Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material (12 page)

“My hat’s off to you,” Rio said simply. “You must be one hell of a rider.”

Hope grinned. “I’ve eaten my share of dirt. And that spotted stud fed me most of it.”

He chuckled and shook his head, enjoying her matter-of-fact acceptance of getting thrown. At the same time he quietly promised himself that if Storm Walker unloaded anyone for a while, it would be him. There was just a whole lot of power in that stud’s spotted body. He could hurt a rider and never mean to.

“Want to ride Dusk,” Rio asked, “or does one of your mares need work?”

“I’ll ride Aces. She’s Storm Walker’s favorite. He’ll be less anxious to get home if she’s along.”

Rio moved to dismount, then stopped and looked dubiously at Storm Walker.

Hope hid her smile. “Don’t worry. You’re okay as long as you don’t take off the saddle. That’s how Storm Walker knows a ride is finished—when the saddle comes off.”

“One bucking session per saddling, huh?”

“That’s it.”

“Makes a man consider the joys of sleeping in the saddle,” he said dryly.

Hope stopped trying to hide her amusement. She leaned against Storm Walker and let laughter bubble up like pure spring water. It had been a long time since she had simply given herself to any emotion except determination. When the last laughter finally rippled into silence, she took a deep breath and looked up at Rio.

“You’re good for me,” she said, her lips still curving in a deep smile.

“Keep you from breaking your neck?” he guessed.

“No. You teach me to laugh again. I’d almost forgotten how.”

Her words sank into Rio like water into thirsty land, renewing him. Without stopping to think, he smiled gently and touched her cheek with his fingertips.

“It’s you who teach me,” he said, his voice warm and deep.

“What?” she whispered.

“Beautiful dreamer,” he said softly. “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know what your dreams do to me. And your laughter.”

Abruptly he closed his eyes, shutting out the vision of Hope watching him, eyes luminous with dreams, deep with promises that shouldn’t be made and couldn’t be kept. The fingers that had touched her so gently retreated and clenched into a fist on his thigh.

“I wish to Christ I was a different kind of man,” he said bitterly.

“I don’t.” She trembled from his brief touch and from the savage emotions that had made his voice harsh. “I wouldn’t change you any more than I would trade the Valley of the Sun for the green Perdidas. I was made for this land, Rio.”

And I’m afraid I was made for you, too.

She didn’t say the words aloud. She didn’t have to. He heard them clearly in his own mind, as clearly as though he had spoken them himself.

And then he was afraid that he had.

Twelve

S
ITTING ASTRIDE
S
TORM
Walker, Rio didn’t open his eyes again until he sensed Hope moving away. Brooding, he watched her go to the horse pasture. A clear whistle floated through the air. One of the horses whickered and trotted over to her. Like Storm Walker, the mare’s stride was leggy and elegant.

A minute later, using nothing more than her fingers twisted lightly into the slate-colored mane, Hope led the dark gray mare into the corral where Storm Walker and Rio waited. The mare was big, clean-limbed, and powerful. She moved with the calm assurance of a domestic animal that had never been mistreated.

Hope shut the corral gate behind Aces and went into the barn. She returned almost immediately with a saddle, blanket, bridle, and a bucket of grooming tools.

Rio dismounted as smoothly as he had gone into the saddle in the first place. One-handed, he took Aces’ saddle from Hope and flipped it expertly over the top rail of the corral. The blanket followed.

Together, working in silence, they groomed the mare. Before Hope could, Rio checked the mare’s steel shoes carefully, knowing they would be going over some rugged, stony land. He checked the saddle cinch with equal care, looking for any weakness that could make the strap give way at the very instant it was most needed. A fall in rough country could easily be fatal.

While Hope watched, bemused at having the familiar tasks taken from her hands, Rio saddled Aces with the same automatic ease that he had done everything else. He had spent his life around horses. It showed in every smooth motion he made.

When Aces was ready, Rio pulled his oversized saddlebags off the corral rail and tied them in place behind Storm Walker’s saddle. Not quite trusting the stallion to behave, he mounted in a single catlike motion. If the stud bucked, Rio would be ready.

As though the thought of bucking had never crossed his well-bred mind, the stallion turned eagerly toward the corral gate. With a wry smile at his own expense, Rio opened the wooden gate, let the horses out, and then refastened the gate without getting out of the saddle.

“How did the last hydrologist get around?” he asked.

“Truck,” Hope said succinctly,

Beneath the shield of hat brim and eyelashes, she glanced aside at Rio. The harsh lines on his face had relaxed and his voice was calm, neutral, wholly controlled. It was as though he had never touched her, never regretted the kind of man he was, never heard her response, never shut her out so finally behind his closed eyes.

But he had done all of those things.

