ITEMS CONTINUE TO COME IN, and I enter each in my book and make a plan for its display, taking into consideration the condition of the piece and what it has to say about its maker and use. To my delight, an elderly Native woman brought in several baskets and spent a few hours telling me about their making. Two were her own work and a third had been made by her mother. One was made of slough sedge and imbricated with a design of cherry bark and maidenhair fern stems, representing the long canoes of the area. Another was an open-work basket of cedar withes, used for clams and other things that might drain as you carried them. The one I liked best was a beautiful basket of coiled spruce root, generous and wide and so tightly woven it could be used to carry water. And in speaking of the baskets, the woman shared with me the narrative of women’s work, which had more than a little to do with the marriage of beauty and utility. I thought of how her hands had been shaped by her mother’s hands to harvest and prepare the materials for baskets, to shape them and decorate them and preserve them. And how the hands of the women who’d embroidered the tea towels, pieced together fabric for quilts, dyed and printed plain cottons for clothing, had in turn been shaped by their mother’s hands. The shadows of our mothers and grandmothers are forever over our shoulders, their arms over ours, their hands ready to help us find our way in the materials.

“Father wants me to help with the mare, Mother. I know I’ve just come in, but can you spare me? I’ll clean up the camping gear when we’re finished outside.”

Jenny was agreeable, wanting only to know how the camping had gone. She told Margaret to let the others know there would be food when they were finished.

At the barn, William and August were getting the equipment for the covering together. Because they were uncertain how Thistle would behave during the mating, they were going to use a twitch and hobbles, and these were brought out to the breeding chute. William asked Margaret to prepare Thistle, since the mare was accustomed to the girl saddling her. He had a bucket of warm water ready and a length of clean cotton for wrapping her tail. Margaret carefully bound the upper portion of the black tail, talking and stroking the tense muscles of Thistle’s rump and back while she did so. Then, once the tail was bound, she carefully washed the mare’s haunch and vulva. She would be holding Thistle during the mating, trying to keep her calm and cooperative.

Outside, William had the stallion haltered with the breeding halter, which had a special band that could drop to put pressure on the Prince’s sensitive nose if he needed to be restrained. He had been washed with warm water and was clearly excited as he waited near the chute, dancing around, his upper lip lifting and twitching as he smelled Thistle in the air. Twice he gave a high-pitched scream that had the range stallion screaming back from a corral on the other side of Culloden.

William led the stallion away while Margaret walked Thistle into the breeding chute, August waiting to help her with the hobble and twitch. A flock of magpies had gathered on the big cottonwood near the barn, muttering and eager not to miss a thing. Later Margaret would remember the way everything was washed with golden light, as thick and limpid as honey. Each sound was articulated clearly — the chickens clucking as they made their way into the shed, one of the dogs groaning as he scratched an ear with his hind paw, the crows calling as they flew above Culloden on their way to some new carrion.

Margaret brought Thistle right up to the bar. The horse was nervous, but still she let August fasten the hobble from her near front foot to her off hind foot. Then he gently applied the twitch to her upper lip while she tossed her head until Margaret brought it down and held it steady. August put the neck guard over her shoulders, adjusting it so that her withers were covered, buckling it under her neck.

“What’s that pad for?” asked Nicholas, who had come to the front of the chute in case Margaret needed help to hold Thistle.

“Stallions usually keep their balance with their teeth while mating. This way, he can grab the guard and not poor Thistle. We know what he’ll be like for this, but not her. I feel bad about putting all these restraints on her when I think she’ll be fine, but it would terrible if she kicked the Prince or one of us. She seems so anxious.”

“She’s had foals,” commented August, “so she’s not maiden. This won’t be new to her.”

