He rode up the creek past the searchers. Some of them stopped and stared at the old man on the old horse. The sheriff called something after him. Royal did not hear it.
At the gravel bar where the dogs had lost the trail, he stopped.
The rain was coming harder now. Cold. The light was going gray. The three draws went up into the dark ahead of him, into the rocks and the pines.
Royal did not pick one.
He let go of the reins. He let them hang loose on Smoke's neck. And he sat very still in the saddle and waited.
"Go on, Smoke," he said quietly. "You listen. You know her better than I do."
Smoke stood in the creek with the water running around his old legs.
He lifted his head. His ears went forward, both of them, and stayed there.
He stood that way for a long time. Royal could feel him breathing under the saddle, slow and deep. The rain ran down Royal's hat brim. Somewhere far behind him, down the canyon, he heard the searchers calling Josie's name, over and over, their voices thin in the wind.
Smoke did not move toward the voices.
He turned his head the other way. Up. Toward the middle draw. The box canyon full of boulders.
His ears were pricked so hard they almost touched.
Royal held his breath and listened too. He heard the rain. He heard the creek. He heard the wind in the pines.
He did not hear anything else. His ears were eighty years old.
But Smoke's were not.
The old horse stepped out of the creek onto the gravel bar, and turned, and started up the middle draw, all by himself, without Royal touching the reins.
It was steep and rocky. Smoke picked his way up it slowly, stiffly, the way he did everything now. Twice he stopped, and lifted his head, and listened, and then went on. Royal held on to the saddle horn with both hands and let him go.
A quarter mile up, the box canyon narrowed. Boulders as big as houses on both sides. The rain was mixed with sleet now. It was almost dark.
Smoke stopped.
He threw his head up and nickered. A deep, rumbling sound in his chest. The sound he made every Sunday at the pasture fence.
And from somewhere above them, in the rocks, thin and shaking, almost lost in the wind, came two notes.
High and low.
"Smo-key."
Royal found her under a ledge of rock twenty feet up the side of the canyon.
She had crawled in out of the rain. She was soaking wet, in her blue Sunday dress, with mud to her knees and one shoe missing. Her left ankle was swollen and purple. She had her arms wrapped around her knees and she was shaking so hard her teeth clacked.
And she was singing. Over and over, very softly, to herself, the way her mother said she did when she was scared.
"Smo-key. Smo-key. Smo-key."
Royal could not climb up to her. Not at eighty. Not with his knees.
So he rode Smoke as close to the base of the ledge as the old horse could get, and he called up to her, gently.
"Josie. It's Mr. Engstrom. From the church. I brought somebody to see you."
The singing stopped.
A small face appeared at the edge of the rock, white and wet, with two black braids plastered to it.
She looked down at the old gray horse standing in the sleet below her.
"Smokey," she said. "You came."
She could not climb down on her bad ankle. So she slid, on her bottom, down the rock, with Royal talking her through every foot of it, until she was close enough for him to reach.
He leaned down out of the saddle, farther than his back had bent in ten years, and got his hands under her arms, and lifted her up in front of him onto Smoke's withers.
She weighed almost nothing. She was ice cold.
Royal took off his canvas coat, wrapped her in it, buttoned it around both of them, and held her against his chest.
"Hold on to his mane," he said. "Both hands. He'll take us home."
He did not touch the reins. He did not need to. Smoke turned around in the narrow canyon and started down, slowly, carefully, one stiff step at a time, in the dark and the sleet, carrying an eighty-year-old man and a six-year-old girl.
All the way down, Josie sang to him. Very softly. And every time she did, the old horse flicked one ear back to listen.
They came out of the canyon at the gravel bar at seven-forty, into the beams of a dozen flashlights.
Somebody shouted. Then the whole creek bank was shouting. The sheriff splashed across the water. The search team came running with blankets and a stretcher.
Josie's mother came last, stumbling over the rocks, in her church shoes, crying her daughter's name.
Royal lifted Josie down into her arms.
He did not try to get off the horse. He was not sure he could. He just sat there in the rain in his shirtsleeves, with his canvas coat around a little girl, and let Smoke stand in the creek, and closed his eyes.
Josie had a sprained ankle and a mild case of hypothermia. She spent one night in the hospital in Cañon City. She was fine.
Royal had a bad cold for two weeks and could not lift his arms over his head for a month. His daughter yelled at him for most of it.
Smoke was stiff for three days. Then he was fine too.
The next September, at the church picnic, there was a new tradition.
After the potato salad and the fried chicken and the pies, the children of the Piñon Gulch Methodist Church lined up at Royal Engstrom's pasture fence, every one of them with a carrot.
And the first in line, as she would be every September after, was a seven-year-old girl with two black braids.
Royal sat in his lawn chair under the cottonwoods and watched her lift her hand and sing two notes across the pasture, high and low.
At the far end of the grass, an old gray horse lifted his head and came walking.