The cold wind practically took her breath away as she drove around the edge of the pasture. Any cows about to deliver would find a secluded spot, maybe close to a mesquite thicket. She didn’t see any, but she did see a pack of coyotes tearing across the next pasture over, and there were tracks right up to the fence line.

“Where’s a donkey when you need one?” Stevie asked. “Or Tex, for that matter?”

As if in answer to her question, a braying sound filled the air. Stevie whipped her head around to see a little spotted donkey making his way from the middle of the herd toward the fence.

“I think this four-wheeler scared them off for you,” she said as she drove on a little farther. “But you keep up the good work.”

Donkeys protected cattle from coyotes pretty much the same way alpacas protected sheep from predators. That thought caused Stevie to wonder why the Ryan family had kept the alpacas after Mia had gotten that wild hair and sold her sheep. She was wondering about that when she made the corner and started along the fence that marked the very back of the forty-acre pasture.

“I’ll have to ask Cody about that when I get back to the bunkhouse,” she said, and then silently gave herself a scolding for talking to herself.

Her focus shifted in a hurry when both front tires of her four-wheeler dropped off into a massive hole that was hidden by the snow. Everything happened as if in slow motion. One second, she was studying a cow that was moving away from the herd toward a big scrub oak tree with broken-down limbs. The next Stevie was flying head over heels through the air toward a grove of scrub oak trees just a few feet from the hole. She threw out her hands trying to grab onto something to break the fall, but all she got was arms full of cold air. One of the lower ice-covered branches of the tree broke her fall, but in doing so ripped at her face and arm. She landed on her back, and the gray sky seemed to fall right down on top of her, sucking all the air from her lungs. Then everything went black.

*  *  *

There was no path to the barn where the panels for temporary stalls were stored, and that barn was almost two miles away. The trip that should have taken five minutes even over rough pasture took half an hour. They had to drive through a foot of snow that was lying on top of a couple of inches of ice.

“I will be so glad to see bare ground again,” Jesse said when they finally reached the barn.

“You are preaching to the choir,” Cody told him. “I may never even listen to that song about dreaming of a white Christmas again.”