Gavin Washington let Travis lead the way home on his Exmoor pony, the better to watch over him. The boy wore his riding helmet, which he disliked. But he wouldn’t be receiving his longed-for cowboy hat until he’d had a few more weeks of experience in the saddle.
Samson was a bit restive about the slow pace and would have liked to gallop full-out or at least canter. But the stallion was always mindful of the signals from his reins and his rider’s legs.
Following the pleasant midday warmth, a late-afternoon cooling had begun. Thin high clouds seemed not to drift through the sky, but instead to form on it like a skin of ice crystalizing on the surface of a pond, glazed patches reaching toward one another with growing fractal fingers that blurred away the blue. The fitful breeze had become constant, though it hadn’t swelled into a wind, rippling the sage not yet in bloom, shivering the spidery late-winter flowers of coombe wood.
Gavin remained alert for drones. Sometimes he thought he heard one in the distance, but getting a directional fix, before the sound faded, was hampered by the clatter of horseshoes on the stony soil plus the creak and clink of tack.
By the time they came out of the wildland to the gate at the back of their property, near four o’clock, Gavin no longer had any concern about the drones, which must have been flown by hobbyists. He could hear an aircraft circling high over the valley; but he hadn’t detected even a suggestion of the comparatively shrill motor of a drone in almost an hour and a half.
They watered the horses at the trough and led them into the stable and removed their saddles. They conducted them into their stalls and put on their feed bags.
Later, after the horses had been fed and the tack had been properly cared for, when Gavin came out of the stable with the boy, the growl of an airplane crawling the sky caused him to search for a dark shape against the hoarfrost clouds. The craft wasn’t within view, perhaps off to the north, and he assumed it was not the same plane that he’d heard earlier.