Starship lunged through the trees, bounding up and up. Billie gripped his sides with her calves and clung to his mane. Branches lashed her face while her knees and shins cracked against jutting rocks. When a huge boulder blocked their path, Starship stopped abruptly. She nearly flew over his head but wound up sitting on his neck. She wriggled back until she was once again where she should be then they started up again.
The trail ended in a cliff at the edge of a canyon. A series of thin waterfalls dribbled down the mountain face opposite, hidden to anyone not standing exactly where Billie stood. Waterfalls she hadn’t known existed until she had found them one day last summer. They fed a deep pool beaten out of the rock face, smooth-sided from eons of watery concussion. The waterfall was intermittent, running hard and fast during the monsoon and the winter storms, and the rest of the year, like now, barely trickling.
She got off, dropped the cotton lead rope she had been using as a rein, and let Starship find his own way down to the small pebbly beach. He pawed the water then lumbered in for a swim. Gulliver bounded after him.
After a quick glance around to reassure herself she truly was alone, Billie stripped off her shorts and top, considered leaving on her underwear, then pulled off her panties and bra, wrapped her phone in her shirt, and eased herself into the water. With her horse and dog, she swam, cooling off, sloughing bit by bit the jagged fear of her day at the walking horse stable.
Sitting wet and naked on a rock with Gulliver flopped beside her while Starship grazed the sparse gray grasses, Doc’s warning played over and over in her head…be careful…don’t… She thought of the way her horse had rolled earlier in the sand. The way, before rising, he had turned onto his stomach, front legs extended. It was the most natural pose for him, one she had seen thousands of times. But now it was superimposed on the memory of the horses she had seen at the show and at the farm.
She looked at Starship’s lower legs, his pasterns, trying to imagine pouring acid on them, tying him so he couldn’t move, muzzling him so he couldn’t tear off the wraps, couldn’t help himself, ignoring his anguish, leaving him to writhe.
She sank deeper into her own body. The sound of the waterfall, bird calls…
She dozed. Just for a minute, at least that’s what it felt like. She opened her eyes, listening. A faint rustling had disturbed her sleep, a sound like wind through dry grass, crumbling leaves, like air leaving a punctured tire. When she didn’t hear it again, she sat up, looked around. The rattle grew louder. Adrenaline froze her. Only her eyes moved, looking into the brush, trying to see the snake. She looked left then right. Nothing. The sound faded, but whenever she moved, it grew louder. She knew the snake could see her, but she couldn’t see it even though it was close enough that her every movement alarmed it. She tried not even to breathe.
Gulliver stood up from his nap and stretched. The rattling exploded from a clump of grass about five feet away. Startled, the little dog looked into the brush. Billie still couldn’t see the snake, but it had to be where Gulliver was looking, probably too far for it to strike her. She inched away, sharp pebbles digging into her palms, and got to her feet.
Since moving back to Arizona, she had expected fangs to sink into her, to pump their venom. She expected one day to become a statistic: “This year seventeen people were bitten by rattlesnakes,” Channel Five on Your Side would summarize. Channel 13-Live Local Late-breaking would photograph the damage, the necrotic tissue, the sloughing, her eventual survival. Today could be the day that she would finally get snakebit. While naked. Her leg would swell grotesquely. She would have to ride for help swollen and bare-assed, and she would pass out in front of astonished cowboys.
Gulliver looked again into the brush then trotted away. Knowing that he’d found a safe way out, Billie followed him. She quickly dressed and cautiously retraced her steps to the pool to get Starship.
They wound their way back through the dense mesquite bosque, dodging prickly pear, and cholla that grew between the trees, and came out the other side into a darkness so intense that, for a moment, Billie thought that night had fallen, that she had stayed too long dozing and awakened at dusk. She felt a raindrop, then another and suddenly more. In seconds, she was shivering. Starship snorted and pawed, getting ready to lie down and roll to dry himself. As suddenly as it started, the rain stopped. Clouds skimmed from west to east and, in the distance, Billie saw a single, jagged lightning bolt.
She used a rock to stand on and climbed onto Starship’s back. When she snapped her fingers to invite Gulliver aboard, the terrier jumped up in front of her, his butt against her stomach, paws straddling the gray horse’s withers and neck. They started on the long ride home. Billie wondered if she had dawdled too long, if she would get back before it was dark or if she would have to feed and water the horses under the night sky using her cell phone as a flashlight.
At the crest of a hill, she reined in and sat. Legs dangling, she ran her toes over Starship’s elbows and watched the sky, fascinated by the first summer clouds. Not yet formed into monsoon’s anvil-shaped thunderheads, these were high, dense, flat, and blackened. They covered the mesa and the valley between the mountain ranges. Syncopated lightning bolts shot from them, and horizontal bolts leapt
