He saw that she understood. Not just the instruction, but the layer under it, the fact of Croft somewhere in Harlow Creek and the letter and all the rest of it. He went out. The cold hit him like a wall of something solid. The wind had a direction to it that was almost physical, coming hard out of the northwest and taking everything it could carry with it.
Snow and ice crystals and a temperature that was somewhere well below zero and still dropping. He got to the barn, got the mayor saddled, and rode out of the yard into the white. He knew this land in the dark. He'd ridden every foot of it in every kind of weather for 12 years. He kept the mayor moving at a walk and trusted his memory of the ground, reading the grade under him in the shape of the fence line when it briefly appeared.
The visibility was down to almost nothing now. He could see maybe 10 ft in front of him before the snow erased everything. The wind made it hard to breathe, the kind of cold that turned the air into something wrong, something the lungs resisted. He found the north field gate by feel more than sight. He got it open and rode through and called for the bull, which was not a thing you wanted to do.
Bulls didn't come to their names the way dogs did, but you did it anyway because sometimes they moved toward the sound. He rode in a widening arc, trying to cover ground without losing his orientation. The darkness and the snow made the world in every direction identical. He kept track of where he was by counting strides and maintaining the angle to the wind. He found the bull huddled against the north fence, which was the wrong corner.
It had moved away from the barn instead of toward it. He got a rope on it without being kicked, which was borderline miraculous, and started the slow, careful work of moving a large, obstinate animal through a blizzard in the dark. The mayor was doing well. She didn't like it, but she was steady under him, and she trusted him enough to keep moving, which was the thing that mattered. He had the rope looped over the saddle horn, and the bull coming sullen and slow behind them, and he was turning the mayor toward the gate when the footing changed.
He felt it before he understood it. The mayor's stride going wrong, a hesitation, the ground doing something unexpected beneath her. He'd ridden over this section of field a 100 times, but the freeze cycle had done something to it. Heaved a section of it in a way it hadn't been heaved before, and the mayor's left for leg went down into a drop he hadn't expected. And then she was going sideways, and he had a half second to make the choice between staying with her and going clear.
He went clear. He was already leaning right as she went and he pushed off and hit the ground hard on his right shoulder and rolled and the cold of the ground came up through his coat instantly. Absolute cold, the kind that moved inside you before you'd finished registering it. The rope pulled out of his hand. He heard the bull lumber away into the dark.