Dan disappearing into the loft’s big open window, reappearing with a scythe, etc. Grannie wasn’t big on the concept of irony either. Irony was lower than a snake. Dan found a leghold trap and was dragging it around. He sat with the trap and WD-40 as the pit got filled. Finished the entire can. The chain draped over his thighs. The dirt poured cool and dark. The smoke was blue rising. Later still, he’d insisted on bringing the trap on the trip. Ridden with the chain over his shoulders as far as the quarry, its teeth banging the chestnut’s haunches until Maul intervened, took the trap, and (never waste! never abandon anything!) looped it onto the buckskin’s load. She was herculean, she could take it, Maul said. Still, Dan’s old trap went missing on the first night’s campout. The ride’s first story, good campfire fare: “The Mystery of the Missing Trap.” Some noise in the night, Dan claimed. He’d parted the weeds hunting for it in the a.m., made a mess of the kitchen things too, which slowed Ella’s packing. And some bread was missing. Saul pretended to hunt too. This was all fine. Ella would set it all down. She’d remember to Remember what you want to. Forget what you don’t. The key to a good life.

“Hear the one about the lesbian cowboy?” Bowman asked now, down in the creek.

“No, but I’m guessing that’s about to change.”

Ella pulled her little book out, unlocked it, tore out the last page and stuffed the mule thought in her back pocket.

They rode on.

The trap would rust, melt, and feed a plant, but the backhoe still hummed in her head. In her head, Saul still (again and again) uncurled himself from the cab, earmuffs down around his neck, the pit full, the pit no longer a pit.

“What we need now,” Saul had said, “is a well-trained pack string.”