The mare wanted out the south gate. Dan offered the north. She acquiesced, bobbed out of the corral, and he followed. “Maybe I am,” he said. “You should hear them in town. For days, nothing else. You and Shaw.” He nodded toward the oak. “You should’ve closed his gate. You’re smart. Should’ve covered your tracks. Protected us.”

The mare headed up the north field, the last field to be burned, just yesterday. The ground still smelled strong, black-stubble char the quarter mile up to the old oak. Dan followed.

“I’m sorry,” Ginny called after him.

“I’d like to be a caveman,” he called back. “I’d like to try it.”

“I’ve said sorry a hundred times.” His back was lean and dry and split in the middle.

“Say it again anyway.”

“I’m sorry I did it.”

He bent, rubbed his knees that were always sore now. “I don’t feel better.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ve loved you right, haven’t I?”

“Yes you have.”

“What’s he got?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been good to you, haven’t I?”

“Don’t know why,” she called. “It felt good. I couldn’t stop it.”

He held his head. “You should hear them talk and talk.”

“Forget them. It’s only us.”

“Only us?” His grin was wrong. He turned back uphill after the mare, who was on a beeline. He walked with long fast strides, three miles an hour uphill. He’d clocked it. He liked a straight line as well as any. If he stayed to the line past the oak, he’d jump Shaw’s fence, which ran the knob above Shaw’s house and barn, and keep going up Hinton’s Hill to Barryman’s Quarry, two more hours along the ridge to the base of the Mormoras where the land was too broken up for grazing.

“She’s headed for shade,” he called back. “Come on. I’ll need you.”

They made a parade of three up the quarter mile. An oak was a rarity in the region, the seed no doubt delivered in the excrement of birds. “Hurry the fuck up,” he said, but calmer now, praise be.

“I’m hurrying the fuck up,” she said in a matching tone, but hung back in body and mind near the outer range of his mutterings.