I just hoped that our work was done by the time that someone turned on the faucet and started thinking it had been pretty smart of me to roll up the yellow slicker that now rode on the cantle behind me.

Pulling up, I turned us toward the wind and watched as a strike of lightning hit the flats between Powder Junction and here, the bolt holding like a heavenly finger poking the earth for emphasis. “Wait for it, Bambino . . .”

The thunder rolled up the wide valley between the mountains and the endless ocean of the plains, a soft rumble that built and then subsided like a tidal voice.

The Appaloosa backed up a half step and sashayed to the left as I wrapped the reins in a fist, determined to avoid the horseman’s greatest fear, to be left afoot. “Easy.”

He tensed, and I caught wind of one of his tricks: getting the rider’s weight traveling backward, he would likely launch and leave you tumbling off his rear as he raced for the barn alone.

“You can try that one, little Bambino, but I’ve seen it before and you’ll be dragging two hundred and fifty pounds of very unhappy sheriff.” I reached down and petted his neck. “Just so we’re clear on this—I will never let go.”

Never let go. Those three words echoed in my mind as I turned south, riding the ridge and letting the Appaloosa watch the lightning strikes and get used to the accompanying thunder instead of it overtaking him from the rear.

We joined up with a cattle path and spooked a group of mule deer that had bedded down for the night. Bambino shifted but stayed steady as we continued on, the first sprinkles of the storm reaching us like a dusting from the clouds as they shook themselves off. It felt good, and I thought back at how much time I’d spent in a saddle in my youth, herding cattle with my father and grandfather, the real rancher of the family.

My father had refined the ranch, but my grandfather had built it, aggressively buying property from adjacent families until he had accumulated many thousands of acres. I was on intimate terms with those acres and knew every single stand, swale, gully, and canyon where a cow and calf could hole up and brush pop in the very worst of weather.

Men get on edge doing some kinds of work, while others develop an ability to continue on where others can’t. My father was outside working—I was eating breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table in the dim light of my grandfather’s home—when the old man told me he didn’t particularly care for me and that in his estimation I probably wasn’t going to amount to much.

Calving season, and I was fourteen years old.

Staring at him through the pewter condiments holder on the round table as I sipped a glass of buttermilk, I’d mumbled an honest response: “That’s all right; as far as I’m concerned you haven’t turned out so great either.”

He hated everyone but had a special, single-cask-strength hatred held in reserve for his immediate family. He had kept his son, a natural-born engineer, from continuing with his schooling, instead chaining him to those thousands of acres and a life of agricultural servitude. To give my father his just due, he had not allowed that to poison his own life, his wife’s, or mine.

The bulwark against the poison usually held, but every once in a while the old bull and I locked horns. I’d been working seventy-two hours straight without sleep and had been stepped on, kicked, horned, butted, stomped, pinched, swatted, and crushed—and I’d had about enough of his venom.

He showed me his teeth. “I suppose you think you’re a man now?”

He was eighty-two years old with a receding hairline and little tufts of hair on the sides of his head that gave the impression that he was an owl—not a wise old owl, but rather the kind that hears small, defenseless things from a great distance. He wore steel-rimmed, round glasses, which did nothing but emphasize the imagery. His eyes were gray, a gift I’d received from him, perhaps the only one.

In the pale light of that morning I’d studied him.

“Stand up.”

I sipped my buttermilk.

He stood, and I ignored him.

Still in remarkable shape, he was broad at the beam and winnowed down to nothing but stringy muscle and gall. He came around the table to look down at me.

I tried to feel sorry for him just then, tried to understand where all the anger, recrimination, and bitterness that had eaten up his life had come from. There was talk of a woman other than my long-deceased grandmother, rumors of a dalliance that had somehow been swept away with the years. There were also whispers of a lost act of violence so unspeakable that its utterance still went unvoiced.

With the first swipe, the blue-willow-patterned cup had flown from my hand, knocking over the condiment holder and the sugar bowl and shattering like the fragile relationship between us, spraying its contents across the table and the papered wall.

I stood, the rough-cut joists of the floor creaking beneath me, my nose brushing his as I gathered myself, looking down at him from a four-inch height advantage.

He’d forgotten how big I was, how big I had become, didn’t know then how big I would be, but the surprise didn’t last and he struck me across the face with his open hand.

It stung, but I didn’t show it, only turning my eyes, his eyes, back on him, my expression as neutral as the nickel-plated color we shared.

A thick forefinger, leathery and stiff as a truncheon, bobbed against my chest like a woodpecker having found a soft spot on an otherwise impenetrable tree. “When I say stand . . .”

They say he’d killed a man, numerous men, but I had grown up in a period when the ghosts of a previous era still roamed the plains and had seen enough that those spirits didn’t affect me any longer. Say what you will about age and experience, youth and indifference can engender an annoying strength of its own.

“Don’t ever do that again.” I brushed past him and deliberately walked slowly back to the calving shed where my father still labored.

Later in the morning when we had returned to the house, my grandfather was gone, likely on one of his aberrant rides where he would disappear for hours and then reappear, barking orders as if he’d never left. When we entered the kitchen, the remains of the mug and its contents had dried on the wall and the floor, but where the sugar had dusted the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, that thick forefinger had traced the words “Never Let Go.” Before I could get a good look at it, my father swept the words away and coaxed them back into the open container at the edge of the table like a scouring wind.

Never Let Go.

Those words had haunted me for decades, especially after my grandfather died, and it was only when my father had been approaching his final rest that he told me the significance of the words and the story, a story that had changed the trajectory of my family for generations.

Never Let Go.

Bambino’s ears perked at my words; probably wondering why I had made the same statement twice, and I could see the white sickle in his eye. The lightning struck again, closer this time, and he sidetracked and sashayed some more, reversing into his launch position, but I turned his head toward the strike to show him that I wasn’t hiding anything. If he shot forward he would have to do it without the benefit of seeing what was ahead of him, and in my experience horses are loath to do that.

“Easy.”

The resounding thunder shook the ground, and Bambino circled to the right, slipping off the narrow trail, digging in with his rear hooves and driving up the slope. I gave him his head just a bit and then changed the lead on him in an attempt to get him going in the right direction but also to distract him from any further mischief.

The rain was steady now, and I thought of the slicker behind me on the saddle. It was tempting, but I wasn’t sure what kind of response Bambino might have to me suddenly producing a large yellow raincoat and swirling it above his head in the pervasive wind like a banshee. Actually, I knew exactly what Bambino’s response would be, and I thought it best to avoid being knocked out of the park.