“Can You Tame Horses?” the Lonely Widow Asked the Apache — But Something Wilder Needed Him First
The town of Marlow Creek Colorado had seen strange things in its time. It had seen floods and droughts and fires that took half a street in an afternoon. It had seen men arrive with nothing and leave with fortunes. And men arrive with fortunes and leave with nothing, which was more common. It had seen shootings and weddings and a trial that lasted 11 days over a mule that nobody ended up getting. It was a town that had developed over its 20 years of existence a certain philosophical tolerance for the unusual.
But on the morning of April 14th, 1874 something was happening in the center of Marlow Creek’s main street that made even the most seasoned residents stop and stare. There was a man chained to a post. Not a criminal or not exactly. He had no charges against him, no warrant, no crime recorded in any ledger. What he had was the particular misfortune of having been captured 3 weeks earlier by a group of bounty hunters working the Colorado New Mexico border who had discovered upon bringing him in that the territorial government
had recently passed a provision allowing the sale of Apache prisoners as indentured labor. A provision that was legal in the way that many terrible things are legal. Which is to say that someone with power had written it down and called it a law. The man at the post was perhaps 30 years old. He was tall and lean and powerfully built with long black hair that fell past his shoulders and a particular stillness of someone who has decided that what is happening to him will not be permitted to show on his face.
His chest was bare. They had taken his shirt apparently, which said something about the people who had brought him here. He wore a traditional skirt of deerskin and wool, belted at the waist with silver-worked leather. Around his neck, several strands of beadwork that he had not allowed them to remove, which said something about him. His name, his full name, was known only to his people. What the bounty hunters had written on the sign beside him was a single word, Apache, and below that, in letters just
as large, for sale. The auction was scheduled for 10:00. By 9:45, a crowd had gathered. Marlow Creek had perhaps 300 permanent residents, and a good portion of them were in the street. Some out of genuine interest in the transaction, some out of the complicated mixture of discomfort and curiosity that such events produce. And some simply because a crowd draws a crowd, and nobody had explained to them what they were walking toward until they were already there. The auctioneer was a man named Pitts, a
thin man in a good coat, who did land sales and estate auctions, and who had been persuaded to run this particular event by the bounty hunters at a fee that he had named too high, hoping they would go away. And which they had accepted without hesitation, which was the first indication that he had made a mistake. He stood on a crate beside the post and cleared his throat, and said the things that auctioneers say. And the crowd watched. And the man at the post looked at the horizon beyond the buildings, the way a
man looks at something that isn’t there, but that he needs to believe in. At 9:58, she arrived. Her name was Eleanor Voss. She was 34 years old, a widow of 2 years, and she ran the largest cattle ranch in the county. A fact that was somewhat complicated by the other fact that most of the county believed the ranch should by rights belong to someone else. Specifically, any man willing to take it over. Which was a belief that Eleanor had spent two years declining to accommodate. She was a handsome woman in the way of
someone who has no particular interest in being handsome. Fair hair pinned up practically, a dark brown dress that was well-made and entirely functional. An expression that had been trained by two years of being underestimated into a kind of polished patience that was more formidable than anger would have been. She had come to the auction for a reason that had nothing to do with the Apache at the post. She had come because she needed workers. The Voss Ranch, 1,200 acres, 400 head of cattle, and a horse-breaking operation
that her late husband Thomas had started. And that Eleanor had continued because it was profitable and because she was better at it than Thomas had been. Though she said this to no one. Was short-handed. Three of her ranch hands had left in the past month. Two had gone to the silver mines where the pay was better. One had left for reasons he hadn’t explained, which Eleanor suspected had to do with the difficulty of working for a woman. Which she found irritating but not surprising. She needed experienced hands.
