Every Sunday after church for a whole summer, a six-year-old girl named Josie Tafoya stood at Royal Engstrom's pasture fence with a carrot in her hand and sang the old gray horse's name in two notes, high and low, "Smo-key," until he came, and on the last Sunday in September, at the church picnic, she wandered up the creek after a butterfly and did not come back.
Royal was sitting in a lawn chair under the cottonwoods with a paper plate of potato salad when he heard her mother start to scream.
Royal was eighty. He ran a few cows on four hundred acres of foothill ranch outside Piñon Gulch, Colorado, the same ranch his grandfather had homesteaded in 1898. His wife, Marian, had died in 2019. His daughter lived in Pueblo and called every night to make sure he had not fallen off something.
The little white Methodist church sat at the bottom of his lane, on an acre of land his grandfather had given the congregation in 1912. Every September, the church had its picnic in the cottonwood grove beside the creek that ran between the church and Royal's pasture.
And for twenty-seven years, Royal's gray gelding, Smoke, had stood at the pasture fence during the picnic and let the children feed him.
Smoke was twenty-seven years old. Ancient, for a horse. Gray going white. Swaybacked, stiff in the mornings, with a few teeth missing. Royal had raised him from a colt and used him to work cattle for twenty years, until they had both gotten too old for it.
Now Smoke mostly stood at the fence and waited for children.
Josie had found him in June.
She was new. Her family had moved from Denver that spring, when her father took a job at the sawmill. She was small and serious, with two black braids, and she was a little afraid of everything except that horse.
The first Sunday, she stood at the fence and stared at him. The second Sunday, she brought him a carrot from home. By the third Sunday, she had made up a song. Just his name, in two notes. "Smo-key." High and low, like a bird.
And by July, the old horse would lift his head from the far end of the pasture when he heard it, and come walking across the grass, slow and stiff, to the fence.
Royal had watched it all summer from the church steps. He had never seen Smoke come to anybody like that. Not even him.
The search started at two-fifteen that afternoon.
The whole picnic spread out along the creek, calling her name. Her mother. Her father. The pastor. Forty people in church clothes, pushing through the willows and the scrub oak.
By three o'clock, the sheriff was there with two deputies. By four, the county search and rescue team arrived with radios and a map, and a woman from Cañon City with two bloodhounds.
The bloodhounds took Josie's scent from a sweater in the car. They went straight up the creek, noses down, baying, a quarter mile, half a mile, into the canyon where the creek came down out of the national forest.
Then, at a place where the creek split around a gravel bar, they stopped.
They circled. They went back and forth across the water. They whined.
"She went in the creek here," the handler said, frowning. "Waded, maybe. Or fell. The dogs can't follow scent through running water. She could have come out on either side. Or upstream. Or down." She shook her head. "We'll have to work both banks. It'll be slow."
Royal had gone up the creek with the searchers as far as his knees would let him. He stood at the gravel bar with the sheriff and the dog handler and looked up the canyon.
He knew that canyon. He had run cattle in it for sixty years.
Above the gravel bar, the creek split into three draws. One went up toward the old mine road. One went up into a box canyon full of boulders. One went along the side of the mountain toward the forest service land, miles of it, ponderosa pine and rock and nothing else.
"There's three ways she could have gone," he told the sheriff. "Maybe four. And there's mountain lions in every one of them."
The sheriff looked at the sky.
There were clouds building over the peaks. Big, dark ones, the kind that came in late September and dropped the temperature thirty degrees in an hour. It was already five o'clock. Sunset was at six-fifty.
"We've got two hours of light," the sheriff said. "Then it gets cold. Then it rains. Maybe snows, up high." He did not say the rest. He did not need to. A six-year-old in a Sunday dress, alone in the mountains, overnight, in a September storm.
Royal walked back down the creek to the church.
He did not run. He could not run. But he walked faster than he had walked in years.
Josie's mother was sitting on the church steps with her face in her hands. A woman from the church had her arms around her.
Royal stopped in front of her.
"Mrs. Tafoya," he said. "That song Josie sings to my horse. The two notes. Does she sing it anywhere else?"
Josie's mother looked up at him. Her face was wet.
"All the time," she said. "Everywhere. In the bathtub. In the car. When she's scared, she sings it. She says it makes her brave." She put her hands over her mouth. "She'll be singing it right now. I know she will."
Royal nodded slowly.
Then he turned around and walked up his lane toward the barn.
His daughter, who had driven up from Pueblo when she heard, met him at the barn door.
"Dad," she said. "What are you doing?"
"Saddling Smoke."
"Dad, no. You're eighty years old. He's twenty-seven. You haven't ridden him in five years. You'll fall. He'll fall. There's a storm coming."
Royal went into the tack room and took down the old saddle. It was heavy. He had to rest halfway.
"Dad, please," his daughter said. "Let the search team do it. They've got dogs. They've got radios."
"The dogs lost her at the water," Royal said. "The radios can't hear her." He swung the saddle up onto the old gray horse's back. It took him two tries. "But Smoke can."
He pulled the cinch tight. Smoke stood perfectly still. He had not been saddled in five years. He stood as if it had been yesterday.
Royal put his foot in the stirrup, and for a moment, he did not know if he could do it.
Then he pulled himself up, slowly, with both hands on the horn, and sat.
Smoke turned his head and looked back at him.
"Come on, old man," Royal said quietly. "One more."
And he rode out of the barn toward the canyon, just as the first cold drops of rain began to fall.