The man touched Doreen’s arm. “Bring you luck,” he said, holding out the dark grey stone, turning it so she could see the white quartz band running all the way around it. “Want it? It’s a charm.”

Doreen pushed his hand away. The man just smiled. His hair was a soft light brown. His eyes were soft and light brown too, and very gentle. He turned the stone over and over in his palm, so the white band glittered in the sun. “Don’t want no charm?” he said after a bit. “Come ride my horses, then.”

Doreen turned so he wouldn’t see her smile. “You ain’t got no horses.”

“Yeah I do.” He watched her with his gentle eyes. “Got me a black one and a sorrel, and a dapple grey ‘at can singlefoot. Come on with me, sweet baby, ride any one you want.”

He wore black denim pants, slick on the thighs as if he’d been working on oily machinery and hadn’t had a rag to wipe his hands on. The pants were tight, and his leg muscles bunched and relaxed under the shiny cloth as he rocked back and forth on the heels of his scuffed black boots. When he smiled she saw a flash of gold, like a tiny little sun, in the corner of his mouth. “You sure a pretty thing.” He touched her hair, pushing it gently back from her face.

“You really got horses?”

Somebody did. She knew that much. There were about a hundred horses up there on the ridge. No one she knew had ever seen them, but everyone talked about them and sometimes on stormy nights she could hear them calling, and the sound of their hooves on the stones as they ran. They all had long manes, heavy with burrs, and tails that dragged the ground.

The man didn’t answer. He smiled his gentle smile and began to walk slowly up the road. Doreen skipped once, to be in step with him.

When they came to the gate he held it open for her, then wired it shut behind them. Doreen’s hair blew in front of her eyes. Strands blew into her mouth and stayed there until he brushed them out with his finger. “Where they at?” she asked.

“All round here, honey.” The man looked past her, his eyes searching the ridge. “Let’s us just start on up the hill.”

Doreen tossed her head. There was a pine smell in the air that made her want to run in circles. The man said, “Shhh,” and put his finger to his lips. “Go slow, go slow. You’ll scare ‘em.”

Wildflowers grew in the lane. There were aspens on one side, and a bobwire fence overgrown with honeysuckle on the other. The man took a knife from his pants pocket. It was a folding knife, a big one, with a stained bone handle. He began to whistle as he opened out the long bright blade. Not a tune, just the same three notes over and over as he stooped to saw at the base of a young sassafras. When he had cut down the sapling he skinned it, peeling the tender spice-smelling bark from the pale sticky wood. He trimmed off the branches and measured the trunk to the length he wanted. “Walking stick.” He smiled, crinkling the corners of his eyes and waving an arm at the steepening lane. “We got a ways to go.”

The lane soon narrowed down to a single track overhung with trees and vines. The man motioned for Doreen to go ahead; there wasn’t room to walk side by side. She led the way uphill between bramble thickets and dense stands of scrub, trudging in silence for fifteen minutes or more. Once she saw horse droppings, faded and crumbling, with the grass dark green around them.

“Well, looka there,” the man said suddenly. He pointed to a coil of rope that lay in the weeds beside the path. “If it ain’t my ol’ lassoo-lariat.” He picked up the rope, uncoiled it and made it dance for a moment on the ground in front of him. “Gon need it to catch that dapple grey.” Doreen said nothing. She watched the man knot the rope around his waist. “Ol’ lassoo-lariat,” he went on, so low she could barely hear him. “Doggone if I ain’t been lookin everwhere for it. And here it is.”

There were tracks in the dust but they were sheep tracks. The droppings in the path were sheep droppings. Bits of oily wool clung to the brambles here and there as the path grew steeper. Dusty ground gave way to hardpan and sharp rocks; the air was hot and still, and there was a shimmer to it from the heat. Doreen and the man climbed past a tumbledown shed and crossed a shallow stream. The man whacked at brush and low branches with his walking stick, filling the air with the smell of bruised leaves. He was whistling again, the same notes over and over.

“That your horse call?” Doreen stopped and looked around. The trees were taller now, the spaces between them filled with brambles and brush. The path lay in shadow, but here and there a bar of brassy sunlight angled down. Berry canes, spiky with thorns and heavy with fruit, arched out of reach above the other briars.

The man whistled a few more notes. He smiled at Doreen and nodded. “That’s it, sweet baby. That’s my magic call.” He dipped into the pocket of his shirt and showed her a store-bought sugar cube. “When they answer, I give ‘em one of these.”

