Free Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss

which was about as far as my blisters would carry me. By that time, I had pretty much decided to quit the whole movie-cowboy enterprise. I would muck out stalls if I had to, just long enough to get the money for a bus ticket back to Klamath County. And what bumped me off this plan was Harold Capsen, who owned Diamond Barns. Harold was the first person I worked for in the movie business, and I want to say right here that he was also the best.
    I came around a turn in the road to find a bunch of corrals and sheds spread out under the trees. From twenty yards off I could see that the fellow leaning on the rails looking over some horses was wearing a hat with a Montana crease in the high crown, an honest-to-god Stetson that had already stood up to some weather; his boot resting on the lower rail was the sort my dad always wore, scuffed brown leather with a worn, steep-cut heel that had been resoled a few times.
    A black mutt was lying down on the straw right under the horses, his chin on his front paws, as if he and the horses had come to an understanding of peaceful cohabitation. When he saw me he hoisted himself off the straw and came up the road to meet me. He didn’t bark, which I thought was a bad sign—I stood where I was, deciding if it was time to get out of range of his teeth—but he’d been taught that barking riled up the horses, that’s all it was.
    The man standing at the corral took a look over his shoulder and saw me coming, but then he went back to studying the horses. I spoke to the dog before he got all the way up to me, told him he was an ugly son of a gun and too stupid to find his own way home, and he studied my face and the tone of my voice before he walked up to my hand and let me touch him around the ears. He wasn’t a pup, he had some gray around his muzzle.
    I walked on toward the man and leaned on the rails next to him. The dog followed me, then went ahead into the corral and wandered amidst the legs of the horses. He waved his tail slightly as he let various horses snuffle him thoroughly. I learned later that he had a bed of feed sacks in a corner of the tack barn. I guess he must have slept on them, because there was always shed fur and a dent in the folded-up sacks in the morning, but when we went out to the corrals he was always there ahead of us, hanging around the horses before the sun was up. No one knew what his history was, because he’d been a stray before he found his way to Diamond. Harold figured he had grown up around horses and was pleased to find himself among them again.
    There were about a dozen horses in that corral, a few of them big draft horses, most of them various shades of brown, and they stood around in pairs, head to tail, engaged in the serious late-afternoon business of swishing flies. They’d eaten up the morning’s hay pretty thoroughly, but a chestnut with a long head snuffled through stray bits of chaff, looking for morsels. The corrals and barns at Diamond didn’t look a bit different from all the corrals and barns I’d been around, and the horses standing in them were no fancier than the horses Mary Claudine and I used to ride to school when we lived on Echol Creek. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but this was a mild surprise and a relief to me.
    The fellow under the Stetson hat, who looked to be about fifty years old, said, without turning his head, “You ought to get off those feet before they get so swolled up you have to cut them boots off.”
    I had been thinking I’d done a good job of walking the last few yards without a gimp, but I guess not. My face got warm, as if he’d caught me doing something shameful.
    He glanced down. “Those are good boots, but they was meant for hooking into a stirrup, not walking around Gower Gulch.”
    I was somewhat testy, so when I said “Yessir, I know that,” I imagine he heard a small note of indignation.
    After another minute he said,