William was bringing the stallion to the chute now, the horse prancing and snorting eagerly on the lead. He was well-trained and didn’t ignore his handler, but he was fully drawn and eager to mount Thistle. William brought him to the near side of the breeding chute to tease the mare and prepare her. She urinated and then lifted her tail, almost sitting down as she moved her rump back and forth. The stallion’s neck steamed with sweat, and he was blowing hard as he entered the chute, William helping him to mount the waiting mare and to position his penis at her opening by lifting her bound tail right back. August released Thistle’s hobble so that she could brace herself under the stallion’s great weight.

“Could you hold her head a little higher?” William asked, and Margaret lifted the mare’s head, speaking calmly to her as she did so. Thistle’s chest pushed hard against the bar and the stallion repeatedly thrust into her, August and Nicholas helping to steady her and keep her as still as they could. The Bonny Prince snorted and grunted, rolling his eyes, as he thrust violently against Thistle’s damp rump. Margaret held her breath as she felt the weight of the two bodies driving against the breeding chute. The stallion was gripping the neck cover with his teeth, his mouth was so close that Margaret could see where the long teeth left his gums, the fierce strength with which they clenched the leather. Yet there was beauty in his great shape covering the sweating mare, his shoulder muscles rippling with the exertion of his movements and his jugular groove contracting. And then it was over, William was backing him off to the mare’s near side and swinging him away from her hindquarters, then leading him away to cool down before taking him back to the barn.

August quietly removed Thistle’s twitch and neck-cover and took the loosened hobble from her foot. She was trembling, and Margaret backed her out of the chute, leading her down to walk along the creek. Nicholas walked beside them, quiet after the drama of what had taken place, wondering at the shock and radiance of the huge bodies moving together in that narrow space between weathered boards. He brushed a fly off Margaret’s arm and felt her flinch.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s fine, you surprised me, that’s all. I wonder if Thistle is cool enough to put away now. My mother wanted you to come in for something to eat before you left.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said Nicholas, still thinking of the horses. “I had no idea how involved a process horse-breeding is. I suppose I just thought horses would be turned out in privacy, not brought together like that. Do you always help?”

Margaret looked at him steadily and replied, “Well, Nicholas, as you saw, several people are needed, and I’m the likely one, aren’t I? Our range horses are allowed to mate in privacy, as you put it, but with the Bonny Prince and Thistle, we have a big investment, and we can’t take the chance of one of them getting injured.”

He realized that she’d taken his comment as criticism of her complicity in the procedure, and that was not what he had intended. She was murmuring to the horse now, telling her they’d go to the barn and get her some oats and a bucket of water. She didn’t look at him.

“Margaret, I only meant that I keep finding out how little I know about anything, even relations among horses. Please don’t think I was questioning how your father manages his ranch. I thought you were both marvellous, the way you knew exactly what to do, and how you were so matter-of-fact about everything. I’m twenty-two years old, the product, you might say, of a fine university, and I must confess I was somewhat embarrassed when that stallion approached your mare. The universities don’t even pretend to touch on life, it seems.”

She smiled at his admission. “On a ranch we see more than most people, I suppose. I think my father might be unusual, too, because he’s always assumed I would help with these things, and he hasn’t felt it would hurt my character to see animals doing what it is in their nature for them to do. But I was embarrassed, too, today. I thought I was going to cry at one point, I can’t really say why.”

She was looking at him over the halter rope, shy again as she had been in the kitchen, at the marsh, on the road to Spahomin with the blooming bitterroot between them. He leaned forward to kiss her mouth, his hand on Thistle’s neck for balance. They returned the horse to the barn, Nicholas going to the pump to fill a bucket with water while Margaret scooped oats out of the feed room and rubbed the horse down with a soft cloth to soothe her. Unwrapping the mare’s tail, Margaret used an end of the cotton to wipe a stream of mucous from her inner flank. Closing the stall door, Margaret led Nicholas to the warm kitchen, where William and August were sitting at the table, eating hot biscuits and fried chicken. After their meal, the men sat on the porch in the dusk, drinking a dram of whiskey while Margaret helped her mother to put away food and wash dishes. The bats were coming out, darting between barn and cottonwoods, where a new hatch of mayflies hovered in the gilded air. Two nighthawks hunted over Culloden, their shrill cry and buzz, cry and buzz sounding over the ranch yard. And in a small corral, the stallion that had not been given the opportunity to mate with Thistle voiced his frustration to the first stars.

