Dream Country Read Online Free PDF

but that would be like trying to plant a cactus in an apple orchard. Wouldn’t take. Besides, there were other reasons why James couldn’t leave this land.
    Jake was here. He was three when James had lost him. They’d ridden down to the spring grazing lands on a roundup, father and son in the same saddle. Twelve cowboys altogether had ridden along, plenty of eyes to keep watch on one tiny kid. Sage had cried because Daisy had wanted Sage to stay home with her. James had felt so bad that day, hearing his daughter wail as they’d galloped off, but soon he felt grateful. At least he had one child left alive.
    They had never found Jake’s body, so they’d never buried his bones. There wasn’t a grave to visit. His spirit dwelled in the canyon, near the rock where James had told him to sit, in the thirty seconds he’d left him alone while he’d ridden off to rope a steer. After all this time, James knew Jake wasn’t coming back, but he wasn’t going to abandon his son to the canyon, with no one to look after him, no matter what.
    The ranch buildings were visible now. James had a log cabin out back, but wanting to check on his father, he rode up the trail toward the big gabled stone house. The land was bone dry. He’d spent the day watching the sky, thunderheads forming without letting out any rain. Riding to the headwaters of the creeks that fed his ranch, he’d seen rocks that hadn’t been above water in his lifetime. Tomorrow he’d go out to burn the irrigation ditches, ready to catch whatever rain might come.
    Reining in his hard-ridden horse, he stepped down from the saddle and led him to the corral. He could smell Louisa’s cooking. She wasn’t quite his stepmother—she and Dalton had never seen fit to get married—but she’d lived with the old man for over twenty years. Louisa Rydell was as different from James’s mother, Rosalind Tucker, as any woman could be. James had never been happy about the idea of seeing his mother replaced, but with his father losing ground, lately he’d been almost glad of Louisa’s presence.
    Slapping his hat back and forth across his chaps, he shook off the trail’s dust. It covered his clothes, his skin, the back of his throat. His hands were brown and dry, and his fingers ached from holding the reins, not a lick of moisture in the air. He’d paid to have water trucked in, so the troughs were full. Bending over, he scooped up a careful handful of water. He drank one, soaked his neck with another. Locusts hummed in the trees, and some bird was squawking.
    James knew all the wildlife, and he hadn’t heard a bird like that before. It stopped him in his boots. Standing still, he looked around. Most birdsong came from the chaparral, and he turned to survey the dense, dry thicket of dwarf evergreens and cactus. But this song was coming from the ranch house, and it reminded James of an ancient sound, one he had rarely heard for over fifteen years.
    After all this time, he still heard a baby crying every time he turned around. But two juncos flew out of the porch eaves, onto a cottonwood branch. They chattered noisily, dipping into the water hole, then flying back onto the porch. Shaking his head, James let out a big breath. Inside the house, he heard the radio playing and pans clattering. The cooking smells were strong.
    “What the hell’s that noise?” Dalton Tucker asked, walking out onto the porch. Small-framed, he had a limping, pigeon-toed gait. He had had polio as a child, and it left him with one leg shorter than the other.
    “Birds, Dad.”
    “Building nests in the goddamn eaves? In October?”
    “Beats me.”
    “Snowbirds, at that. In the middle of a drought. We’re in for a bad winter. I’m telling you, son,” the old man said, shaking his head, “the birds know. This dry patch’ll look like child’s play compared to what’s coming. Snowbirds nesting on the porch . . . did you see the frost this morning?”
    “I did.”
    “No water in the streams, but