Free Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mystery series) by Laura Crum

shrugged a lot. After a minute, Melissa turned away, apparently in a huff.
    The loudspeaker crackled; the first class was announced.
    "Come on," I said to Bret. "Let's go over where we can see. I want to watch these horses work."
    As we walked toward the arena, Bret asked me, "So what did you think of Mrs. Gotrocks?"
    "Mrs. Gotrocks?"
    "Old Martha. Haven't you run into her before? She's been involved with show horses in Santa Cruz County for years. She had a horse or two in training with Jay Holley when I worked for him." Bret chuckled. "She's a dandy. Scads and scads of money-she's the heiress to some kind of timber fortune-and she's tighter than a clam with it. She's been through four or five husbands; she doesn't keep them around any longer than she does horse trainers."
    "I can see why. She looked fierce. But I'm pretty sure I've never seen her before."
    Bret grinned. "She doesn't get along with vets much, either. She's probably had some kind of spat with Jim Leonard years ago, and won't use his office."
    I shrugged. "Well, it's no loss; that I can see."
    We reached the rail of the show ring and I leaned on the fence to watch the horses work, asking Bret occasional questions. A cutting, I discovered, was, generally speaking, remarkably slow watching. A herd of cattle were brought into the ring and "settled" by four horsemen-that is, the cattle were herded up against one fence and the horsemen rode around them and through them until the cattle got comfortable enough with this that they quit trying to break and run. The whole procedure took ten or fifteen minutes, after which the herd was pronounced ready to work.
    Each competitor rode into this herd in turn with two and a half minutes to show what his or her horse could do. The horses were scored between 60 and 80 by a judge who sat in a small elevated booth in the center of the ring. Every horse, Bret explained to me, started out with a 70, to which the judge added and subtracted points as need be.
    The rules for scoring were definite in some ways and ambiguous in others. If a horse let a cow get past him and back to the herd it was an automatic five points off-an easy-to-spot mistake, and lethal in terms of the score. But other things were more subtle-a "miss" meant that the horse had gotten slightly off position; a "hot quit" indicated that the rider had pulled his horse off a cow that was still trying to get by him, rather than waiting until the animal was defeated and turned away; "switching a cow" seemed to mean that while the rider was in the process of selecting one cow out of the herd for the horse to work, he first committed to one and then tried to work another. Most important, a horse could not be guided at all when he worked a cow, and the most common mistake appeared to be "bumping" the bit; a rider would stop his horse with the reins, afraid that the horse wouldn't stop with the cow on his own. All these things resulted in points being taken away from the 70 the horse started out with.
    Points were added more or less at the judge's discretion, it seemed, though Bret explained that a horse was supposed to be given credit for certain things-a high degree of difficulty in the cow, keeping the animal in the middle of the pen, separating it from the herd quietly, etc.
    I watched the horses desultorily when nothing much was going on, intensely when a horse "locked on" to a cow, and took in the whole scene meanwhile. All around us, whenever it veered from the horse that was working, the conversation between cowboy-hatted men and women was of the West Coast Futurity next week-who was going, who wasn't, who had a good horse, who didn't. Will George seemed to be favored to win once again; I wondered if it would be on the horse named Gus that Casey had started.
    When Casey and Shiloh were called, I tuned out the talk around me and concentrated on the scene in front of my eyes-a little blue roan mare walking quietly into a herd of cows. Casey guided her until they had a