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onto his hide. “Chico, where’s Jim and Ira? They must have gone off and left us.” My chance to be a real cowboy was crashing in on me. I was in danger of becoming a dude. And on my first roundup. I needed to cowboy-up before someone saw me crying.
    Chico didn’t seem too perturbed that we had been walking the canyon by ourselves forever. He meandered at the same pace, occasionally nudging the back end of a cow that had slowed. This helped calm me. I had wiped the tears from my face and was contemplating how to pee from the saddle when I heard cows bawl from a side canyon. A cowboy’s yell followed. We were saved!
    Jim and Ira arrived a few minutes later. I’m sure they saw tear streaks on my dusty cheeks but neither said a word. And of course, Chico never let on that there had been a problem since by his standards we had done just fine.
    After lunch, the cowboys branded and sorted the cattle, and then we drove them back to Robb’s Well. By the end of the fifteen-hour day, I was one exhausted, proud little cowboy. No one could call me a dude. I had made a hand.
    I turned off the state highway onto Lazy B’s eight-mile ranch road that started in New Mexico and ended in Arizona. Somehow being on Lazy B made me feel that much closer to Chico. He and I had ridden over these hills and dales; he had grazed in the horse pasture through which this road curved. Even though by age twelve I had outgrown riding Chico, I never outgrew my love for him. He had taught me so many lessons, including patience and how to keep the faith.
    I pulled into headquarters and parked. The new moon thickened the darkness so I could barely see the outline of horses fifty yards away in the corral. My boots ground the gravel. One of the horses snorted; another answered with a low nicker. Maybe they were reading my mind and the question simmering there. Would my love affair with horses begin with one wild horse and end with a herd of them? The moon would cycle through its phases almost fifty times before shedding light on the answer.

3.
    The Dream Takes Shape
    “I’m getting dizzy watching you pace in there,” said Sue. She was in the family room adjacent to my office. “This house can’t contain your excitement. We need to get out of here.” Her tone indicated there would be no arguing. “Why don’t you go throw the old mattress in the pickup and cut some steaks from that quarter of beef hanging in the cooler. I’ll pack some potatoes and wine and we can head up to Horseshoe Canyon.”
    So the day after my conversation with Dayton, still afloat in a bubble of possibilities, my wife and I drove an hour across the flatlands of Lazy B to the part known as the Gruwell Ranch, then up fifteen hundred feet into a juniper-filled canyon where the ruts of the pickup trail ended in a flat, shaded area. With the nearest human at least ten miles away, this was my haven for chewing on a challenge, a dream, or a grilled steak.
    We unloaded the cooler and dinner provisions and spread charcoal in the grill. I opened a bottle of wine and grabbed two glasses. “Let’s walk up there before we start the fire,” I said, pointing the bottle at a two-foot-high rock wall about a hundred yards above us.
    We climbed through the mellowing light and leaned our backs against the warm stones. The wine gurgled into a glass. I handed it to Sue, then poured my own.
    “Did I ever tell you this was the site of the Stein’s Pass Indian skirmish?”
    “At least ten times,” she said, poking her elbow into my side.
    I liked to come up here and imagine how the battle between the Apache Indians and the Seventh U.S. Cavalry might have been fought. Starting from Stein’s Pass ten miles east, the cavalry had driven the Indians to this spot, where they forced the band of Apaches higher and higher. The Indians had climbed this hill on foot and erected this rock battlement to shield them from the soldiers’ bullets. The cavalry, not wanting to storm the fortress at dusk,