Burn Out

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Marcie Galick, good friend to horses-and to me.

Bill, my first editor and best friend.

Les Pockell-your suggestions were right on.

Celia Johnson-yours, too.

I sat on the bluff’s edge, facing southeast, where a newly risen full moon cast a shimmery path over the waters of Tufa Lake. To my right, the towering peaks of Yosemite had disappeared into purple darkness. Here in the high desert the evening cooled quickly this time of year, but I’d prepared for it, appropriating a shearling jacket several sizes too big for me from the closet at the ranch house. As I’d appropriated it every night since I’d come up here from the city ten days ago.

Behind me, my husband Hy’s twenty-year-old horse, Lear Jet-an ironic name for the red dun gelding, which had never willingly picked up the pace in its life-whickered. I hadn’t ridden a horse in more than a decade. Pretty much disliked the creatures, in fact. Lear Jet was big-about fifteen hands and twelve hundred pounds-with a white star on his forehead and a white snip on his nose. He didn’t like me any more than I liked him. Every chance he got he’d lean hard on me, try to stomp my feet, bare his yellow teeth and snort.

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