He looked at Henry and the expression on his face. First the relief, then the complicated aftermath of relief that always looked a little like anger, but wasn't quite anger, made Miriam understand something she hadn't fully understood before, about what it cost a person to care about children that weren't their own. She looked at him. He looked at her. "He's fine, " she said.
Bramwell nodded once. He dismounted slowly, like he needed a moment to put himself back together and ran a hand over Henry's hair as Miriam carried him past. "You scared us, bud, " Bramwell said quietly. Henry lifted his face from Miriam's shoulder. "I saw a hawk, " he said by way of explanation.
"A hawk, " Bramwell said. "A big one. " "August says that kind eat rabbits. " "I was watching where it was going in case I could find where the rabbits are. " Bramwell looked at the boy.
August told you about rabbits. He said if we found where they were, we could trap them and have rabbit stew. Henry looked thoughtful. I like rabbit stew. Something shifted in Bramwell's face.
Not quite a smile, but the thing underneath a smile, the thing that causes it. Let's go inside, he said. I'll tell you what I know about where hawks go. Henry's face lit up. He reached out one small hand toward Bramwell.
Bramwell took it, and the three of them walked back toward the house through the snow, and Miriam told herself that what she was feeling was simple gratitude and straightforward relief, and she was only partially lying. It was December now, and the isolation of deep Montana winter had settled over Red Spur like a second roof, one made of weather and distance, and the particular quality of long, dark evenings with nowhere to go. They were snowbound, not constantly, but enough. Enough that the rhythms of the ranch drew inward, and the space of the house became the whole world for days at a time. Miriam had expected this to make things difficult, the way it had always made things difficult in their old homestead, where being snowbound with Orson had meant being locked in with his grievances and his failures, and the particular cold silence he'd developed for periods when he felt wronged by circumstances.
Being snowbound had always felt like a door closing. At Red Spur, it didn't feel like that. It felt, if anything, like a door opening to a room she hadn't known was there. The evenings changed first. The children had always done their schoolwork in the hour before bed.
Miriam insisted on this regardless of where they were or what the day had been. But at Red Spur they began doing it at the large kitchen table, and Bramwell began appearing at the table, too. Not interrupting, not making it about himself, just present. Once he answered a question, Samuel put Miriam about land measurement because he happened to know the answer and had practical examples from the ranch. And Samuel's face had lit up in the way it did when abstract things became concrete.