Incident in San Francisco

With her groom already up in the city to tend to her other horse, Cynthia had had no option on such short notice but to drive the truck herself. She’d done that often enough in her younger years, but recently she’d distanced herself from almost everything but the actual riding. Her husband’s software company had finally gone public last year, and there was so much money now that she didn’t see why she should ever have to drive a truck, brush a horse, or even put a saddle on one. She did still enjoy riding, though. Even if she didn’t win, she loved that feeling of mastery as she convinced an animal more than a dozen times her weight that it had to do what she told it to do.

Her love of riding had come early. Born the only child of middle-income, doting parents, Cynthia had been exposed to all the right sports. Her parents believed that the entree which would get their daughter into a society far above theirs was a mastery of some sport of the rich, and so she had tried tennis, golf, and finally riding. Her parents just wanted their daughter to have a wonderful, easy life: Cynthia herself, although she never let anyone know, absolutely burned with the desire to enter, and live in, that world of wealth and leisure of which she caught glimpses in Palo Alto and Los Altos Hills. Riding opened the gate to that world.

It was not just the fact that she had a natural seat, and that horseback riding seemed the activity for which her body had been shaped. Some girls were too gentle with their horses, treating them as pets, and the horses soon took advantage, becoming lazy. Others were too harsh, treating the horses only as mechanical means to achieve the rider’s end: winning a trophy. The horses became afraid of them, and their nervousness translated into erratic performance. Cynthia, on the other hand, instinctively knew how to combine encouragement for good performance with the discipline of the whip for less-than-optimal performance. She did not love horses, nor did they love her. Rather, the relationship she always created was that of dominatrix and submissive, and she did it so skillfully that none of her instructors was ever quite able to figure out her secret.

Cynthia’s desire to get to the inner circle had been strong enough to drive her to keep her grades up near the top. With her success in riding competitions aided by her scholastics, she was given a scholarship to an exclusive private school down in Ojai, where the students kept their own horses and had riding as an important part of the curriculum. Although an outsider initially, Cynthia used the same innate knowledge of how to deal with horses in her dealings with the other girls. She had a face and figure attractive enough to place her in the top echelon in appearance, yet knew how to carry herself to keep her looks from threatening the top clique. A coterie of girls soon took her into their circle, admiring her quick wit, and laughing at the cutting remarks she made about teachers or other students who were not in their group. At school break times she frequently confided that her parents were traveling and she’d be at home alone, and so got invited to spend weekends with many wealthy families. The scheme had worked, and Cynthia had eventually ended up on a country estate in Woodside with a husband who spent a great deal of time at work, made a great deal of money, and seemed to require nothing more of his wife than that she look ravishing at parties, make love passionately after the parties, and keep herself amused the rest of the time. One of her amusements was showing horses.

Cynthia swung the rig in close to the show stable entrance and parked it there. She backed down from the high cab, a movement watched appreciatively by the men standing nearby. She had realized from puberty that her body had to be kept in shape to get where she wanted to be, and her designer jeans were stretched tightly enough as she dismounted from the truck to show that she was maintaining that perfect balance - not unappealingly thin, not voluptuously fleshy, but that point in between which men found so attractive. She was oblivious to the stares as she stalked into the barn. She had driven here, but if she could find her groom he could come out and unload the horse. She’d already done far more work than she had wanted to today, and her mood was not going to improve if he was off somewhere and she had to unload the damned horse herself. She was surrounded by incompetents, and they’d do well to stay out of her way, like that driver who had thought to cut in front of her entering the parking lot. She’d already forgotten about him.

Ranny had not yet forgotten about her.

Chapter 5

Monty was within sight of the point where the boundary fence snaked down out of the brush and ended in a solidly-built corner, meeting the side fence which followed the edge of the road. He knew that he could check that fence quickly from his truck on the road, so he shifted his weight and the reins slightly and Buck instantly swung around and headed back toward the ranch headquarters in the valley. Although it had been a long day, Buck pretended to interpret a slight squeeze of Monty’s legs to be the signal to break into a slow, easy canter. Monty grinned, knowing that a scoop of oats and several flakes of rich alfalfa hay back at the barn were the stimulus behind this change of gait. The big buckskin had a trot which was sometimes a little jarring, but his canter was so smooth that Monty settled into the saddle and prepared to enjoy a relaxing ride home.

