"She's standing."
"That is not the same as sound."
Nathan climbed down from the wagon.
He walked over to the animal, slow enough not to spook her, and watched her take three steps.
Then he crouched beside her.
Hannah stayed where she was.
A minute later, Nathan straightened.
"Stone wedged in the hoof."
"I know."
He looked back toward the wagon.
"You enjoy that, being right?"
"Yes, very much."
He shook his head, but she saw the corner of his mouth move.
That became their rhythm.
Days passed, then weeks.
Hannah learned Black Pine from paper first, then from the ground.
She rode fence with Ben Shaw when a tally did not match the books.
She watched calves move through the lower pasture and compared earmarks against Nathan's notes.
She learned which hands counted carefully and which guessed.
She discovered that Nathan remembered almost every animal on the ranch, but could not remember whether he had paid a freight charge 2 months earlier.
He learned that Hannah could look at a page of numbers for 10 minutes and find the one figure that did not belong.
They argued constantly.
"You don't need three written counts for one herd," Nathan told her one evening.
"I do if three men counted it."
"They know cattle."
"They also know whiskey."
Nathan looked toward the bunkhouse.
"That's not fair."
"It's accurate."
Another night, he complained that she kept too many receipts.
"You keep a receipt until the ink fades."
"I keep it until the debt is dead."
"That could be 10 years."
"More than 10 years."
He stared at her.
"You planning to fill the whole house with paper?"
"Only the parts you aren't using."
That one made him laugh.
A real laugh, short and rough.
Hannah stopped turning a page.
Nathan stopped, too.
For half a second, they looked at each other across the table.
Then both went back to what they were doing.
Supper changed next.
At first, they ate quietly.
Then Nathan started asking what she had found.
Hannah started asking why certain herds were moved when they were.
Soon they were still sitting at the table after the plates had gone cold.
One night, wind pushed snow against the windows in dry little bursts.
Nathan was mending a leather strap.
Hannah had been studying a series of old cattle transfers.
"You never wrote down what happened at Mill Creek," she said.
His hand stopped.
"What do you mean?"
"Three years ago, spring. Your herd numbers drop all at once."
Nathan set the strap down.
For a moment, she thought he would tell her it was none of her business.
Instead, he stared into his coffee.
"My brother died that spring."
Hannah said nothing.
The stove clicked softly.
Nathan's thumb rubbed once over a crack in the mug.
"Jacob was younger. Twenty-six."
He paused.
"Creek was up. Snowmelt came fast that year. We had cattle stranded across it."
Hannah waited.
"I told him to ride over."
His voice had gone flat.
"Said the crossing would hold."
He looked toward the dark window.
"It didn't."
Hannah lowered her eyes.
"I'm sorry."
Nathan nodded once.
"After that, I stopped counting on people."
She looked back at him.
"That why you count on work?"
His jaw moved.
"Work does what it's told."
"Sometimes."
He glanced at her.
"Numbers don't."
That surprised a small smile out of her.