Not the restlessness of a young man, which settles on its own if a person is patient enough, but something deeper. Something that in Boon's case had been unsettled for a long time without him having a clear name for what would settle it. He didn't try to name it now. He simply noticed on a morning in early spring when the light was coming over the eastern ridge, and Cheese was telling August about something that had apparently happened to a rabbit the day before, that the road south did not call to him the way it used to. He thought about the morning when he had stood in the heat with 200 cattle around him and made a choice that nobody would have known about if he had made it the other way.
He thought about how small that moment had seemed at the time. One man and a tired horse and a decision in the middle of nothing. He thought about what it had become. It is a thing that is easy to say and harder to fully believe that the choices made in empty places when no one is watching are the ones that build something. But he had watched this particular truth prove itself out across 8 months and a legal challenge and a Saturday morning when 11 riders had stopped at the edge of a valley and looked around and found that they had underestimated the width of the thing they were riding toward.
He had brought 200 cattle home because they weren't his. That was all. That was the beginning of everything. And what had met him at the other end of that simple, honest act, not reward in the transactional sense, not payment or recognition or anything that could be put in a pocket was something he was still quietly working out how to describe. Grey Elk put it in a way Boon liked.
One evening near the end of that first winter, sitting with the fire low between them and the cold pressing at the cabin walls. He said it in Apache first and Yuma translated it and Boon sat with the translation for a long time afterward. He says Yuma told him that the land keeps track of things, not the way a ledger keeps track in numbers, the way a river keeps track, by what it carries, by what it gives back. Boon nodded slowly. Outside the prairie stretched away in all directions under a sky that had stars in it from one edge to the other, so many that it was hard to remember where any of them had started.
Inside the fire crackled once and settled. August moved in the corral. From somewhere in the direction of the camp, Chase was explaining something to someone with great conviction, even at this late hour. Boon thought about a tired horse and a Tuesday morning and a choice made in the middle of nobody watching. And he thought, ""Yes, that sounds about right."