The kids, enjoying the last of the afternoon sun.
We await winter and languish in the relatively balmy days of sun strong enough still to melt the snow in spots where it penetrates the pending season, our paths around the ranch and through the woods, grass along the hillsides where the elk have pawed or bedded, the arbitrary tracks of the coyote, where the horses have tromped about the hay shed, the south side of our cabin. The mountain appears as a patchwork quilt with bright white snow alternating with rich, dark, moist soil and pale dried grasses waving golden in the mid day sun. It is different every day yet so similar every year. We wait for the unavoidable, the absolute white which swathes the mountain and closes the road and shuts down a part with us. Like wild animals, we retreat to a season of dormancy, we do not fight the inevitable, my soul recoils to a natural hibernation while my body keeps on keeping on, perhaps only a little slower beneath the many heavy layers.
With each storm, anticipation builds, and expectations sprout up with the first forecasts. We should know better by now, but we look for what we want to find. And more often then not, what we get is sun. This makes it hard to complain.
The last storm passed us by gently. The air cleared with the usual frigid blast. Seven below zero on the first morning, the willows laced with heavy hoarfrost and the new snow sparkling and light and loose.
The air is warmer yesterday. There is a temperate release, like a relaxed sigh, a lack of tension about the mountain. The fear and urgency which accompanies the severe cold was gone. We walk comfortably and stir up a bunch of cow and calf elk that raise their heads and watch us. I am certain they somehow know hunting season is over. They move off silently and secretly, sifting into the monotone woods of naked aspen. They do not run.
I work in the yard in a t-shirt. No jacket. No hat. Not even gloves. The horses roll in the snow to cool off with their coats thick and fuzzy and ready for the cold. That will come. For now, today, they are relaxed. You can feel it. I work out in the paddock there near them. They come over. They can not help themselves, all of them, especially the kids. A magnetism grown from millennia of domestication and dependency perhaps. Or perhaps because we are alone here together again. The kids, Beka named them, three horses in one. The yearling Bayjura has her nose on everything. Even the drill as I use it to set another screw. There is little she will be frightened of for long when she begins to work on the trail with me next year. She has a comfort and confidence about her that I respect and admire.
I wipe off the mud she has smeared on the drill and finish my work around her. We look to the west and judge time by the lowering of the sun, the shrinking distance between the sun and the silhouette of Indian Ridge. I estimate but a half hour left before the sun drops behind and takes with her the comfort and warmth of the day.
