He dismounted and walked among the outer edge of the herd, running his hand along flanks, checking conditions, looking at ears and hooves, and the overall state of the animals. They were in decent health, not starved, not badly injured, just foot sore and directionless. And then he found the brand. He stopped moving when he saw it and crouched down to look more carefully. It was not a brand he recognized from any of the ranches he'd worked, and he'd worked enough of them in enough territories to have a decent catalog in his memory.
It was a mark he'd only seen once before, years ago, on the edge of a reservation boundary. A design that was not the letter and number shorthand of settler ranching, but something older, more deliberate, a shape that had been applied by someone who meant it to mean something specific. Boon stood up and looked at the hills around him for a long time. He was at least 2 days ride from the nearest town. He was broke.
He was jobless. And standing around him in the August heat was somewhere between 180 and 200 head of cattle that absolutely did not belong to him and that nobody within a 50-mi radius would ever know he had found. He stood there long enough for August to get impatient and start nipping at the scrub grass beside the trail. The sun climbed, the cattle waited, and Boon Callaway made up his mind. He spent the rest of that morning moving around the full perimeter of the herd, counting properly and gathering the stragglers who had wandered into the drawers on the far side of the ridge.
The final count was 211 head, 211 animals that he was going to have to push alone through 2 days of rough country to get them back to wherever they had come from. He had enough water for himself and August to get there if he was careful. He had $3 and some jerky and a bed roll. He had done considerably more with considerably less. He pointed August north and began the drive.
If you've ever moved cattle alone, you already know what those first few hours looked like. The constant circling, the shouted correction, the small crises of two or three animals deciding simultaneously to go in opposite directions while the rest of the herd uses the distraction to drift sideways. It is work that uses every part of a man, the legs and the voice and the instincts and the patience and especially the patience. And it doesn't stop until the sun goes down and sometimes not even then. Boon worked through the first afternoon without stopping, except to water the herd at a shallow creek he found by following the draw northeast, which was the direction his reading of the landscape told him was most likely to hold water this time of year.
He was right. The cattle drank for 20 minutes while he stood watch on August, and then he pushed them north again until the light gave out. That first night, he camped at the edge of the herd, sitting against a rock with his rifle across his knees, watching the darkness for the shapes of coyotes that might test the herd's edges. He didn't sleep for more than an hour at a stretch. The stars were very bright, and the air was cold, the way desert air gets cold the minute the sun is gone, and he drank the last of his coffee cold, because he didn't want to take the time to build a proper fire.