But there was no vehicle on the road.
Instead, a liquid herd of twenty pronghorn antelope slid in an undulating line up a hillside to the right of the gate. They’d obviously passed through and triggered the alarm. The herd trailed a spoor of dust as they ran.
“All clear,” he said.
“I thought it might be Sheridan,” Liv said. “She’s coming this morning, right?”
“Yes.”
Sheridan Pickett was Yarak, Inc.’s lone full-time employee, Nate’s apprentice in falconry, and Joe’s oldest daughter. She had been with them for nearly a year.
“Are you sure you want to get her involved in all of this?” Liv asked Nate. “I mean, everything?”
“I do,” he said. “She’s really coming along. She’s smart and she has bird-sense. It’s time she learned every aspect of the job.”
“I worry about her,” Liv said, bouncing Kestrel on her hip while pouring a cup of coffee.
“What about?”
“Put aside the fact that she’s your best friend’s daughter,” Liv said. “I get worried that she’s isolated out here and on her own. I know she used to have a pretty steady boyfriend back on that ranch she worked at, but pickings are pretty slim in these parts. I think about her all by herself in that little cabin, with no friends or social circle. Women need people, Nate. Even if you don’t.”
“I’ve never heard her complain,” he said.
“It’s not something she’d bring up to you. You aren’t exactly a sympathetic ear.”
“I thought I was,” he said.
Liv laughed and smiled at him. “Don’t forget she’s a twenty-four-year-old single girl who has barely seen the world. She may want a lot more in her life than a bunch of falcons to take care of.”
Nate didn’t know how to respond.
“My question is,” Liv continued, “are we holding her back? Is she staying with us because she feels obligated, because all of the things you and Joe have been through together? I don’t want her to get to a point where she resents us.”
“I don’t either,” he said.
“And when you say she has a lot more to learn, I hope you’re talking about falconry in particular and the business in general. You’re not having, you know, philosophical discussions with her, are you?”
“What’s wrong with my philosophy?” he asked.
“In the past it got a lot of people killed,” Liv said, deadpan. “Sheridan doesn’t need to know what led to all that . . . mayhem.”
“If it weren’t for that, I never would have met you,” Nate said.
“No,” Liv said, waving a finger back and forth, but unable to completely stifle her grin. “You don’t want to go there with me right now.”
“Even though it’s true,” he said.
As he did, the trespass alert chimed again. Nate turned back to the window.
“Here she comes now.”
* * *
—
Once you get cocky about rock climbing,” Nate had lectured Sheridan, “your chances of doing something sloppy or stupid go way up. That’s how you fall and die, and then I have to find another apprentice falconer.”
His bedside manner left a lot to be desired, she’d thought at the time, but his words stuck with her.
Nate had been an important player in Sheridan’s life—and her family’s—since she was ten years old. He’d always simply been around—despite long absences that were whispered about by her parents and kept from their daughters, and then showing up at odd times. But when he did show up, he was larger than life and he filled the room with a kind of smoldering charisma that she’d never encountered in a man before.
Nate was a self-described “outlaw falconer” with a Special Forces background. He was proficient with large-caliber five-shot revolvers, especially the .454 Casull and the .500 Wyoming Express, both manufactured by Freedom Arms in Freedom, Wyoming. He was also a master falconer, and that had captured Sheridan’s imagination to a greater degree than his shadowy past or weaponry.
She could recall the first time, in her early teens, when she’d accompanied him to a small series of willow-choked beaver ponds in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. After releasing his peregrine to the sky, he’d waded into one of the ponds, gathering up paddling ducks who were too scared to go airborne. She’d never seen anything like it and it had opened her eyes to a natural order of things she thought long bypassed by the twenty-first century. And it had made her want to become a falconer herself.
Over the years, despite both of their individual journeys, they’d tracked each other. He’d presented her with a tiny kestrel and taught her how to feed, nurture, and fly the smallest of falcons. When it had flown away and never come back, he took her aside and explained that it happened to the best of them. A falconer could “train” a bird to always return, but only at the cost of breaking its wild and predatory instincts. It was better to watch a bird fly away than to turn it into a parakeet. It was a hard lesson.
Nate’s relationship with her dad was contentious, yet devoted. It was also very complicated, since her father operated by the letter of the law and Nate operated under his own. She knew they’d had serious disagreements, and she’d witnessed some of them. It was only after she’d gotten older, after graduating from college, working as the head wrangler on an exclusive dude ranch, and returning back to Twelve Sleep County, that she’d realized in a moment of revelation that the bond between her dad and Nate was very much like the bond between Nate and his falcons.
That bond was deep, but predicated on achieving the same goal in the end. With a falcon, it was delivering its next meal. With her dad, it was achieving an end, even if he didn’t necessarily approve of every step taken to get there.
Her mother’s relationship with Nate was even more complicated. Sheridan couldn’t help but notice how her mother lit up when Nate came into the room. Despite some of the crimes Nate had been accused of—several of which Sheridan had no doubt he’d committed—her mother was absolutely loyal to the falconer. She’d once overheard her mother telling her best friend after one too many glasses of wine that if anything ever happened to Joe she’d know where to turn. Sheridan tried hard not to think about that very much.
And, of course, Nate had found Olivia Brannan.
* * *
—
For the past year, Sheridan had shadowed Nate on bird abatement calls throughout Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and South Dakota. She’d also spent the long winter reading through Nate’s library of ancient Scottish falconry tomes and modern techniques. It was her job to feed Yarak’s Air Force, which consisted of nine mature falcons and two “trainers.” Feeding them was easy because they were voracious, but keeping a supply of their food—pigeons, rabbits, mice, gophers, sometimes ducks—was an elemental and bloody business. She’d finally learned to think of prey species as exactly that, although she still found herself turning away when a bird ripped a living creature limb from limb and ate everything: bones, hide, guts, and head.