Horsepeople

Chapter One

Joanna King looked out over the valley, holding Cricket's reins in her hands. The horse's nostrils flared with each breath after carrying Joanna up the hill at a canter. Sweat glistened on her shoulders and neck. Her daily rides with Cricket were something Jo had taken to doing most mornings after tending the other animals. Beside her was a stone cairn; smooth rocks piled high on the windswept hill.

Cricket was a rich chocolate brown with a white diamond-shaped star on her forehead. Her blonde forelock often fell across large, kind eyes, full of a fierce loyalty unique to mares. She was the first horse Jo had ever trained, under the guidance of her grandfather, and she didn't think any other horse would ever know her so well. Patting the little mare, more heart than height, Jo faced the cairn. A small wooden cross was pounded into the unforgiving ground, his name scratched across it. John King.

"Mornin' Grandpa," she said. "Beautiful today. No wind. Can you believe it?" She sighed and shifted her gaze to the sprawling farmland below. She was running out of important things to say to him. Neither of them was much for small talk.

A wedge of prairie separated the Southern Alberta Rocky Mountains from their foothills, called the Porcupine Hills, which hinged from the Livingstone Range and jutted up incongruously from the prairies. Atop a hill on the southern reaches of the Porcupine Hills, Jo could look out over the vast flat land that lay to the east of the Rockies. She could see the dammed up Oldman River directly south of her, glittering in the early fall sun. Windmills towered up from the fields, motionless on a calm day.

"Eagle misses you," she told him, "the bees too. Get stung every time. Not sure about them chickens though."

She smiled in his stead and could almost hear the wheezing laugh that would have turned into a cough. "Foals are looking good. Wean them in another month or so, I reckon.

"Harvest soon too. Looks like it'll be a good crop, if the weather holds. Plenty of extra. I guess the animals will like that."

Though not hers, the crops on the land below were ready for harvest as well. It had been a dry summer, as was now the norm, and the corporation's irrigated crops were overdue. However, not a single combine could be seen at work from her lookout. Some sat unmoving on the edge of fields, the remote-controlled million-dollar machinery no more than ornamental.

"Quiet today, Grandpa," she continued, "AgCorp isn't harvesting today. Don't know why; it's a good day." Her callused hands played with Cricket's supple leather reins.

In fact, Jo couldn't see any vehicles at all on the roadways that scarred across the prairie. Traversing one of only three major mountain passes, Highway 3 ran parallel to the reservoir, across southern Alberta, and was usually thronged with vehicles during the busy summer months. Usually.

Usually, Jo could hear the hums and whizzes of travel on a clear day. But no sounds reached her.

No wind.

"Quiet today, Grandpa," she repeated, holding her breath against the vast soundlessness. There was something strange about it today, something too quiet. She cleared her throat, "Haven't been blacksmithing much lately. No need, I suppose.

"Lille's looking good though. I think I'll start wiring her in, get some electricity and central heating in her." Her joke fell flat and she shuffled to ignore his absence.

She had always teased her grandfather about modernizing the frontier village, never serious, and she missed his stern rebuke of "We keep the old ways alive." If she didn't agree right away, he would rant on: "Now more than ever," he would say, "in this technology world, we are the living memory and don't you forget it." But Jo was finding it harder by the day to feel alive at Sweetwater Ranch and not another one of its memories.