After August and Nicholas had left to ride back to Spahomin, Margaret scoured the skillet and plates from the camping trip. She took kitchen leavings out to the chickens and listened for coyotes. She could hear horses stirring in their stalls; the roan gelding in the yard neighed once for reasons known only to him, and the Bonny Prince answered. It was lonely to be the only one standing in the yard, listening to the world going on in its intimacy. Margaret returned to the house and said her goodnights to her parents. Then she took a jug of warm water to her room. Tipping the water into her wash-bowl, she took off her shirt and chemise and washed her arms and breasts, using a bar of scented soap she’d been given by her Astoria grandmother (“Hard milled with the flowers of Provence”), drying herself with a rough towel that smelled of spring air. She washed her ankles, her feet and her knees. Taking off her underpants, she crouched over the bowl to wash between her legs. The warm water felt welcome. Margaret also felt something else, a feeling she didn’t have a word for, but suddenly she knew how Thistle had felt in the hours before the stallion mounted her. She must have yearned for him, the consolation of his body in the golden air, waited for him, restless in her solitude. Was this what the poets meant when they spoke of longing, this physical ache which felt like hunger and pain, like the beautiful complicity of fire?

Nicholas was glad that August was a man of few words as they rode home in the darkness, the horses jogging surely on the dusty road. He was full of astonishment at the way this sojourn was unfolding beyond any expectation he could have had. He was beginning to think he had fallen in love, not just with the girl he had left behind in her mother’s kitchen, but with the entire valley. After they’d unsaddled the horses and made conversation with Alice, August’s wife, Nicholas read a little by the light of his kerosene lamp and worked on his notes. Moths fluttered around in the weak light, and one or two entered the transparent chimney, briefly flaring, then turning to soot against the glass. Lying on his back, he thought of Margaret riding down from the hill in starlight that first night; he remembered kissing her while summer lightning crackled in the sky. He had known girls before, the daughters of his father’s associates or the sisters of classmates at Groton, then Columbia. He’d escorted them to parties, the opera, for Sunday outings to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, making witty conversation by the roses. Yet none had made as singular an impression as the sight of Margaret Stuart, her hair dishevelled and her clothing dusty, cooking grouse over a fire of sweet pine. Or holding Thistle steady while the stallion copulated with her, bracing himself with his teeth. Nicholas turned his face into the pillow and said her name to the darkness, quietly.

Nicholas received permission from William to take Margaret to a dance in the Nicola hall the next weekend; they would go with August and Alice and their oldest daughter, Eliza. William provided the buggy, August driving it to Spahomin the day before the dance, and it had been arranged that Margaret would be collected late in the afternoon. She had hung her rose-coloured dress in her window that morning so that the creases could ease out during the day. Her mother heated the sadirons on the stove and helped her to press it, the kitchen redolent of damp muslin and steam. Margaret washed herself and brushed out her hair, dabbing a little of Aunt Elizabeth’s perfume from Grasse on her wrists and the hollow of her neck. She was very excited and nervous, never having attended a dance without her family and certainly not on the arm of a young man.

When the buggy came up the dusty lane, Margaret was waiting on the porch. Nicholas jumped from his seat and ran up the steps.

“You look beautiful! What a lovely dress! And what have you done to your hair?”

Margaret smiled. She had brushed it, that’s all, and run a piece of silk over it to settle it. Had he thought she would be waiting in her riding clothes to be taken to the dance? She let him help her up into the buggy, where her relations were dressed in their finest, too, and waving goodbye to the children watching their sister in awed silence from the rope swing under the cottonwoods, she said a little prayer to herself that the evening would be perfect.

