He smiled over his shoulder and kicked his blue paint horse with the white star on its nose and was gone. Annie pulled her pants on very quickly, grabbed her gun, and walked out from under the trees to look after him. He was already small, riding along the bank upstream and Annie raised the rifle and sighted in on his back in the space between his neck and shoulder blades and let the rise and fall of the horse become part of her breathing. The sight merged with the target and blurred and Annie felt her fingertip rest on the trigger. Spider whinnied behind her and the man's laughing face appeared close in front of hers and Annie shuddered and lowered the gun.
She walked back to Spider feeling cold and calm, like she had worked a whole day branding. She pulled her boots on and swung the saddlebags over Spider's back and slid the Winchester into its holster. She climbed up onto her horse and rode out of the cottonwoods back out into the hot sun. She rode due north towards the high badlands, wanting to avoid contact with the camp upstream and with the man who must have belonged there somehow. Sometimes the Indians left the Reservation in the summer to camp along the rivers. As long as they did not bother the cattle no one minded. Sometimes there was trouble. Not usually. The pass in the badlands for the cattle was upstream farther, north from the little Indian camp, but there was another way through, a place called the Maze where a watercourse had carved a path all the way through the high badlands. It was a passage only the Oglalas used, because it was easy to get lost in the series of dead-ending canyons and it was full of snakes, but Annie had been through once with Tom, looking for strays, and she had never had trouble with getting lost anywhere in her life. It had already been a strange day and Annie thought maybe she needed a strange day and that she should not resist it being strange but maybe even help it along a little, so she went that way.

"No sense in telling a cloud which way to fly," her mother had said one morning hanging wet clothes on the line and staring up at the Tennessee sky. Annie had not known what she meant but she had remembered it. She thought now that her mother must have already been in pain from her sickness because she died that fall. Annie was fifteen when her mother died of a bone sickness.
"Take care of my boys, Annie Dear, and I'll watch over you."
That was their deal. It had seemed simple enough. Now all the boys were dead. Annie had not watched over them well enough. She was sure her mother was angry because she did not come into her dreams anymore. Riding across the flat bottomland towards the high badlands, Annie felt very far away from the ranch, from Noreen's nagging and all the animals that made her life, Yellow Girl, the two mules, the horse herd, the cattle, the chickens, the pigs. Spider had been a gift from Uncle Charles, the medicine man, in exchange for some of her father's tinctures. Spider was an Indian paint horse, and he understood the country perfectly, was part of it.
Like the way he picked his way along the edge of the badlands, sniffing the air, until he smelled the right amount of moisture and turned into the entrance of the Maze, which was just a sandy cut in the face of the sand castle hills that looked like all the other sandy cuts, but unlike all the others opened up into a bottom land fed by an underground spring. Inside it was cool, the sun had not yet reached the low part and there was still dew on the lichen underfoot. Annie could have reached out and touched either wall of crumbling badland but it would not have been a good idea as the prairie rattlers were sunning themselves to a warmth that would allow them to metabolize the day.

The trail wound back and forth, a miniature grand canyon, and then emptied out into a wider oasis, cluttered with scrub where the spring's trickle broke the surface. Annie stopped Spider and took notice here, looking around her for a landmark, turning around in the saddle to study the opening she had emerged from. The trick of the Maze was here, in its heart, because all but two of the pathways out from it led to nothing, just disappeared into a rubble slide and a steep wall. Spider moved along, following the underground water course. It was a favorite place for mountain lions and the horse's ears turned forward alert. Annie realized as she was riding that she had not appreciated the place the first time she had been through with Tom. It's existence was another annoyance in a land where a cow could get lost just by lying down, where every fold of the land held more intricate folds, all of them hiding places. The land looked wide open, clean, honest, but it was not that way.
"Spider stop," she said.