Free The Farmer's Daughter by Jim Harrison Page A

but he hadn’t noticed Sarah and apologized. Sarah was reading Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy at lunch and pretended she hadn’t heard him to save him from embarrassment. It was clear to her on the plane that Karl wasn’t the only animalistic man and obviously there were women taking part. Suddenly she questioned whether shooting Karl would make things even but after a pause thought that it would.
    After a brief layover and changing planes to a bigger jet in Salt Lake City, Sarah was thinking that though there was a lot of anti-Mormon prejudice in the West they certainly lived in a grand place. One day in the future she hoped to ride Lad around in the Escalante area of southern Utah. After only a couple of hours of her trip everything seemed brand-new and she was forgetting where she was from. Montana might be huge but it was also confining. Now, finally, the world was opening its windows for her. She had memorized an Emily Dickinson sentence that was au point, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” When her family had come west five and a half years before and crossing South Dakota she had looked over her father’s shoulder and had seen the dark, immense shapes of the Black Hills in the distance she had decided not to believe her eyes. To a flatlander from Ohio the first mountains are mentally not quite acceptable.
    Now in the Tucson airport with her aunt Rebecca approaching she was back in a slow-motion dreamscape. Rebecca shook her hand and hugged her and looked down at Sarah’s hands which were calloused and there was a raw spot from a rope burn she got from helping Marcia pull a calf.
    â€œYou’ve been working, I see,” Rebecca laughed.
    â€œWell, I work in the garden, split wood, and the other day we pulled a difficult calf.” Sarah was embarrassed because Rebecca’s hands were soft and smooth compared to her own which were the hands of a workingman. They’d had to pull hard or they would have lost both cow and calf and when the calf came out suddenly she and Marcia had fallen backward. It all reminded her of mouthy Terry saying that nearly everyone in their area except the big ranch owners were actually peasants in the old European sense. They weren’t called peasants because it was a democracy but that was what most locals were.
    Rebecca had a four-wheel drive with the same name as Sarah’s dog and explained she needed it to get up the steep grade to Kitts Peak Observatory on the occasional icy nights. They drove nearly an hour to the southeast of Tucson to the crossroads village of Sonoita. When Rebecca stopped at a corner store to get cigarettes Sarah heard two dark men in ranchwear speaking Spanish outside their pickup and decided she was in a foreign country. She didn’t know that there was a local saying that all of the territory south of Interstate 10 was mostly Mexico.
    Rebecca had a pleasant, sprawling adobe house on ten acres. There were two large Labs she called Mutt and Jeff in a kennel that were drooling nitwits when released. It took Sarah a while to comprehend the house which was built to welcome the outside rather than to keep it at bay. There was an inside, roofless patio with a fair-sized cottonwood growing in it. Sarah wandered around, then unpacked her clothes while Rebecca started dinner. The Labs sniffed her luggage and asked with looks, “Where is the girl dog?” By looking outside her bedroom and through the patio she noticed a small grand piano in a sunroom which delighted her. On the wall by the door there was a small map on which Rebecca had scrawled “you are here” pinpointing Sonoita and the surrounding mountain ranges, the Rincons to the far north, the Whetstones and Mustangs to the east, the Patagonias and the Santa Ritas to the west. To the south forty miles was all of Mexico. What a place to ride a horse, she thought.
    At dinner Rebecca made a proposal that at first