The head came, then the neck. It was a private time. Dan cut a stick and whipped the air. “A Percheron’s the second-biggest horse. Shires win first, largest on the planet. Clydesdales win third. Clydesdale people bicker. Percherons hold all the records. That’s undisputed.”

“Shut up,” she said. “Get over here.”

The mare pawed the air. Dan fanned the flies from her face. The Percheron grazed and grazed. What are life and death to a horse, after all? Unworthy of comment is what.

The foal fell out, gray and enormous. The mare nuzzled its gray ears folded back, licked the face and spindle legs tucked up to the muzzle, tucked down and still. The foal came to them warm but was getting cold. Dan dragged it downwind by one back hoof. He dropped the foal on the far side of the oak in the sun. The mare gave up sniffing and laid her head on stubble. Her belly rose and fell.

“Better think of getting up,” Ginny said and slid her hand inside the halter, didn’t tug, not yet. Tripped to the fence and sat, her face in her knees, in the meantime. Peeled her coveralls off to jeans, flung the coveralls. A young woman still. The Percheron nibbled her hair from over the fence with his big lips. She shoved his face. The wind was hot. Dan walked down to the barn and returned with a shovel. He dug a hole. Ginny raked the afterbirth in. She pried a stone.

“A stone’s just for show,” he said. “Only slows the coyotes.”

“They won’t bother,” she said. “Plenty of food this time of year.”

He set the stone over the hole. Sat back down on his branch. All this was once a tide of stone, rockslides from the Mormoras. Imagine the tumble. The new piles and gorges. How strange the new mountain must have looked after the slide! The little gorges later filled by wind, leaves, and dust, then covered over with roots and sod until even the tallest rocks were buried to their chins: Here Lies a Stone Big as Your Barn. I Will Crush Your Barn at the Resurrection.

“It’s incurable,” he said.

“Silence is the only cure for the incurable.”

They urged the mare up, to no avail. They watched the cows and horses below, the fires blurring the neighbors’ hills, Milton’s and Johnson’s, Baltazar’s and Cortez’s, the Mestizo cluster, though intermarried now, mixed with Bolts, Blakes, and Native clans who’d lightened up and gone to Congress, come back disgusted. Shaws. A plane with pontoons was bound behind the Saint’s Head, to lakes you couldn’t walk to on the Old Swede’s Trail. Dan thinking grin and bear it, sisters again, weddings. “In storms or raids,” he said, “they pushed the oxen in their own cabin doors, shoveled dung out their tiny windows, dried it, stacked it, burned it in winter for baking.”