yet but the horses were saddled and tied to the hitch rail. “If the last you saw of them was over on Silver Creek, maybe we should start there.”

      “I saw signs of them this past week near the head-waters of the Piney.”

      “That high up?”

      “Yessir.”

      Caleb drained the last of his cup and set it on the porch rail. “Let’s ride.”

      Guthrie’s halting footsteps followed Caleb’s down the porch steps. Caleb unwrapped Billy Budd’s rein from the rail and stepped into the saddle, wishing the old gelding’s legs were a little shorter or that his own legs were more flexible. It was a hard thing to look graceful while hauling his six-foot frame into the saddle. Still, he couldn’t complain. Guthrie was still so crippled up that he had to use the porch steps to mount his horse. That had to burn deep down inside, because Guthrie Sloane had been one of the best horsemen in Park County before that mare had fallen on him last October.

      The ranch manager was a hard man to read. He didn’t say much, didn’t reveal himself in long-winded conversations the way some people did. He was quiet and competent and he worked damn hard. Caleb liked him very much and counted himself very fortunate to have the skilled cowboy in his employ.

      “Steven’s sister is coming today,” he said, nudging Billy into a walk and giving him a loose rein.

      “The boys, too?” Guthrie said, falling in beside him.

      “As far as I know. I didn’t dare broach the subject at breakfast. Didn’t want to get Ramalda too upset.”

      “She cleaned the bedrooms yesterday.”

      Caleb’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”

      “I saw her bring out the rugs and hang ’em over the porch rail to air. Then she disappeared down the back hall carrying a whole bunch of clean bed linens, muttering away to herself.”

      “I’ll be damned. Maybe she isn’t going to quit after all.”

      “If Ramalda leaves, she knows Jessie’d never forgive her.”

      “No, I guess she wouldn’t,” Caleb agreed. “Speaking of Jessie, when’s she coming home? Classes must be over for her.”

      “Yessir, they are. She’s way ahead of where she thought she’d be, and the school has advanced her into senior-year studies.”

      “Does that mean she’s going to be graduating sooner than you thought?”

      “Yessir. She’s apprenticing with that horse doctor down in Arizona again to finish her credits.”

      “She’s down there now?”

      “Yessir. She’s there for the summer.”

      “Huh. Too bad she couldn’t come home for a little visit, but at least you got to see her at spring break. And she’ll be back in September. I assume she’s planning to be here for her own wedding.”

      “Oh, probably,” Guthrie said with a faint grin, smoothing his horse’s mane with one gloved hand. “She said she might.”

      They rode up along the creek to the place where a smaller tributary fed into it, then threaded through groves of Engelmann spruce and across high meadows of greening grass spangled with wildflowers. They caught sight of some cattle but no buffalo. After an hour they stopped to rest their horses on a high knoll from which they could survey the valley. The wind pushed tall, bunched-up clouds across the vast expanse of blue sky. “I’m buying the leases back,” Caleb said, leaning his forearm on the saddle horn. “The ones Jessie’s father had to sell. Ten thousand acres of leased land, most of it belonging to the Bureau of Land Management. That gives the whole ranch a footprint of fifteen thousand acres. Enough room to run us some buffalo.”

      “Damn,” Guthrie said. “That’s good news.”

      “I didn’t want to tell Jessie until it was a done deal.”

      “She’ll be real glad to hear about it.”

      “I