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So would she. But it didn’t stop the possibilities going through her head. Maybe Kyle realized he was overpaying her and that Watchdog plugged along just fine and dandy without her. Or maybe it wasn’t about Watchdog at all. Maybe something was wrong with Shelby, or her parents, something he didn’t want to discuss over the phone.

“Hey.”

She looked at Mac. He reached over and squeezed her knee.

“I know where your head just went, Ranch Girl. I was there last night when you told me.” His thumb moved over her knee. “Whatever Kyle wants, it isn’t because you’re not enough. And you can’t solve a conversation you haven’t had yet.”

“I know.” She gave him a weak smile.

And turned her attention to the horses waiting somewhere beyond the hills.

She’d heard helicopters plenty of times. In Colorado they were hardly unusual. Medical flights, wildfire crews, news choppers, military aircraft coming and going over the Front Range. None of those had ever made her stomach seize the way this one did.

At first it was only a distant thumping over the low hills, almost too faint to separate from the wind. Jodie stopped writing and looked up from the folding table where she’d arranged her binder, tablet, camera, two pens, and a stack of paper identification sheets. Her tablet had enough of the database downloaded to work offline, thank God, because her phone had been useless since they’d left camp, but she’d printed a backup list anyway.

Beside her, Willow lowered the binoculars hanging around her neck. Neither woman said anything as they looked at each other. Words weren’t necessary to convey their growing dread.

The sound grew louder.

Focus on your job.

Her assignment was simple enough. Watch the horses coming through. Identify as many as she could. Photograph identifying marks where she was permitted. Match mares and foals. Note band relationships. Reconcile what entered temporary holding against what FHDH had expected based on the most recent field counts.

She’d done versions of this work for years. Just never out here like this where she could feel the sun beating down, smell the dust and the smoke, hear the helicopter’s rotors and feel the ground vibrate to the pounding of horses’ hooves.

The rotors’ thumping became a hard, rhythmic chop in the air, and then she saw the helicopter rise above the ridge.

Her fingers tightened around her binoculars. She brought them to her eyes.

Dust lifted into the air. A tan cloud rolled across the slope beyond the trap site, and for several seconds Jodie couldn’t see anything through it. Then movement appeared inside the haze. One horse. Then three. Then ten.

The herd came over the rise.

Jodie forgot to breathe as she fought back tears.

The first time she had stood out here and watched wild horses crest a hill, the sun had been coming up behind them. For a moment, they’d turned gold. Now dust coated their hides and a helicopter hung in the sky behind them like a thundering storm cloud.

Focus on your job.

Jet was leading the band. She knew the black stallion immediately, even at a distance, even through the dust. He ran hard with his head high, then suddenly broke left when several mares peeled away from the main group.

The helicopter shifted with him.

Jet turned back.

“No,” Jodie whispered.

The pilot pushed the scattered horses toward each other again. Jet circled wide, trying to get behind a mare and a foal that had split from his band. Jodie was pretty sure it was Bramble and her foal, Frost. The mare changed direction abruptly. Frost went the wrong way.

Jodie’s heart stopped.

“Oh, come on. Come on, sweetheart.”

Frost ran parallel to his mother with a widening strip of ground between them. For several awful seconds Jodie could see the foal struggling to keep up. Bramble called, head turned toward her baby even while she kept moving.

Then dust swallowed the foal.

Jodie stood so quickly her camp chair fell backward and she almost dropped her binoculars.