Tiberius trotted along, his head high, his gait strong. He was no longer limping after a few days off, but I didn’t push him too hard. I had a few hours to kill and doing it atop a horse was one of the best ways to while away some time.
The pastureland was greening up rapidly. A warm wind danced and played, the cold bite of the Tetons disappearing more and more every day. Soon flowers would be knee high. Seeing something big and brown to my left, I pulled up on the reins. Tiberius didn’t act spooked as he would if it were a grizzly so I relaxed a bit, smiling when I made out the cow elk as she slowly got to her feet. She must have winded me. A spindly-legged calf also stood up then fell back down. He was still wet by the looks, so I rode on, leaving mama to tend to her newborn. Hopefully, she and the babe would be fine. We had our share of hungry predators out here, and a wobbly newborn elk calf would look damn good to a mountain lion, grizzly, or the wolf packs that called this area home.
I spied Aaron’s bright yellow truck a mile away. Giving my horse a little head, we closed the distance quickly. Kyle lifted a hand in greeting as he rested his ass on the tailgate of Aaron’s truck. I dropped the reins and Tiberius moseyed off to enjoy the fresh grass.
“Sorry I’m late,” I whispered as I hopped up to sit beside Kyle.
“No worries. He’s just started.” Kyle jerked his head at the silver-haired man holding two forked willow branches which had been blessed in a ceremony back on the Shoshone-Arapahoe reservation where he lived. Aaron was in his sixties, shorter than his grandson by several inches, weathered and wrinkled from a lifetime in the sun, and prone to telling the dirtiest jokes I’d ever heard. We’d had Aaron out several times during my time running the ranch. Today he was doing his thing while wearing worn jeans, bright green sneakers, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt.
Kyle was more of a scientific sort who relied on hydrologists, geological maps, and random drillings to locate new water sources. Which was fine and all, but Landon had expressed a desire to not have drilling companies on his land if he could avoid them, which was why we’d been out scraping around when Millicent had been found. Plus, Aaron knew his stuff.
“You okay? Word ran through the hands about the shit at the dino site.”
“I’m fine, we’re both okay. Just a few bumps and bruises. My four-wheeler is in bad shape though.”
“Sons-of-bitches. We should go talk to those asshole McCrary’s. This has their dirty fingerprints all over it,” Kyle snarled.
“I visited the neighbors this morning. They claim to have no knowledge of the robbery, not that they’d confess to it if they did, but they know that we know and are suspicious.”
“I hope you spit in Morgan’s eye.”
“I did not.” I chuckled. “I did speak to Landon today. He said Will can sign on, but he’s got to walk a damn straight line,” I stated and got a firm nod from Kyle.
“Thank you. I’ll keep his wild ass in check. Besides, what the hell can he possibly get into out here?”
That was a good point. So we sat back and watched Aaron dowse. It was an incredible process to observe. Aaron worked the area in a precise method laid out by a medicine wheel method he once explained to me. He always started walking north as the north wind was always the best place to start according to him. Then he would take a certain number of steps and if the willow branches didn’t cross, he would walk west, then south, and then east until he came to a spot that made the branches speak to him or cross. It was really fascinating to watch him work.
According to Aaron, he could also dowse burial mounds, sacred rock sites, marker trees, and rock cairns. Amazingly, or perhaps not so amazingly, almost all the sacred sites that he dowsed had water running under them. He claims that the Native Americans know where the water runs in the earth and so that was why they would plant marker trees over that water source. Aaron has also dowsed for graves and burial sites. He professes to be able to tell the gender and tribal affiliation of the person in the grave. As precise as he is at finding us water, I have no reason to doubt his dowsing expertise or claims. We were as quiet as possible, which was how Aaron preferred it when he was working. Nothing but the winds, the mountains, and the song of the earth. Kyle stretched out, covered his face with his beat-up hat, and took a nap. With the sun beating down on me, a snooze did sound good, but I forced myself to remain upright.
Forty-five minutes into the process and about a solid mile from where we were parked, Aaron found a spot that made his rods extremely happy. Which he bellowed down to us, waking Kyle from a rather erotic dream if his mumblings of “more” and “suck it, baby” were any indication.
“Dammit,” he muttered as he sat up, his hat sliding down to his lap. “I was just about to come.”
“Who was it this time? Scarlett Johansson or Pedro Pascal?” I asked as I slid off the tailgate to the dusty ground.
“Both,” he replied with a wink.
“You two coming or what?” Aaron shouted.
“I was about to,” Kyle yelled back. Aaron hooted in glee. No sooner had we gotten to within spitting range when our dowser hit us with one of his ribald jokes while Kyle began entering coordinates into his phone.
“A man boards a plane with six kids,” Aaron opened with.
“Are we sure this is the final spot?” Kyle interrupted.
Aaron gave him a dark look. “Don’t you know it’s rude as fuck to interrupt a tribal elder?”
“Sorry,” Kyle muttered. “But are you sure this is the spot?”
“Look at my happy sticks.”
“Old man, stop trying to get me to look at your happy stick,” Kyle parried.
Aaron snorted. “Yes, I’m sure, now shut up and let me finish. Keeping this one inside me while I dowsed gave me flatulence.”
“Right, like you can blame that on a joke,” I tossed out. Both men chuckled.
“Are you two done? I’m not getting any younger. I might croak any second,” Aaron said. We both fell into silence. God knows we didn’t want to add to Aaron’s gas problems. “Good. Now, a man boards a plane with six kids. After they get in their seats a woman across the aisle leans over to him and asks, ‘Are all of those kids yours?’ He replies, ‘No, I work for a condom company. These are customer complaints.’”