Hope turned Aces onto a dirt ranch road that went a short way into the foothills.

Rio followed. “Just a truck? He must have missed a lot of your land.”

“He had a fistful of survey maps.”

“Good thing, maps. Save a man a lot of saddle and boot leather. Not worth much for finding wells, though.”

She let out a long breath. “That’s what I hoped. I just don’t see how he could spread out a piece of paper on the kitchen table and then tell me that if there was any artesian water on my ranch, it was three miles down and hotter than hell.”

Rio’s mouth turned in a sardonic curve that was a long way from his earlier smiles. “He was half-right. Three miles down it is hotter than hell.”

With a light touch of spurs, he lifted Storm Walker into a lope on the dirt road. He held that pace until the horses began to breathe deeply and their coats took on a satin sheen that was just short of sweat. Then he alternated between a trot and a lope, eating up the miles without wearing down the horses.

When he reined Storm Walker back down to a walk, Aces was still alongside, her gunmetal legs easily keeping pace with the more powerful stallion. Rio nodded approvingly.

“Good animal,” he said.

Hope smiled. “Thanks. I picked her out when she was two days old.”

“You have a good eye.”

“Right now I’d rather have a good well.”

“If it’s here to find, you’ll get it. According to my map, the road ends two miles up from here. Is there a trail to the ranch boundary?”

“The road ends a mile up,” she corrected. “Landslide.”

He smiled slightly. “That’s the problem with maps. The land keeps changing.”

“There’s a trail to Piñon Camp. Dad used to hunt deer there. That’s only a few hundred yards from the ranch boundary, I think.” She shrugged. “Close enough. It’s hard to tell without an expensive, full-blown formal survey.”

“It’s hard to tell with one,” Rio said wryly. “Sometimes it seems like each new surveyor has a new opinion. Besides, a surprising amount of the Basin and Range country has never been surveyed. Hell, it’s hardly even been settled. Two or three cities and a whole lot of sagebrush and mountains in between.”

“That’s why I love it. Plenty of room to just . . .
be
.”

“Yes,” he said. “A lot of people don’t understand that.”

“Good. Leaves more room for the rest of us.”

Smiling, Rio looked down at the road. There hadn’t been enough rain to wipe out the tracks of the last vehicle to pass over the gritty surface. In places that were protected from the wind, tire marks still showed clearly. He noted that the tread patterns weren’t those of either ranch truck.

“Hunters?” he asked, gesturing toward the tire tracks.

“The hydrologist. He came up here to get an overview of the whole ranch.”

“Well, at least he wasn’t entirely a fool. That’s one of the things we’re going to do.”

The hydrologist’s tire tracks went up to the landslide, stopped, crossed over themselves, and headed back down the mountain. Rio guided Storm Walker carefully around the tracks, looking for boot marks or any other sign that the hydrologist had gotten out of his truck and walked around.

There weren’t any tracks.

Rio turned in the saddle and looked back over the trail. The road had climbed steeply in the last mile. There was a clear view of the tiny ranch buildings, the low desert basin beyond, and the next mountain range beyond that.

“This is as far as he went,” Hope said. “I told him that Piñon Camp had a better view. He said he could see more than enough from here.”

She looked beyond the landslide to the Perdidas rising darkly above the dry foothills. Then she turned as Rio had, toward the west.

The ranch boundaries sprawled invisibly along the rugged foothills like a carelessly thrown blanket. The basin between the Perdidas and the next mountain range fifteen miles to the west was low desert, a place of alkali flats in the summer and temporary, brackish lakes during the season of winter rain and mountain runoff.

The foothills were rugged, but not as steep as the east-facing foothills of the Perdidas. Small valleys thick with grass lay in the creases of the hills, guarded by rocky ridges where big sage and piñon and mahogany grew nearly twenty feet tall. They were shrubs rather than true trees, but so tall they were often called pygmy forests.

The endless changes of elevation fascinated Hope, basins alternating with mountain ranges that looked like tawny velvet waves frozen forever in the moment of breaking. A thin silver haze of heat shimmered above the basins, blending invisibly into the blue-white haze of extreme distance. There was nothing to stop the eye but range after range of mountains falling away to the far curve of the earth.

“How much do you know about the geological history of this land?” Rio asked quietly.

“Not much more than the name ‘Basin and Range,’ and that’s self-explanatory,” she said, gesturing toward the view. “Basin followed by mountain range followed by basin, world without end.”

His clear eyes narrowed slightly as he focused on the distant horizon.
World without end.

“You live in a rare place, Hope. It’s almost unique on earth. Its closest cousins are the Baikal region of Siberia and the African Rift Valley. Those are places where the crust of the earth is being stretched by the force of molten basalt pressing up from below, literally tearing the continent apart. The crust thins and breaks apart under the pressure in a process called rifting.”

