Tess's horse went down on its knees in the mud at the edge of the creek bank.
For one terrible second, Ione saw her granddaughter tip forward over the saddle horn toward the brown water.
Then the horse lunged up and back, hard, scrambling, and Tess hung on with both hands in its mane, and they came back up the bank onto solid ground. The horse stood shaking. Tess sat on it, white as paper, with mud to her waist.
Ione rode back through the herd to her. It took her a long time. The cows were pushing toward the water, and she had to turn them back one at a time.
When she reached Tess, she put a hand on her granddaughter's knee.
"You all right?"
"I'm all right," Tess said. Her voice was shaking. "Grandma, we can't cross that."
"No," Ione said. "Not here."
The pickup came bouncing down the two-track along the creek a few minutes later. Russ and Gary jumped out before it stopped.
Russ looked at the creek. He looked at the herd, bunched and bawling on the slope. He looked at his daughter, covered in mud. Then he looked up at his mother on her horse.
His face was red. Ione had seen that face when he was four years old and had just been told no.
"Mom," he said. "This is exactly what I was afraid of. Look at that water. Tess nearly went in. We'll have to turn the whole herd around and take them back. Twelve miles. Then truck them Thursday."
Ione looked at the creek for a long time.
"Russ," she said. "Do you remember the Lindahl gravel bar?"
Russ stared at her.
"What?"
"Half a mile upstream," Ione said. "Past the old cottonwood with the lightning scar. Your great-grandfather crossed there before they built the wooden ford in 1952. The creek spreads out over a gravel bar. It's wide and shallow. Even in high water, it's never more than belly-deep on a horse."
"Mom, that crossing hasn't been used in seventy years."
"Your father used it in 1975," Ione said. "And 1997. The two years the ford washed out. You were five in '75 and home with the measles. In '97 you were working in Billings that summer." She looked at him. "I rode it both times. Right beside your father."
Russ did not say anything.
Gary, beside him, slowly took off his hat.
"Russ," he said quietly. "I remember the cottonwood."
They stood by the truck for a while. The creek roared. The cattle bawled. The afternoon light was starting to go long and gold across the grass.
"We'll never get them to it," Russ said finally. "They won't leave the water. They'll mill. They'll break back."
Ione shook her head.
"They'll go," she said, "if Old Blue goes."
She rode back to the front of the herd. She found the old black cow with the white spot, standing at the edge of the bank, bawling at the water.
Ione rode up close beside her. She did not shout. She did not push. She talked to her, in a low, steady voice, the way she had talked to cows for sixty years.
"Come on, Blue," she said. "Come on, girl. Not here. Up the creek. You know the way."
She turned her horse upstream and walked it slowly along the bank.
Old Blue watched her go.
Then the old cow turned and followed. The bell rang.
Behind her, the herd began to stir. First a few cows. Then a dozen. Then the whole long black line of them, a hundred and eighty pairs, swinging away from the roaring water and stringing out along the bank behind an old woman on a horse and an old cow with a bell.
Russ watched them go. Then he swung up on Gary's horse, which they had trailered up behind the truck, and rode to the flank of the herd without being asked.
Gary took the other flank. Tess, mud to her waist, rode drag.
The gravel bar was right where she said it would be. Half a mile up, past the old cottonwood with the black scar of lightning down its trunk.
The creek spread out there, wide and pale and shallow over the stones, singing instead of roaring. It came to Ione's horse's belly at the deepest point. Not one inch more.
She rode into it first. Old Blue walked in right behind her, steady, bell ringing. Then the cows, one after another, and the calves swimming a few strokes in the middle and scrambling out the other side, shaking themselves like dogs.
It took forty minutes to get them all across.
Russ came last, behind Tess, and when he rode up out of the water onto the far bank, he stopped his horse beside his mother's and sat there for a while, dripping, without saying anything.
"I should have asked you," he said finally. "Before I called the hauler. I should have asked you how the drive works. Instead of telling you."
"Yes," Ione said. "You should have."
He laughed. He could not help it. So did she.
They camped that night on the high meadow above the creek, the four of them, with the herd bedded down in the dark and the stars coming out over the mountains. Russ made coffee on the fire. Gary had brought sandwiches in the truck. Tess fell asleep in her bedroll before she finished hers.
The next afternoon, they pushed the last of the pairs through the gate of the summer allotment, twenty-two miles from the ranch, at three-fifteen.
Ione sat on her horse at the gate and counted them through. A hundred and eighty pairs. Every one.
When the last calf went through, she rode over to where Tess was sitting on her horse, dusty and sunburned and smiling.
Ione took off her old felt hat. The same hat she had worn on the drive for fifty-five years. Arne had bought it for her in 1971.
She held it out to her granddaughter.
"Next June," she said, "you ride point."