The goat’s horns grew in funny. One was floppy and fell off at three inches. The other grew up properly, then U-turned, aimed into his blocky brain. Saul fixed it. Held the goat down, fingers across the rock-hard brow. His horizontal pupils were turned vertical under Saul’s big hand. The cord snaked across the yard. The electric buzz was entirely alien; the goat couldn’t escape it. Couldn’t escape Saul. He looked up at the trees seeking salvation. The saw spit bits of horn into the snap peas. His tiny tail wagged throughout the catastrophe. What choice but to trust? He danced about the yard after, blood flying across green grass, dust, and sun as he shook his head, then lay in the cool weeds, thinking.

They were stopped again at the bottom of a bluff. Slow as slow as slow, Ella wrote in her little saddlebag notebook.

“On what kind of chase can you write in a book!” It was not a question. Slow as molasses chase. Molasses. She’d packed a squeeze bottle of it so put a line through the word.

“For fuck’s sake!” she tried later and the four men turned, unaccustomed to that degree of vulgarity from her.

“That’s right, fuck! Fuck’s the operative word here!”

They rode on when her fit was done.

Slow as a glacier but too hot for glaciers so she blocked them.

She considered going home. Her three kids. She could not block them. In the dubious care of Saul’s cousin. How many miles till they missed her? She pulled back on her reins. The paint objected but obeyed, turned, pawed, watched the ten mules climb, slow as mules in a pack string on an uphill slope.

Saul and Bowman were finally going up and over the bluff after some other delay involving rope rope rope. The natural leaders. Bowman: the neighbor across Dan’s fence line, Mr. Tall-Lean with chiseled jaw, the man taking all their money. His boy was staying at Dan’s with the cows. Their fiasco was a Bowman family windfall. Slow as …

The very front pages of her little book were full with lists, ever crossed out, ever growing. Still, most of the book remained divinely empty, an open range of pages to be arrived at and filled, though not the last page, which was already jammed with tiny words, a “mule thought,” numbered as the first, though mules don’t—as goes the common wisdom—tend to think or count. Her own handwriting too, very small.

She’d blocked the mule thought this morning in the tent and did so again now.

The bluff was not big but steep … a pillbox of dust.