Free Breakaway (A Gail McCarthy Mystery) by Laura Crum Page A

liked best about the little horse was his willing and cooperative nature. Eventually a gap opened up and we crossed the road, Plumber stepping confidently across the pavement. I smiled to myself, recalling the first time I had crossed this street on Gunner; my older horse had balked and refused to step over the white line, seeming to regard it as some sort of terrifying obstacle. But Gunner was a spook-not so Plumber.
    Winding our way up the trail on the other side of the road, I thought about my two horses. How individual they were, in their reactions and temperament. And yet there was a basic sameness, that prey-animal mentality that differentiates horses from companion animals such as cats and dogs. Despite its size and apparent strength, a horse is always something small and vulnerable inside; its first reaction is flight rather than fight.
    Hills rolled away on both sides of us, slopes of wild oats bleached gold in the fitful June sunshine. Clumps of tangled brush-greasewood, manzanita, sage, blackberry-broke up the grassland. Everywhere was the movement and scurry of the wild things, going about their business.
    Quail scuttled along the ground, clucking to each other, cottontail rabbits sat up to listen and hopped away. A lizard ran up a nearby fence post. Louder crackling in a patch of dense brush fifty yards away was probably deer, though I couldn't see them. Plumber cocked his ears, unperturbed. He was used to deer.
    These brushy California coastal hills were alive with wild animals; since I had moved out here, I had seen more varmints, up close and personal, than ever before in my life. A raccoon broke into the cat food bin almost every night; a bobcat had taken one of Jack's previous two wives right in front of me; a red-tailed hawk had gotten the other. Roey had twice been thoroughly skunked, and a big six-point buck regularly pruned most of my rosebushes.
    Living in the brush meant living with wild animals-a joy and a trial. I was vexed with the deer's habit of preferring rosebuds to all other vegetation, and I wept over the two little hens; still, there was nothing like the sight of a gray fox sky-lined on the ridge, staring down at me with that peculiar intense stillness in its eyes. Or the time a coyote had parked itself under an oak and watched me ride my horse for half an hour. Or the day I had seen two Cooper's hawks mating in the top of a Monterey pine at dawn.
    On and on it went, with every day full of these interactions, bright and sad, this endless dialogue with nature. I watched the sunlight on the shining wild grass, saw a red tree squirrel pick its way from oak top to oak top, following a highway I would never know. Plumber's ears moved forward and back, forward and back, as he walked along the trail.
    Now the ground was growing steeper; we entered a grove of redwoods, the terrain instantly and dramatically different. Deep shade under the trees, a chill in the air, ferns clustered on the bank above the trail. It was quiet here, almost hushed, compared to the life and motion of the brush country.
    Plumber walked; I let my gaze drift. An occasional shaft of sunlight slanted through the shadows under the trees. The air had a rich, loamy smell. The trail wound through the forest, leading upward. I knew where we were, and where we were headed. Upward, ever upward, toward the ridge.
    I could see light through the trees; in a minute we emerged from the forest into more open country. Grass and brush, scattered clumps of madrone and oak. We were fairly high now-a tapestry of hills, like a cloth tossed down into folds, lay on all sides of us.
    Rolling, gentle hills, the golden-eyed California Coast Range. Not steep and severe and dramatic, not intense as the Sierra Nevada Mountains were. No, this country was different, these brushy, brambly curves a complete contrast to the sharp silver granite edges of the mountain range where I'd spent my last vacation.
    The Sierra Nevada-the range of light. I thought