Hope turned toward Rio, drawn by the near-reverence in his deep voice.

“In Africa the process has gone so far that parts of the rift are below sea level, just waiting for the south end of the rift to split the edge of the African continent and let in the ocean. Then a new sea will be born. Like the Red Sea, where the Arabian peninsula slowly split away from Africa and salt water bled into the gap, concealing the rift.”

He watched the horizon for a moment longer, but his eyes saw only the compelling, massive, surpassingly slow movements of continental plates over spans of time so immense that they could only be named, not understood. Geological time. Deep time.

“A similar kind of crustal spreading is happening all the way down the center of the Atlantic Ocean,” he added.

Just listening to Rio made Hope ache with all that couldn’t be. His words were alive with a subtle excitement, the voice of a man who saw things few other people could, a man who was intellectually, spiritually, and sensually alive to the world around him.

“I’ll show you maps of it tonight,” he said. “The Atlantic rift is really something, all the frozen ridges of basalt and the flat intermediary basins being pushed east and west from a great central seam at the bottom of the ocean.”

“I’d like to see that.”

Slowly Rio’s focus returned to the rugged land in front of him instead of the images in his mind. “The Basin and Range country is pulling itself apart, just like the Atlantic. Basalt wells up deep below the surface, fracturing the crust in thousands of fault zones. Some of the land rises along the faults, some drops, and then huge blocks of land tilt up and back like a dog pushing up on its haunches after sleeping in the sun.”

Hope smiled at the image of blocks of land changing positions like a pack of great, shaggy dogs.

“That’s what makes our mountain ranges,” he said. “The tilting. Look over there. See it?”

She followed his glance from the Perdidas to the distant basin shimmering with heat.

“Tilting is why the west side of the mountains isn’t as steep as the east side,” he explained. “The uplift is sharper on the east face of the blocks. If you look with your mind as well as your eyes, you can see the blocks of land shearing apart, rocking back, rising, mountains growing up into the sky. And the higher the mountains go, the more clouds are combed out of the sky, and the less rain falls on the eastern side. The dry side.”

“Valley of the Sun.”

“Yes. And a lot of other valleys. That’s where part of your water problem comes from. The Basin and Range country is in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Young mountains, tall and growing taller. They block the clouds coming off the Pacific Ocean, milk them, and very little rain escapes to the other side. It’s as though the mountains cast a shadow where it rarely rains.”

He shifted slightly in the saddle, putting his palm flat on the saddle horn, and studied the land he sensed in his soul as much as saw with his eyes.

“Okay, living in a rain shadow is part of my problem,” Hope said. “What’s the rest?”

“There just isn’t as much water in the atmosphere as there used to be,” he said simply. “We’re in a dry cycle. And I don’t mean only the last few decades or generations. A hundred thousand years ago, if we looked over the Basin and Range country, we would have seen water, not sagebrush.”

At first she thought Rio was joking. A look at his face told her that he wasn’t. He was watching the land with eyes that saw through the surface of reality to the shifting forces beneath—shaman’s eyes, darker than twilight, as hypnotic as his voice sinking into her, wrapping her in visions of an earth she had never dreamed.

“A lot of little lakes and two big ones covered this land,” he said. “One of the lakes was nearly nine thousand square miles of water. The other was twenty thousand square miles.” As though he was remembering, his eyes looked inward. “They were deep lakes. Hundreds of feet deep. They filled the rift in the land where the crust was being pulled apart.”

“How? Was there really that much more rain back then?”

“Partly it was more rain. Mostly it was runoff and meltwater from the Sierras. The mountains got a lot more rain and snow then. Rivers that only run part of the time now were a year-round torrent racing down to fill the crustal rift.”

“What about evaporation? Why didn’t the runoff lakes dry up then the way they do now?”

“It wasn’t as hot, which meant less evaporation. The water that came to the Great Basin stayed and created lakes. Men lived along the lakes, fished there, explored island mountain peaks covered with pines and glaciers, hunted animals that are now extinct, and saw vast fields of wildflowers bloom.”

Hope listened without moving, enthralled by the words and the man who spoke them. While Rio talked she saw her land change before her eyes—and she saw him change, too. His country drawl was overlaid with words and phrases and concepts that should have been utterly alien to a drifting cowhand.

“But the last ice age ended, the weather warmed, and rivers stopped running year-round,” he said. “Less moisture to evaporate. Less moisture to gentle the climate. More evaporation and then more, until the rains couldn’t keep up.” His voice was low, intense, seeing today’s drought foreshadowed in the climatic shifts of fifteen thousand years ago. “The vast lakes began to evaporate. They shrank and shrank and shrank until nothing is left today but what we call Great Salt Lake and Pyramid Lake on the California-Nevada border.”