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Jodie did her best not to cry. The work helped. She could look at markings instead of the fear on their faces. A sock ending below the fetlock. A blaze that widened over the right nostril. A patch of white in a dark-brown mane. She could watch who stayed together and whether the mare entering the funnel was the same one whose foal had come through ten seconds earlier.

She could put facts between herself and everything else. The smell of horse sweat mingled with smoke. A mother screaming for her foal. Jet calling to his mares.

An older paint mare began falling behind near the mouth of the funnel.

Jodie knew her. Rosie. Seventeen, still in decent condition but slower than she’d been two years ago. Days passed without a single sighting, and here she was. Jodie’s relief lasted about three strides.

Rosie dropped farther back. The helicopter shifted. Jodie’s mouth went dry.

“Come on, Rosie.”

The mare broke into a faster run and caught the group. A minute later she fell behind again. Clouds of dust obscured her from Jodie’s view. Then she caught up a second time, but now she was limping badly.

“Fuck!”

Jodie photographed her. She marked her arrival only after she passed fully into the funnel.

“Ten. Rosie, seventeen-year-old paint. New lameness.”

Willow glanced toward her. “You get a photo?”

“Damn straight I did.”

Her handwriting was harder than usual, the letters pressed deeply enough into the paper to leave marks on the sheet beneath it. Jodie wiped her eyes.

More horses came.

Then more.

The sound changed once they reached the panels. Hooves struck packed dirt, metal rattled, people called directions. The helicopter pulled away enough for Jodie to hear horses blowing and calling to one another inside the temporary pens.

A young sorrel stallion hit one of the panels shoulder-first when another horse crowded him.

Jodie flinched.

He bounced away, startled but upright, then kept moving.

“Copper,” she said automatically. “Three-year-old sorrel stallion. No visible lameness.”

She zoomed in quickly on the camera display. Copper’s shoulder showed dust and a darker streak where he’d struck the rail, but he was putting weight evenly on all four feet. She wrote that down, too.

The horses moved from the receiving area toward sorting, where the language changed.

“Stallion sixty-eight.”

“Mare sixty-nine.”

“Foal with sixty-nine.”

Jodie kept her eyes on the animals.

“Mare seventy.”

A gray passed through. Jodie wrote the number, then the name beside it.

70—CLOUD—gray mare, Pepper band

“Mare seventy-one.”