And it was. Jack Thynne was there with his banjo, two men had fiddles, and the music was wonderful. Margaret had been to these fetes all her life and knew the various dances that the musicians would play, the Virginia reel, a Spanish waltz, a polka, one man calling the dances so everyone would know what to do next. Nicholas had never been to this kind of dance and was amazed at the skill expected of all the dancers, the way groups dancing the quadrille would move from one partner to the next in perfect rhythm. During one of the breaks, he and Margaret went outside to get a breath of air. Standing a little way from the hall, he could hear loons on Nicola Lake and coyotes yipping very near. He imagined writing a letter home to describe how one moment he was dancing and the next listening to coyotes outside the hall, the stars so many and so close that they dusted the cheeks and shoulders of the girl he was with, and he wondered what his family would make of it.

“Margaret, may I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“That first afternoon I met you, I said something about the train robbers, and you got angry and said I didn’t understand. I got the impression you knew something about the capture that you didn’t want anyone else to know. Was I right?”

They had walked away from the hall by then, along the main road towards the Driard Hotel. Every window was lit, and from the road Nicholas and Margaret could hear two men talking quietly on the upper balcony, saw the glow of their cigarettes and heard the clink of glass as something was poured from a bottle. Margaret told him the story then, in a rush, of riding to Chapperon Lake that morning, quietly moving to the edge of the camp and seeing the three men with their simple meal by the campfire, the others confronting them with accusations, the gunfire, the scream of the man who was shot in the leg.

“You must have been terrified!” Nicholas could scarcely imagine what it must have been like for her to come upon the drama as she had, unknowing, a girl on a horse in a remote place.

“I rode away as fast as I could, I didn’t really know what it had all been about until later, when the story of the capture began to be told by everyone, but I really thought that George Edwards was innocent. Now it seems he actually did rob trains. I read the newspapers in Kamloops and listened to the accounts of the trial, the first trial and then the retrial just last week, but I still find it hard to think of him as dangerous. He isn’t, wasn’t, a bad man, not really. How could he be, when everyone, including my father, liked him and trusted him? When he was on his way by train to prison in New Westminster, a woman saw him who said he’d spent a night in her home. This was in the newspaper only yesterday. Lots of us have something like that to say about him — we knew him, liked him, thought of him as just like any other man. And the story of the capture makes the scouting team sound brave beyond belief. But they were the ones who ambushed three men while they were eating and then shot wildly everywhere, not Edwards and the other two. Anyway, I just couldn’t talk about it to anyone because I knew how worried my parents would be if they knew I’d been there. It was like a bad dream, Nicholas, and I have even dreamed of it since, often. I wake up with the awful feeling that there’s no one to tell. It’s such a relief to tell you, but you must promise you won’t say anything to my father.”

“But were you frightened when you realized what was happening?”

“Oh, yes, I was. I remember getting off my horse and trying to calm myself by lying down in the grass. I could hear my heart beating, it sounded like a drum. I couldn’t believe at first that no one had seen me, I kept expecting the police, although I didn’t know then that’s who they were, to come after me at a gallop, but I guess there was such confusion at the campfire that no one noticed me or heard my horse’s hooves as we left.”

Nicholas put his arm around her shoulder and drew her to his side. His own heart was racing as she told the story, and he was surprised at her courage. “Did you follow the trial closely?”

“I think everyone did. We went to Kamloops just a day after the preliminary hearing to attend a concert — my father had arranged the trip long before. The newspapers were full of it, and my father asked his friend the stage driver to leave newspapers for him twice a week at the crossroads so he could read all about the trial without having to go all the way to Nicola. There was a joke, ‘Bill Miner is not so bad, he only robs Canadian Pacific Railway every two years, but the CPR robs us every day.’ I thought of him being taken into Kamloops in the rain, I could see it in my mind so clearly, the wagon bringing the men to the jail on Seymour Street in the streaming rain, the street muddy, bells ringing them in, the light grey and electric at the same time. They were soaking wet and wrapped in blankets, wearing handcuffs, Mr. Edwards in the front with the second man and the one who was shot lying in the back. I could even smell the mud and the wet horses. I heard some of this in Kamloops and read some of it — I feel as if I was there, but I wasn’t, really.”