People who could work horses, specifically. The breaking operation was the ranch’s best income and it required skill. She had not expected what she found when she pushed through the edge of the crowd and understood what the auction was. She stood very still for a moment, looking at the man at the post. At the sign. At the crowd around her. Then she walked forward. She stopped in front of him. The Apache looked at her. His eyes were dark and direct and gave nothing away. The eyes of someone who has decided that
his dignity is the one thing in this situation that remains entirely his. Eleanor looked back at him with the same quality of attention she gave everything. Careful, without performance, taking stock of what was real. Then she said, simply and without preamble, in a voice quiet enough that only he could hear, “Can you tame horses?” A silence. The Apache looked at her. Something moved in his expression, not amusement exactly, but something adjacent to it. The recognition of a question that was
not what he had expected. “I was riding before I could walk,” he said. His English was precise and unaccented in a way that suggested it had been learned carefully and a long time ago. “I have broken horses that no one else could touch.” Eleanor nodded. “My name is Eleanor Voss,” she said. “I own a ranch 12 miles north of here. I need a horse handler. The work is hard and the pay is fair and you would not be anyone’s property.” She said the last part looking at him
directly, so there was no confusion about what she meant. The Apache held her gaze for a long moment. “My name is Cale,” he said. It was not his full name, but it was the name he chose to give her, which was its own kind of information. “Then we have a deal, Cale,” Eleanor said. She turned and walked toward the auctioneer. What Eleanor Voss did at the auction of April 14th was, depending on who you asked in Marlow Creek, either the most sensible or the most incomprehensible thing she had done in
two years of doing sensible and incomprehensible things. She paid the bounty hunters their asking price, $40, which she counted from her purse with the deliberate efficiency of someone making a point, and told them that she was purchasing the contract of indenture, which was the legal mechanism available to her, and that the man was coming with her, and that any further contact from them would be addressed through the county solicitor. They took the money and left, which was what men who work for money generally do
when they’ve gotten it. She had the chains removed by the blacksmith, whose shop was 20 ft away, and who did it without comment, which Eleanor thought well of him for. Caleb stood in the street and rubbed his wrists where the chains had been. Then he looked at Eleanor. “You didn’t have to do that,” he said. “I needed a horse handler,” she said. “That’s not why you did it.” She looked at him. “No,” she said, “it isn’t, but the work is real, and the offer is real,
and I’d appreciate it if we could proceed on that basis.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded. They walked to where Eleanor’s horse was tied at the rail outside the general store. She had a second horse, a bay mare she had brought specifically for hiring purposes, which turned out to be a practical coincidence, and she handed him the reins without ceremony. He took them, ran his hand along the mare’s neck once, the way a person greets rather than inspects. The mare settled immediately in the way
that horses settle for certain people and not others. Eleanor noticed this. She didn’t say anything. The ride back to the Voss ranch took 2 hours, and they covered most of it in silence, which suited both of them. The ranch appeared over a rise in the way that a well-situated property does. First the windmill, then the roofline of the main barn, then the sprawl of the corrals, then the house itself, set back from the working buildings by a respectful distance. It was a substantial operation. Anyone
could see that immediately, maintained with the careful attention of someone who understood that a ranch’s appearance was not vanity, but information about how it was run. Cale looked at it as they rode in. “It’s a good property,” he said. It was the first thing he had said in 2 hours, and it had the quality of an honest observation, rather than a compliment. “It was good when Thomas built it,” Eleanor said. “I’ve tried to keep it that way.” “Thomas was your husband?” “He was. He
died 2 years ago, fever.” A pause. “I’m sorry,” Cale said. “Thank you,” she said. They rode into the yard. Three ranch hands were visible, working at the fence line, loading feed, moving through the afternoon with the efficient pace of people who knew their work. They looked up when Eleanor and Cale rode in, and their faces did the thing that faces do when they are adjusting to something unexpected and trying not to show it. Eleanor dismounted. “This is Cale,” she said to the yard in
general. He’s the new horse handler. He knows what he’s doing.” She paused in the way of someone adding the important part. “Anyone who makes his time here difficult answers to me.” She went into the house. Cale stood in the yard with the reins of the bay mare in his hand, and three ranch hands looking at him. He looked back at them with the same patience he gave everything. Then he led the mare to the water trough, because the mare was thirsty, and that was the next thing that needed
doing. The horse’s name, informally, was Devil. Nobody had named him this as a joke or an exaggeration. He was a black stallion, 4 years old, that Eleanor had acquired 6 months ago from a rancher in New Mexico who had been unable to do anything with him and who had sold him at a significant discount with the slightly guilty expression of a man passing along the problem. Three of Eleanor’s hands had tried to work with Devil. The first had been thrown in the first 30 seconds. The second had not even managed to get a
hand on him before the horse made his position clear. The third, a man named Porter, who had 15 years of horse work behind him and who was not without skill, had spent a week trying and had finally come to Eleanor and said, with the professional honesty of a man who knows his limits, that the horse was not breakable by any method he knew. Devil was in the far corral, separated from the other horses. He moved along the fence with the nervous, coiled energy of a creature that has decided the world is against
him and is prepared to act accordingly. On Cale’s second morning at the ranch, he walked to the far corral and stood at the fence and looked at the horse. He [snorts] stood there for 2 hours. He didn’t approach the fence. He stood 10 ft back and watched. Devil watched him back. First with the aggressive attention of an animal expecting a threat, then with something more complicated as the threat failed to materialize. Eleanor, who had been watching from the house window, came out at noon.