Some of the ranchers had begun to use trail bikes and pickup trucks for much of their ranch work, except in the very steepest terrain. But Monty still preferred a good horse, and one advantage that he saw was the ability at a time like this to allow the horse to take care of the driving, giving himself complete freedom to look around. It was fortunate that he was not operating a vehicle, or he might have missed the problem at one of his haystacks.

Using the land only for grazing gave this area a carrying capacity of about one cow per 20 acres. Rainfall averaged a little over 12” annually, and it was vitally important to cattle ranchers. They all tracked rainfall amounts, using the wedge-shaped gauges which let them record hundredths of an inch from even brief showers. Monty had run into one old-timer after a little storm system had passed through, and asked “How much rain did you get over at your place?”.

“Well,” replied the neighbor, “We got three one-hundredths , but I don’t think we’d even have gotten that much if there hadn’t been a couple of drowned bugs in the bottom of the gauge”. Monty never tired of the dry humor with which country people met adversity.

In order to run more cattle, and to provide a buffer for drought years, Monty always grew some barley hay. As had his ancestors before, he worked up part of the flat valley land which had been fenced off, planted barley in the fall, and hoped for enough rain at the right time through the winter to ensure a decent crop. In May, when the stalks were waist-high, the heads plump with seed, and the leaves just starting to turn color, Monty wheeled the big swather into the fields, and watched from the high cab as the waving field of greenish-yellow stalks in front became a 14-foot-wide carpet of manicured stubble behind, the hay now lying in a neat swath, curing on the sun.

One aspect of cattle ranching which had always appealed to Monty was the fact that much of the work did not have to be done on a specific daily schedule. When calves were ready to brand, that could be done anytime within a time frame of a couple of weeks. The one exception was haying. With the days getting longer and much, much hotter in the late spring, a few days too many would allow the hay to become overripe and the seeds would become hard and indigestible, the stalks too dry to be appetizing, the leaves brittle. Once the barley was cut, that same intense dry heat meant that there was a window measured in hours, not days, when the swathed hay was cured enough to be raked up into windrows, and then baled. In the East and Midwest the concern was always to be able to get the hay sufficiently dried in spite of the high humidity and frequent rains: here, the concern was to have a little moisture remain so that the hay didn’t shatter under the pounding as the baler compressed it into those tight elongated cubes. Many of the people making hay in this climate started baling around 2 AM, and stopped around 6, just before the heavy dew settled in. Monty had a philosophical objection to doing work which required using the lights on his machinery, and always tried to do his baling in the early morning hours just after the sun rose.

Since the hay would be fed out during the following autumn and winter, keeping it under cover was not a necessity. At several points on the ranch, in the low hills where the big automatic bale wagon could be easily driven, Monty had fenced off long rectangles of hilltop and used these as storage areas where he built his haystacks. Kept safe by the 5-wire fence, the hay remained there all summer, and when the grazing started to run out in September, Monty had only to pull bales out of the stack all along its length and throw the hay over the fence to feed his hungry cattle. The ground sloped away from the stacks, so rain didn’t collect around the base. This system also kept the cattle away from the ranch buildings so that the ground didn’t get trampled and fouled during the winter months. These haystacks were an important part of Monty’s overall management plan, and contributed greatly to his reputation as the rancher who always had the best-fed cattle in the county.

Now, from the back of his homeward-bound horse, Monty spotted a serious problem. When he twitched the reins to the right, Buck swung off the trail and headed immediately up the slight rise toward the stack. Monty didn’t need to dismount, or even to stop, to analyze the problem. His eye had been caught by the sight of a bale rooted out of the bottom of the stack, where it lay torn apart, chunks of hay strewn about the ground. Nor did he need to examine the ground for the marks of stubby cloven hooves or elongated droppings to know that his stack had been desecrated by a wild pig, or two. He was only too familiar with the signs.

