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“He’s consistent,” I said. “Same buck every time?”

“Same jump, same kick, same spin left. Every out.”

“Run him early,” I replied. “Feature bulls should be unpredictable. Sunday Ticket’s a machine — he’s going to do the same thing at eight o’clock that he’d do at noon. Save your wildcard for the feature.”

Ty wrote in the notebook again.

I became aware that someone was watching.

Not Ty. Not the bulls. From the arena rail, thirty feet away, Priya stood with her clipboard against her hip and her pen motionless. She’d been working — I could see the notes on the page from here, the small dense handwriting — but she’d stopped. Her attention was on us. On me. On the conversation she’d been listening to, or the one she’d been watching, or both.

Ty followed my glance. He looked at Priya, looked at me, and his mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile.

“Your producer,” he said.

“Yes she is.”

“Mm.” He closed the notebook. “Appreciate the look. Hammer alone saves me a vet bill I was about to eat.”

“Buy me a beer at the rodeo.”

“Planned on it.”

He went to park the trailer, and I stood at the rail with my hands on the top strand and waited for her to come over or go back to her notes, and she did neither. She stood there looking at me with an expression I’d seen once before — in the truck, on the way back from Virginia City, when I’d told her about Dena Fry and the rooms I’d performed in.

The expression said she was rearranging something.

“You know bulls,” she said at last.

“I know some bulls.”

“Ty Bannerman has been on the circuit longer than I’ve been producing events. He just asked your opinion, listened to the answer, and changed his plan.”

“He’s a practical man.”

“You told him a bull was lonely and he believed you.”

“Hammer is lonely. That’s not a theory, it’s a diagnosis.”

She looked at the holding pen, where Hammer was grazing shoulder-to-shoulder with the red Braford, his head low, his weight even on all four legs for the first time since he’d come off the trailer.

Then she looked back at me.

“I’ve been here three weeks,” she said. “I’ve watched you charm permit clerks and tease your brother and make toast at exactly the right moment. I had you filed under a category.”

“Which category?”

“Doesn’t matter. It was wrong.”

She said it flat. Not apologetic. Not generous. The voice of a woman correcting a spreadsheet.

She turned back to her clipboard. The pen moved. The notes resumed. The moment passed, or seemed to, and I stood at the rail and watched her work and felt something shift in the ground under my feet that had nothing to do with the clay base we’d packed.

Nobody in the Madison Valley asked my opinion about anything that mattered. They asked me to be funny, to be easy, to be the one who kept the room warm. They asked Boone about cattle and Wyatt about land and they asked me to pass the salt and tell the story about the time I got bucked into a stock tank at Caldwell.

Ty Bannerman had asked me about bulls. Had pulled out his notebook. Had written down what I said.

And Priya had watched it happen, and the look on her face had been the look of someone who’d opened a file marked Cash Calloway and found pages she hadn’t turned to yet.