The climb had winded him. His chest rose and fell unevenly. There were sweat-wheels under the arms of his blue cotton shirt. Doreen watched as he turned the clean white sugar lump this way and that. The back of her neck prickled. She wished she had a walking stick and could whack leaves from limbs.

A rabbit run disappeared into the brush beside the path. She dropped to one knee. “See this-here track? I can catch a rabbit any time I want.”

The man knelt beside her. He looked at the track. His face shone with sweat; little bent yellow hairs like grass starved for sun stuck out all over his chin. “Ol’ rabbit’s pretty smart,” he said. “How come you so sure?”

Doreen tossed her hair. “I done it a million times.”

“How?” He grinned at her, crinkling his eyes. “Work some kind of spell?”

“No such a thing as spells.”

“Yes it is,” he told her. “Oh yes it is, my honey.”

“Ain’t,” she said firmly, “and no need for ‘em neither. If I want a rabbit, I just make me a snare. I’d lay it right there in that little path. It ain’t hard.”

“Show me,” said the man, and his gold tooth flashed. “Don’t reckon I ever learned to make no snare.”

The rope at his waist was too heavy. Darleen frowned. “You got any string?”

He shook his head. “Your hand, sweet baby. Just show me with your hand.”

So she spread her hand in the dust of the rabbit path. “Like that, see? And when ol’ Mr. Rabbit comes along, he’ll step. . . .”

“Like this?” The man made a rabbit of his own hand, hopping it nearer and nearer until his thumb brushed against hers.

She grabbed; made a noose of her thumb and forefinger, and jerked his whole arm into the air. “Like that!”

He fluttered his fingers, and it was like a rabbit kicking. She laughed. “You was a rabbit, you’d be halfway dead.”

He nodded soberly. “Sure would, my honey. I sure enough would.”

She turned his hand loose and they stood up. “Know what?” he said. “I got something I bet you gonna like. Got me a pretty dollbaby. Long yella hair, red silk dress, and that ain’t all.” His voice dropped to a whisper and he leaned with his mouth close to Doreen’s ear. “She got real lace pantypants. You can hold her all you want, sweet precious child.”

Doreen hid her smile. “How old you think I am?” He didn’t answer. “Too old for dolls,” she told him severely. “Way too old now. But I had me one once, a drink-an’-wet name Erma. Only thing. . . .” She stared right at him, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. “Only thing, she drink through this little hole in her mouth, but where it come out. . . .”

A bar of sunlight fell across the man’s eyes as he tilted his head. It made him squint a little. “Aw,” he said, and tilted his head to the other side. “I bet it come out her bellybutton.”

Doreen laughed out loud. “Not her bellybutton! But not the real place neither. It come out this other little hole down there, in her cheek. In the side of her cheek. You think we’ll find them horses pretty soon?”

Ahead, a mossy boulder almost blocked the way. “Ain’t far now,” the man assured her. “It’s a big bunch of pines up round the bend past that ol’ rock. I speck we’ll find ‘em there.” He took Doreen’s arm, pulling her hard against his chest. “You gon make a real rider,” he whispered. “You gon like it real good.”

For a moment it was as if the ground had tilted – as if, instead of him holding her it was the other way around: let him go and he might fall. He felt light enough that she could lift him, carry him, toss him in the air. The rough cotton of his shirt scratched her face; she felt his heart knocking and smelled his rank, goaty sweat – just like her stepfather at night when he came home from the mill. Releasing him, laughing, pushing him away so that he nearly lost his balance, she raced on up the path.

The boulder was grey granite, furry with yellowgreen moss. Large as it was, it seemed to shift a little as she squeezed past, pressing against it to avoid the curving bramble canes that plucked at her bare arms. Just for an instant she thought she felt it teeter, as if it were lightly balanced there instead of rooted deeply in the hill. It almost seemed that she could topple it with one hard shove, and send it bounding down the path. “Look out!” She laughed again, waving her arms at the man below. “Could squash you like a ant, I could!” His answering smile flashed from the green shadows. She waved again and ran on.

Pines closed in around her and dust filled the air. A side-stitch tugged, then clamped down tight, slowing her nearly to a walk. Dim shapes went flitting through the shadows beneath the trees. She heard branches breaking, the clatter of stones; glimpsed the sheen of dappled flanks. Her heart leaped; her whole body felt like lightning was in it. “Hurry!” she cried. “It’s them!”