“That horse has put three of my men in the dirt,” she said. “I know,” Cale said. “I talked to Porter this morning.” “What are you going to do?” “Today, nothing,” he said. “Today, I’m letting him understand that I’m not going to do anything.” Eleanor looked at the horse, then at Cale. “It’s the first part of a method,” he said. She went back to the house. On the third day, Cale moved to 8 ft from the fence. On the fourth, to 5 ft. On the fifth, he
stood at the fence rail itself. Devil approached him, not in friendship, but in the aggressive way of a horse testing the edges of a situation. And Cale stood completely still and let the horse make whatever assessment it needed to make. On the sixth day, he put his hand on the fence rail with his palm up. Devil looked at the hand for a long time. Then, with the careful suspicion of a creature extending trust against its better judgment, he lowered his nose to it. Porter, who had been watching from the
next corral, said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll be damned.” Eleanor saw the whole thing from the fence on the seventh day, the day Cale went into the corral. He went in without a rope, without a halter, without anything. He walked to the center of the corral and stood with his back to the horse, which was either the most confident or the most foolish thing she had seen in 20 years around horses, and she genuinely wasn’t sure which. Devil circled him once, twice, then on
the third pass, slowed. On the fourth pass, stopped. And on the fifth, the horse walked up behind Cale and put his nose on Cale’s shoulder. Eleanor stood at the fence with her hand over her mouth and said nothing for a long time. Then she said, “How did you do that?” Cale turned. Devil moved with him, staying close, the way a horse moves when it has made a decision about a person. “I didn’t make him do anything,” Cale said. “I just gave him enough time to decide on his own.”
Eleanor looked at the horse, then at the man. “Most people don’t have that kind of patience,” she said. “Most people are in a hurry,” he said. The weeks that followed were the kind that don’t announce themselves as significant while they’re happening. The ranch worked. The horse-breaking operation moved forward with a new efficiency that even the most resistant of Eleanor’s hands had to acknowledge. Cale had a quality with horses that was beyond technique. A quality that the
hands discussed among themselves in the particular way that people discuss something they’ve witnessed that doesn’t fit the categories they have available. Porter was the first to come around, which was not surprising given that he was the most honest of them about what he did and didn’t know. He began working alongside Cale, not as a student exactly, more as someone willing to watch and learn without calling it that. Cale taught without teaching, which was the only kind of teaching that Porter
would have accepted. The others followed gradually in the way that people follow when they’ve seen enough evidence and run out of reasons not to. Eleanor ran the ranch. She did this the way she did everything, carefully, directly, without wasted motion. She managed the accounts, handled the buyers who came for horses, negotiated with the ranchers who wanted cattle work done. She was, by any measure, good at this. She had been good at it since Thomas died and she had needed to be, and the competence had settled into her and
become simply who she was. She and Cale did not talk much in those early weeks. They were two people with a professional arrangement and a shared understanding of the terms. And there was a mutual respect in the space between them that was more substantial than conversation would have been. But the ranch was not large enough to be anonymous in. They ate at the same table. Eleanor had established this on the first day over the silent objection of two of her hands because she was not going to run her
household by any other standard than the one she set. They worked in proximity. They passed each other in the yard, in the barn, and the space around the corrals. And over time the nods became words, and the words became sentences. She learned that he had been educated at a mission school as a boy, had left at 14 to go back to his people, but had kept the English, kept the reading. That he had a sister somewhere to the south whose name he said with a particular quality that told Eleanor the sister was well, and that this was a
source of quiet relief. That he had been captured while traveling alone, which was a decision he had made for reasons he didn’t explain, and which Eleanor didn’t ask about because she was a person who understood that some things were not her business until offered. He learned that the ranch had been Thomas’s idea and Eleanor’s execution. That Thomas had been a good man with a good vision and a tendency to overextend, and that Eleanor had spent most of their marriage quietly fixing
