The boy coming around the front of it had his head down against the cold and his hands jammed in the pockets of a thin canvas coat, and he did not see Wade until he was nearly on top of him. Then he stopped dead.
He was tall and narrow, all wrists and neck, with a shock of dark hair under a seed cap and a long face that had not finished deciding what it was going to look like. Wade had last seen that face clearly at a 4-H show at the Fergus County fair, maybe five years ago, above the halter rope of a black steer that had taken reserve champion. Ray's boy. Danny Ferris.
For a long moment neither of them said anything. Out on the creek a great horned owl started up, low and patient. The boy's breath came out in short white bursts.
Then Danny Ferris took his hands out of his pockets and held them a little away from his sides, open, the way a man does when he wants you to see he isn't holding anything.
"Mr. Hollister," he said. His voice cracked on it. "I didn't know you were home."
And then, before Wade could speak, before Wade could even get his mind around the whole of what was in front of him, the boy said the rest of it, fast, as if it had been sitting in his mouth for months and had finally found a way out.
"I took your calves. In May. The six. It was me."
* * *