The path ended in a clearing ringed with briars and scrub pines. The clearing was empty. Here and there a few tags of oily wool fluttered from the low-growing briars. Above the clearing the sky stretched blue and thin. The sun was brilliant white when she looked directly at it, and when she turned away, black specks like flakes of ash danced on the quiet air before her. They changed to white and then to green when she closed her eyes, and then they faded. Doreen stood still, holding her side and listening.

He was coming. She heard his tuneless three-note whistle, the scrape of his boots on the stones far down the path. And then she could see him, climbing steadily toward her up the steep trail. At the edge of the clearing he stopped and stood with his legs braced wide, gold tooth glinting, both hands lightly gripping the walking stick. His wet face shone; his chest rose and fell. Doreen could count the pulse throbs in the side of his neck.

“Ain’t no. . . .” Her tongue felt dry and small, a little dry lizard in her dusty mouth. She cleared her throat. “Ain’t no horses here. You a damn lie.”

“Ain’t no lie.” The man scrinched his eyes against the sun. “Never you worry,” he told her in his quiet voice. “They ain’t here, they somewheres else. We’ll find ‘em.”

“You said there was horses.” The sun pressed down on her shoulders and the top of her head. It bounced off the sharp rocks and the pine boughs and shivered in the dusty air around her. She frowned, catching her lower lip between her teeth, listening again – to her own uneven breathing and the wind in the pines. “You ain’t got no horse,” she said finally. “Bet you ain’t got no dollbaby neither. Just a ol’ lucky rock, like anyone could find.” Bending down, she scooped up a handful of stones from the ground in front of her. Sure enough, one of them was grey, girdled all around with white quartz. She threw it at him. It was a good throw, but he flung up a hand so it hit the inside of his wrist instead of his face. “I’m going home.”

“Go ahead on, then.” He sat down on a stump at the clearing’s edge, loosened the lariat from around his waist and began pulling it through his fingers, working out the kinks. “You go ahead on,” he told her softly, “if that’s what you want to do. Me, I know how to wait.” Smiling his gentle smile, he watched her walk toward him and then slowly past to where the path began. “You’ll be back,” he said, so low she almost didn’t hear him. “You’ll be back, sweet precious child.”

All he had to do was reach out and he could touch her, keep her there with him – she was that close. But his hands stayed where they were, suppling the kinks out of the lariat. All by itself, without her even thinking, Doreen’s own hand made itself into a fist, a snare. It almost seemed that she could feel him struggle; the banging of his heart.

She stopped. He didn’t look up. Whistling, he passed the rope through his fingers. It was as if she wasn’t even there. “You’re crazy!” She backed up a step and then another, and then turned. “Crazy!” shouting over her shoulder. Already moving from the bright glare of the clearing into the shadows of the path; the distance between them already stretching into something that began to feel safe, but at the same time empty and sad. “Ain’t no horses, never was, and you know it!”

The man didn’t move. He sat there on the soft punky wood of the decaying stump with his legs straight out and his feet in their scuffed boots making the letter V. The rope lay across his knees with the tag end looping to the ground beside him. His head was cocked to the side. Listening; she could see that. Waiting and listening. Then as she watched he reached into his pocket, brought out the sugar cube again, and another and another. Three, four, five of them, sparkling like rhinestones as he set them out before him on the rocky ground.

A clump of blackberry canes grew among the spindly pines. Careless of thorns and dust, Doreen stripped off a handful of hard, half-ripe fruit and ate them one by one, the sour juice staining her fingers.

The sun beat down on the clearing. The air trembled, so hot it looked like water. It smelled of the man’s sweat and the bruised leaves stuck to the end of his walking stick. It smelled of heat, dust and pines. And it smelled – so faintly it was like a memory or dream – of horses. Black ones. Sorrels. A singlefooting dapple grey.

The man was whistling again. The same three notes, but they had a tune now, in her mind, and words: You’ll be back. “Lie!” she shouted. “Crazy lie!” Doreen ducked her head and ran.

She was almost halfway down, no longer running but picking her way slowly over the stony path, when she heard what her ears had been straining for. She stopped then, turning to face uphill, holding her breath to hear the distant rattle of loose pebbles, the snapping of twigs, the wild sweet call. Soft, then loud, then louder still, until the ground trembled and her heart surged. Horses! She could almost see them now, and flung wide her arms to bar the path. No way down but past her; no way he could ride by. She went to meet him smiling, reaching out with her stained hands. Still tasting the seeds, faintly bitter, that she had crushed between her teeth.