the overextensions before they became problems, which Thomas had been grateful for in the abstract way of people who benefit from competence they don’t fully see. That she had two sisters in Ohio who wrote to her regularly and whose letters contained, between the lines of family news, a sustained and gentle pressure for her to come east, to sell the ranch, to live a smaller and safer life. That she had not done this and did not intend to. That the ranch was hers, not in the legal sense only, but in the deeper
sense of a thing that contains a significant portion of who you are. They were, it turned out, people who understood each other. The trouble came in the sixth week, which Eleanor had been expecting in the vague way that you expect weather when the season is right for it. His name was Raymond Cook, a rancher from the south end of the county who had interests of his own in the Voss ranch, specifically the interest of a man who had been waiting for Eleanor to fail for 2 years, and who had not been shy about
his conviction that the right buyer for the property was himself. He arrived on a Wednesday morning with two men behind him, and the particular swagger of someone who has decided in advance how a conversation is going to go. He looked at Cale working in the main corral, and his face did the thing that Eleanor had been waiting for it to do. “Eleanor,” he said when she came out to meet him, “we need to talk about your situation here.” “My situation is fine, Raymond,” she
said. “You’ve got an Apache working your horses,” he said. “People are talking.” “People can talk about whatever they like as long as the horses get worked. I don’t see the relevance.” “There’s a principle involved.” “The principle,” Eleanor said in the tone she used when she had finished being patient, “is that I run this ranch, and I make the hiring decisions, and I don’t require your opinion on either. Was there something else?”
Cook looked at her, then at Cale, who had stopped working and was standing at the corral fence looking at Cook with the same quiet directness he gave everything. Not threatening, not aggressive, simply present and unafraid. Cook left. Eleanor watched him go. Behind her, she heard Cale return to his work. She stood in the yard for a moment longer than she needed to. In the eighth week, the trouble that Raymond Cook had hinted at arrived in a more concrete form. Three men came at night. They came
after midnight when the ranch was quiet. And they came with the particular intent of people who have decided that property damage is a language that speaks where words haven’t. The main barn, where six of the horses from the breaking operation were stabled, was where they went first. Cale heard them. This was not as surprising as it might seem. He slept lightly, had for years, for reasons that had to do with the kind of life the territories demanded of Apache people. And the sound of men moving carefully in
the dark was something his ears had been trained to register the way other people’s ears registered their own names. He was out of the bunkhouse and moving before any of the other hands had woken. He didn’t shout, which would have given the men warning. He moved through the dark with the silent efficiency of someone who has moved through dark places before and for higher stakes. And he got between the three men and the barn door before they had completed whatever they came to do. What happened in the next four minutes
was not elegant. Cale was one man and there were three of them and one of them had a gun. And Cale’s bad shoulder from a fall three years back made itself known at the least convenient moment. But he knew what he was doing, which they did not. And by the time Porter and the other hands arrived with lamps, the three men were on the ground and the barn was intact and Cale was standing in the yard bleeding from a cut above his left eye and breathing carefully. Eleanor came out of the house. She
looked at the three men on the ground, then at Cale. “Are you hurt?” she said. “The cut,” he he “nothing else.” She looked at the barn, then back at him. The words that came to her were not the words she said, because the words that came to her were too large for the middle of a night crisis with hands watching and three men to deal with. She said the practical words, sending for the sheriff, seeing to the prisoners, directing the hands. But later, after everything was handled and
the yard was quiet again, she found him at the water trough, washing the cut above his eye, and she sat down on the fence rail beside him. “This was Cook,” she said. “Probably,” Kale said. “I’ll deal with it through the law,” she said, “properly.” “I know you will.” She was quiet for a moment. “Why did you come here?” she said, “not to the ranch, to the barn in the dark.” He hadn’t had to. He could have woken the others, could have
waited. Kale pressed the cloth against the cut and looked at the dark line of the mountains beyond the ranch. “Because it needed doing,” he said simply. Eleanor looked at him. “Kale,” she said, and then she said the thing she had been not saying for eight weeks, which was, “You could leave whenever you want. The contract means nothing to me. You’re not bound here.” He looked at her. “I know,” he said, “but you’re still here. The work is good,” he said. “The horses need me.
