I’ll take care of this here and now. No one ever has to know . . . WINTER followed him down from Utah’s Marka gunt Plateau. Neil’s breath came in clouds of white as the temperature dipped down for the night, ending a sunny day of painfully blue sky for the crisp middle-desert night of brilliant stars and familiar constellations. The chill itself he didn’t mind. The unseasonable clouds moving in from the west . . . those could pose a problem. Cold rain to chill his bones, sicken his animals, and rile the already furious river. Cold rain to trap them east of the crossing, vulnerable to wolves, to coyotes . . . to the pieds. All of them, bound together in modern times by an age-old pastoral system. Neil, his two sturdy little tolting ponies, his gelding guard llama, and most of all, the five hundred sensible Churras under his charge. As sensible as sheep ever got, anyway. Even personable, some of them. Neil had his favorites; all the partido herders did. With nearly five hundred ewes and another fifteen rams to service them, any herder picked out a few individuals for special attention.
