Pamela Ryder
The terrain turned flat and treeless, beset with outcroppings of jagged rock angled aslant to the earth and great plates fractured along fault lines where they had been folded over on themselves again and again into scarps and scars of granite and tuft. The pleats of rock stood sharp and clean in colors of reds and rust, free of signs of weathering and the passage of time as if newly thrust from some unseen force deep below the surface and by this he thought they must be moving still, slipping and buckling upward even as he looked, even as they seemed not to move but must be in some trick of time too slow to see, some clock apart from the one that tick tocks the world.
He met no other riders except a troupe of Apaches. Ten or so men, a hunting party homeward on their wild range ponies. Palominos, duns, pintos coming on at an easy lope, fitted with old cavalry saddles covered in hide, the pommel-horns hung with quail strung in bunches. The Apaches dressed in deerskin shirts and deerskin breeches, some with their dark hair loose along their shoulders and some with it evenly cropped at the neck, and all with scarves of cotton cloth twisted over their foreheads and tied from behind. They came toward him, upright and astride in postures natural and rocking with the gait of their animals. Billy halted his horse. He took off his hat. They came on, steady and unswerving. Billy held up his hand, but they did not stop and when they rode so closely by on either side of him, he saw that they looked past him and ahead to the far horizon. The Appaloosa nickered and tossed her head as horses greeting horses will do, but the Apache ponies did not answer and went on.
He turned to look at their leaving, at the swinging bundles of quail hanging head-down and wingspread, the gutted pronghorns trussed and slung across the rumps of their horses, the desert dust of hoof strikes rising around them.
Billy put on his hat. He looked at the hand he had raised. Yes, there was his hand. He put his hand on the neck of the Appaloosa. Yes, and she was there. Her hide stiff and smooth. He tugged at her mane. She turned to look at him, her eye clear and gleaming. You see me, he said.