Free The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss

rough racket of the motor, "Mr. Bliss, thank you for saying those kind things about me." She had devoted the last many minutes to finding her tongue but the words that came out now were a disappointment to her—too few and too common.
    George, without taking his eyes off the rutted road, shouted back mildly, "I guess if you make a mess of things, I'll just have to pack up and move to another part of the country."
    When Louise said, "Oh for goodness' sake, George," Martha understood that he was teasing her again.

7
    S HE HAD THOUGHT George Bliss might go with her on Monday morning when she rode out to take a look at the horses she'd been hired to break, as they were scattered across six other ranches and farms around the valley and she didn't know how to get to any of them. But what happened is that George sat down at the breakfast table and drew up a little pencil map and gave it to her.
    Any map of Elwha County would have to show the Whitehorn Mountains and the Clarks Range taking up the lion's share, with the Little Bird Woman River carving a valley through the middle roughly twenty miles long, seven or eight or nine miles wide, where most of the people had settled and where the towns had grown up. In those days there were just two roads through the valley, one that came up through Lewis Pass, turned to follow the river west through the three valley towns, and petered out in the steep gorge at the far west end—the Owl Creek Canyon, which was home to a few dozen families of sheep growers—and the one Martha Lessen had come in on, which more or less followed the rail spur through Ipsoot Pass from Pendleton and along Graves Creek to intersect the
east-west road at Shelby. But dozens of rutted tracks forked off from the roads and wandered up to dozens of ranches and half a hundred little farm claims.
    George's map was not much to look at: just a few squiggles standing in for the bigger creeks and the river, straight thick lines for the two roads that bisected the county, and pointy triangles for the mountain ranges. He had printed the names of the six families who wanted horses broken at roughly the places where their properties lay, with an
x
to mark his guess as to where each farmhouse or ranch house stood, but he had not tried to draw in the ranch lanes or name any of the streams or mark distances.
    "You think you can find them places?" George said to her while he was putting on his chaps and hat, and she looked up from studying the map and said, "Yes sir, I'll find them," since there didn't seem to be any other answer she could make.
    She rode out on her own horse, the liver chestnut she called T.M., which meant Trouble Maker and which was his name because if Martha let him stand in pasture for very long he forgot every bit of his manners and what he'd learned about being a good horse and he got fractious and full of himself. She set him on the Graves Creek road, which in most places was not much more than a pair of beaten ruts running alongside the creek and the rail spur, veering out here and there around stands of bitterbrush or marshy swales. The little bit of snow that had fallen on Saturday night had melted right off by Sunday afternoon, and the road was muddy enough that there were no automobiles venturing out; Martha kept to the center of the road between the ruts, where the beaten-down weeds made less trouble for the horse to get through.
    Romer,
George had written on the map at what she judged to be the nearest place to the Blisses, maybe a mile or so south of Dewey Creek and a half mile or so west of the Graves Creek
road. These were evidently people Martha had talked to, but she couldn't connect any of the names on the map to the faces of people she had met after church on Sunday.
    About the time she started to worry that she'd missed the turn, a faint track bent left off the road and she set the horse on it. She first saw the little brown pond where they'd evidently cleared willow and sage from