Cy Bannister heard the trailer before he saw it, a long way off, rattling across the cattle guard at two in the morning.
He was awake anyway. He didn't sleep much anymore.
He'd been sitting at the kitchen table in the dark with a cup of coffee, the way he did most nights since his wife died, listening to the wind and the coyotes and the old house settling. And then, from somewhere far out to the north, carried on the cold September air, came a sound he'd know anywhere.
A stock trailer. Empty. Bouncing over the steel pipes of a cattle guard.
The north pasture cattle guard. Eleven miles from the house. Where there was no reason on God's earth for anybody to be at two in the morning.
Cy set down his coffee.
He was seventy-seven. He'd run cattle on the Bannister place in northern Nevada his whole life, the way his father had, and his grandfather before that. Forty thousand acres of sagebrush and bunchgrass and dry creek beds in Elko County, most of it leased from the government, with the Ruby Mountains standing up blue and white on the eastern horizon.
He ran about six hundred head of black baldy cows. In September, most of them were still up on the high summer range. But he'd brought a bunch of first-calf heifers down to the north pasture two weeks ago, close to the county road, to wean their calves.
Good heifers. Young, and fat, and worth about two thousand dollars apiece at the sale barn in Elko.
He'd heard about the thefts. Every rancher in the county had. Forty head gone from a place near Wells in the spring.
Twenty-two from a ranch out past Tuscarora in July. Thieves with a gooseneck stock trailer, working at night, hitting pastures close to a road, and hauling the cattle across the state line to sell with forged brand papers before anybody noticed they were missing.
The sheriff said it was the work of somebody who knew cattle. Somebody who knew which ranchers were old, and lived alone, and slept far from their pastures.
Cy had a pretty good idea which list he was on.
He went down the hall and knocked on the door of the spare bedroom.
"Tess," he said. "Wake up, honey."
His granddaughter was nineteen, home for the weekend from the University of Nevada in Reno, where she was studying animal science. She'd grown up on this ranch every summer of her life.
She could rope and ride and pull a calf better than most of the men Cy had ever hired. She came out of the bedroom in thirty seconds, in jeans and boots and a sweatshirt, with her hair stuck up on one side, wide awake.
"What is it, Grandpa?"
"Somebody's at the north pasture," Cy said. "With a trailer."
Tess stared at him. Then she went and got the satellite phone off the charger in the kitchen, because there wasn't a bar of cell service within thirty miles of the Bannister place, and she called the Elko County sheriff's office while Cy pulled on his sheepskin coat.
The dispatcher was kind and fast. She said she'd send a deputy.
She said the nearest one was on a call out past Jackpot, fifty-three miles away. She said to stay at the house, and not to approach them, under any circumstances.
"Yes, ma'am," Tess said, and hung up, and looked at her grandfather.
Cy was already at the door with the keys to the old pickup.
"Grandpa," Tess said. "She said stay at the house."
"I'm not going to approach them," Cy said. "I'm going to watch them. So when that deputy gets here, he knows which way they went."
He looked at her.
"You can stay here, Tess. I mean it."
Tess picked up the satellite phone and put it in her sweatshirt pocket.
"No, I can't," she said.
The pickup was a 1994 Ford with three hundred thousand miles on it, faded red, with a dented tailgate and a cracked windshield and a bench seat held together with duct tape. Cy had driven it across every foot of this ranch for thirty years.
He drove it north on the ranch road with the headlights off.
There was a half moon, low in the west, and the sagebrush showed silver-gray under it on both sides of the two-track. Cy didn't need much more than that.
He knew every rut and rock on this road. He'd driven it in the dark more times than he could count, checking water and chasing strays and bringing in heifers in a blizzard.
Tess sat beside him with both hands on the dashboard and didn't say a word.
They stopped on the low ridge above the north pasture, a mile from the corrals, and Cy turned off the engine.
Down below, in the corrals by the loading chute, there were lights. A pickup with its headlights on. A long gooseneck stock trailer backed up to the chute.
And men moving around in the glare, two of them, maybe three, with flashlights and a hot-shot prod, pushing cattle up the chute into the trailer. Cy could hear the heifers bawling all the way up on the ridge.
He watched them load. He counted under his breath.
Sixteen. Sixteen of his best first-calf heifers, packed into that trailer.
Then the men slammed the trailer gate. They climbed into their pickup. And the headlights swung around, and the truck and trailer pulled out of the corral and rolled away north, across the cattle guard, onto the county road.
Tess grabbed the satellite phone and called the sheriff's office again. The dispatcher said the deputy was still forty-five minutes out.
In forty-five minutes, the rustlers would be on the interstate. In two hours, they'd be in Idaho.
Cy sat in the dark cab of his old pickup with his hands on the wheel, watching the red taillights getting smaller and smaller on the county road.