Thinking of her walking in the darkness alongside a hotel that no longer exists apart from its image on sepia cards which I pin to my wall, hoping for a trick of the light to show me her shadow among those cast by slender pines, I want so much to hear her telling her story to the young man at her side. What will come to them, in the fullness of years, is sorrow, and I would take it upon myself if I could. Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. No one who has walked in darkness in the ardour of youth knows that the garment of praise is so easily put aside. Or that the spirit of heaviness, once taken on, is a weight on the shoulders forever after, a burden to be borne even during times of great joy. Or that what is remembered of a life fades to a few photographs, a receipt for train travel, some dates carved in stone propped up in a graveyard among cactus and stunted iris. In dry air, magpies remember the dead; wind carries seed from one field to another.

They returned to the dance to the opening strains of a waltz. Holding her, Nicholas reflected on how uneventful his own life had been compared to Margaret’s thus far, and yet he had sailed to Europe, attended lectures by world-renowned scholars and philosophers, travelled by train across the breadth of America. After the waltz, Archie Kelly, one of the fiddlers, announced that he would play a suite of reels from his native Ireland. The other musicians sat back and listened as he lifted his fiddle and played so swiftly, so uncannily sweetly, that no one danced, no one clapped, but stood in the spell of “Scotch Mary,” “The Dunmore Lassies” and “Robbers Glen.” How ironic, thought Margaret, that there would be a piece of music about the moment at Chapperon Lake before the lawmen arrived on the scene. At midnight, the ladies brought out the supper: platters of cold beef and thin slices of cured ham; baskets of high biscuits, split and filled with sweet butter; slices of pound cake and apple pie and heaps of airy meringues dusted with sugar; urns of tea and coffee, pitchers of lemonade with slivers of ice, and ginger beer. Some of the men went outside to share swallows of rum from flasks they concealed in the buggies, in the wood pile, in the bushes. More dancing followed the supper, and at dawn the Stuart-Jackson buggy headed home along the road that clung to the hillside above the lake, Alice and Eliza asleep on the seat beside August, Margaret and Nicholas holding hands under the blanket that was hardly needed, the air still warm and dry, Venus hanging on the horizon like a tiny brilliant lamp.

The stallions of the valley run through memory, The Boss, The King of Nicola, Rothesay Castle, Bonaparte Denmark, Galloway Prince, Diamond Fire, the generations raised by John Chilihilsa and sent to the Front in France, Woodward’s Peppy San, some branded with the three bars of Douglas Lake, some with the curved line over a straight from Guichons, the JL of the Lauder Ranch, the inverted V followed by an X from the Jackson Ranch, T of the Willow, and the Cottonwood’s half-circle with a trailing line to represent William’s lost gillnetter, its net out for salmon in a glittering sea.

And I have been examining the buckskin jacket, unwrapping it carefully from its tissue. It is so soft to the touch that I want to rub my cheeks against the sleeves. It smells warmly of skin with a recollection of sage, either from the bark woven into the fringe or the smoke used for its curing, smudges that might be ash or fine dust. And it smells of lavender, too, from the little sachet tucked into its tissue. I spend a long time just looking at it, meditating on its empty sleeves, its toggles of horn. What do textiles remember of their makers, the deft touch of their fingers, and do they carry the shape of the bodies who have worn them, the heavy absence of shoulders or the pressure of a spine? In one of the photographs there is a child dressed in buckskin leggings and an overshirt, not one of the fair children in their Sunday best, but a small girl, her black hair braided, serious eyes, and the tiniest of smiles on her lips. Beauty for ashes and a garment of praise.