“He doesn’t give in at all,” she says, shrugging.
“What if I tried talking to him myself?”
She snorts. “If you could find him, and if you could get him to listen, he probably still wouldn’t change his mind.”
“Find him? He’s the owner of the ranch, how hard can it be?”
She hesitates, thinking. “I know he was planning on working out of Alpha Camp for the next few days—he said as much when we spoke to him last night.”
“Alpha Camp?” I ask.
She nods. “The ranch is ten thousand acres, Brooklyn. That’s fifteen miles square, and it’s fenced off into various pastures, each of which has its own cowboy camp—a way station, you could call it, where the ranch hands can stay, take breaks, things like that, without having to ride all the way back here, which can take most of a day. Alpha Camp is the biggest one, and it’s the most central, and it’s nearly eight miles from here.”
“Well, point me in the right direction, and I’ll drive over there.”
Theo shakes her head. “No, you don’t understand. We do things the old-fashioned way. Meaning, on horseback.”
“I saw an ATV and a utility vehicle in the garage,” I point out.
“That’s for getting back and forth from here to the big barn, and to town. It’s an absolutely inviolable rule—no vehicles of any kind, even electric, in the pastures. In the history of the ranch, there has never, ever been a wheeled, mechanical vehicle on those lands—nothing beyond good old horse-drawn wagons.” She sighs. “I’ll have to go find him.”
“And when you say you’re going to go find Will…”
“I mean I’m going to saddle up a horse and ride out to Alpha Camp and see if anyone’s seen him.”
“He doesn’t have a cell phone, or a walkie-talkie?”
Theo laughs. “A cell phone. That’s funny.”
I stare at her. “I mean…not really? They have satellite phones that will work in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or at the top of a mountain, or deep under the earth in a bunker.”
“There are walkie-talkies at the camps, and there’s always at least one person in each crew who has one in case of emergency, but Will doesn’t like to be easily found. He knows where he’s needed, and that’s where he’ll be.”
“What about emergencies?”
She shrugs. “This is a ranch—there’s always an emergency. Horses foundering, mares giving birth, colts wandering off, wolves and coyotes and mountain lions getting stragglers, hands getting thrown or kicked. It’s a dangerous place, Brooklyn. What’s Will going to do? Monitor every last little thing? That ain’t his job.”
“But…he’s in charge. So yeah, it is kind of his job?”
She shakes her head. “No. His job is to run the ranch—to know the horses, to select the best stock and separate them so they can breed the best horses, and cull the rest. The horses are his job, the land is his job. But he can’t be everywhere. That’s why we’re careful of who we hire—our hands are independent, trustworthy. They can handle their own emergencies without having to call Will every few minutes for input.”
I again think of my own father, and how he selected James as his personal assistant and how much he delegates to James—leaving him free to worry about the big picture which is, in the end, his primary talent and responsibility. Different world, different stakes, but the same mentality.
“I understand that,” I say. “So, I’ll just wait here while you go find him?”
She shrugs. “I could be a while.” She gestures toward the barn. “I could get Hector to give you a tour. But it would be best if you came back tomorrow morning. By then I’ll have had a chance to speak with Will and he can talk with Mom and Dad.”
“That sounds good, Theo. I’d love to see the barn, though.”
Theo grins. “All right, then. Come on.”
And so, I find myself in the passenger seat of a side-by-side UTV, zipping down a gravel road at a breakneck speed around a long downward curve from the house toward the barn, which, as we approach, is even more mammoth than I’d originally thought.
Theo parks beside a pair of doors huge enough to admit one of my father’s private jets, and leads me into the cool, airy, echoing interior of the barn—the floor is concrete, but scattered with wood chips and hay and horse droppings.
The central hallway is easily ten feet wide, with horse stalls lining each side; windows built into each horse stall admit daylight, and here and there a horse head can be seen over the top of a stall door. The stalls I’m seeing here clearly only comprise a small portion of the total size of this barn.
The air is thick with barn-smell—horses, manure, leather, hay. Voices echo, horses whicker and whinny and grunt. The sense of industriousness is palpable; everyone has a job, and they are busy—there’s no one loafing or lounging. At the far end of the barn is another pair of opened doors, letting a cool, steady breeze waft through, ruffling my hair and the silk of my suit pants.
