Free The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss Page A

around a spring and then the house, which was not much more than a milled-lumber cabin with small windows and a sheet-metal roof and a sketchy little front porch. There was a shed and a chicken house but no horses in sight and no proper barn.
    In the past fifteen or so years a late homesteading boom had hit everywhere in the West, with more people trying to homestead in the new century than had tried it in the old. And the rush of latecomers grabbing the last pieces of free land happened to coincide, in Elwha County, with the railroad being put through, which meant that for a while just about every section of land in the valley was individually claimed and had a house sitting on it—benighted homesteaders who thought they could make a living from a piece of dry land and a scant twelve or fourteen inches of yearly rain.
    The county never suffered the range wars between sheepmen and cattle ranchers written about in the six-shooter Western novels; the steep slopes along Owl Creek naturally lent themselves to sheep, and everybody back then was pretty satisfied with the division. But there was trouble of a sort between the longtime cattlemen and the newcomer farmers. The good farm land had all gone in 160-acre chunks twenty and thirty years before. The homestead acts passed in later days were giveaways of 320- and 640-acre parcels of the dry grassland that Elwha County had a lot of, land without much timber and without the means to irrigate—open range that the old-time ranchers had always been free to run their cattle on. The idea
was that the newcomers would take up ranching, but people figured out pretty quickly that you couldn't make a living off the cattle you could grow on 640 acres of dry grass, so of course the newcomers fenced it off and set out to plow and grow crops. In the valley of the Little Bird Woman River, it wasn't quite a war between the old-timers and the newcomers, but a good deal of resentment and squabbling went back and forth. Fences sagged, broke, got leaned on, and range bulls got into fields with dairy cows; every so often a range bull would turn up dead in mysterious circumstances. When a farmer dammed a creek to force the water into his garden and fields, sometimes that dam got knocked out by steers ranging loose and driving through.
    This kind of thing didn't last long, because most of the settlers coming late to the game didn't have the cash or other means to get through a dry summer or a deep winter, and most were laying claim to land that couldn't be made to support a crop or pasture dairy cows unless the rain cooperated, which it seldom did. By the war years, a good many of those homesteaders had already given up and moved out, and by the end of the war only ten or fifteen of them would still be farming in the valley out of the nearly two hundred that had been there in 1910 when things were at the peak; the federal land banks and private mortgage companies that had been so free with money for stock, farm equipment, and houses during the boom years would be left holding title to land that was mostly barren through overtilling, land where nothing much would now grow but scrub juniper and weeds. By the 1920s most of the valley would be back to the way it had been before the century's turn: sheep ranging the canyons and lower gorge of Owl Creek at the western end of the county; cattle running over the eastern parts from Graves Creek clear across the valley bottom to
Burnt Creek; and a few wheat farms along the well-watered valley bottoms.
    But as it happened, the war years were wetter than usual, wheat and cattle prices were high, and any of the dry-land homesteaders who hadn't already given up the fight took this as a sign they could make a living off their little claims, and they settled in for the duration. A couple of the people who hired Martha Lessen to break horses for them in November of 1917 were homesteaders holding tight to their dreams.
    The woman who came over from the chicken