The ranch needs me.” She held his gaze for a long moment. “Yes,” she said quietly. “It does.” She went inside. The night sat around the ranch, enormous and quiet and full of stars, the way Colorado nights are. And Kale sat on the fence rail and looked at it. And somewhere in the dark, the horses moved in their stalls, and Devil, in the far corral, made the low sound he made now when Cale was nearby, which was a sound of recognition, of home. Epilogue. What Marlo Creek came
to understand. Raymond Cook was arrested 3 weeks later. The three men who had come to the ranch gave statements with the motivated honesty of people trying to reduce their own sentences that connected the night visit directly to Cook’s instructions. The county sheriff, a methodical man who disliked Cook for unrelated reasons, and pursued the case with perhaps more enthusiasm than was strictly required by duty, assembled a file that resulted in Cook being charged with criminal conspiracy and property damage.
The trial lasted 4 days. Cook was convicted and fined significantly and stripped of the county board position he had held for 6 years, which he valued more than the money. Eleanor Voss attended every day of the trial. She sat in the front row and looked at the proceedings with the composed attention she gave everything. And when the verdict was read, she nodded once, the nod of someone receiving information that confirms what they already knew, and went home. The Voss ranch continued. The horse-breaking operation expanded in
the year that followed. Word had spread in the way that word spreads in ranch country that the Voss operation produced broke horses that stayed broke, which was not as common as it should have been, and which commanded a premium accordingly. Three new hands were hired. The corrals were extended. Eleanor had the main barn re-roofed, which it had needed for 2 years. Cale stayed. He stayed because the work was good, which was true. He stayed because the horses needed him, which was also true. He stayed because Eleanor Voss was the
most capable and honest person he had encountered in a long time. And because the ranch felt, in a way that he examined carefully and found he couldn’t argue with, like a place where it was possible to exist completely, rather than partially. There was a morning in the second year, an October morning, cold and clear, the mountains showing their first snow at the top. When Eleanor came out to the far corral, where Cale was working with a young mare that had come in difficult, she leaned on the fence and watched.
The mare was coming around, slowly, carefully, the way things come around when they’re not forced. Cale worked with his back to the fence, his attention entirely on the horse, and Eleanor watched the way she had watched that first week, with the same quality of attention. After a while, without looking at her, Cale said, “What are you thinking about?” She considered it honestly. “The auction,” she said. “That morning.” She paused. “I almost didn’t go. I had no reason to
go. I went because the farrier canceled and I had an hour free.” Cale looked at her then. “And if you hadn’t gone?” he said. Eleanor looked at the mountains, at the snow on the peaks, bright in the October sun. “Then I wouldn’t have known what I was missing,” she said. “Which is the worst kind of loss, the kind where you never find out.” The mare moved toward Cale and put her head against his shoulder. The mountains stood where they had always stood, indifferent and enormous
and beautiful. And the ranch, Eleanor’s ranch, Thomas’s ranch, now something that belonged to both of them and neither of them, in the way that things belong when they’ve been built by more than one pair of hands. Spread out around them in the morning light, real and solid and continuing.