These pigs which roamed the hills of Monterey County were not the small peccaries of the Southwest. These were direct descendants of large Russian wild boar, originally imported by William Randolph Hearst to add to the exotic stock on his sprawling San Simeon ranch to the south. There had been some dilution of the original bloodlines by interbreeding with escaped domestic swine. However, the pig, judged by many to be the most intelligent of non-human mammals, was also the species which most quickly reverted to its original wild form. In only three generations, escaped domestic pigs, those relatively docile Yorkshires and Durocs, bred for centuries to produce smooth cuts of ham, bacon, and chops, were transformed into feral beasts which barely resembled their great-grandparents. Razor-sharp tusks, up to 6 inches long, curled out from the front of the jaw. Shoulders were higher, narrower, and covered under the hide with an armor of gristle, an inch or more thick, which ran from just behind the head to well behind the shoulder. It protected well from the few remaining predators, primarily mountain lions, which might tackle a grown boar. It would also stop a bullet from anything less than a very high-powered rifle.

The more powerful front shoulders tapered back to slimmer hips - these were not the smooth, slab-sided domestics with bulging hams. The whole package was wrapped in exceedingly tough hide, covered coarsely with wiry, curly hair. Baby piglets started life with a rusty brown coat, camouflaged with horizontal stripes. Like the spots on the coats of little fawns, these soon were replaced with the permanent adult color. Some showed their Russian ancestry clearly, colored the gray of Russian Wolfhounds. Others, though, showed the influence of the domestics, and red, black, spotted or belted markings could all be found in the same herd. Fortunately, the stack had not been visited by a herd, or the damage would have been much greater - and much more difficult for Monty to remedy.

As he swung Buck around to head back down the slope Monty remembered noticing exceptionally bright moonlight last night when he had gone to bed, which would help solve his problem. Wild pigs were mainly nocturnal creatures, but the law did not allow hunting at night. Like most ranchers out in the country, Monty had a deep respect for law and order, but it was tempered with the belief that some laws were made in Sacramento or Washington which did not apply to every case everywhere in the state or the country. The proper procedure was to apply to Fish and Game for a depredation permit. This specified how many pigs were to be killed, and that the carcasses would be field-dressed and given to the Department. The permits took more than a few days to obtain, and expired a couple of weeks later.

“The 3 S’s for dealing with predators are shoot, shovel, and shut up” was the advice Monty had heard one speaker give off-the-record at an alfalfa-growers conference. That was the method used by most ranchers. The problem was handled quietly (except for the loud boom of a high-powered rifle late at night) and talked about only among themselves. The ranches were so large and the distances so great that there was virtually no chance that a sheriff’s deputy or a game warden would be anywhere near in the middle of the night to observe the unlawful act. And so tonight, aided by a full moon so that he wouldn’t need to use lights, Monty would take care of this pig predation problem before it grew to threaten his livelihood.

At the barn, Monty swung down from the saddle, his long legs accomplishing this maneuver with a grace which spoke of thousands of past repetitions. He undid the cinch, then reached up to grasp the saddle horn with his left hand, the cantle in his right, the little finger on each hand hooked under the edge of the colorful Navajo-style blanket beneath. His biceps, shoulder, and chest muscles, which had been built up by lifting 130-pound 3-wire hay bales, barely tensed as he lifted and swung the heavy saddle off in one fluid motion. He carried it in to the saddle rack, having let the reins fall to the ground in front of Buck. Even though there was fragrant alfalfa hay nearby, the big buckskin remained motionless where his rider had dismounted. He had been trained to be ground-tied, but the moment Monty scooped up the reins Buck eagerly stepped toward the gate to his pasture, knowing that once the hackamore had been slipped over his ears he would get his reward for the day’s work.

With his horse and tack taken care of, Monty headed for the main house for a hot shower and dinner. But his path took him past the little old original ranch house, and what he saw as he rounded the corner seemed guaranteed to make him change that to a cold shower - a very long, icy-cold shower. It was Mercedes, the young wife of his hired hand Roberto, and she was taking down clothes which had been hung on the line to dry in the afternoon sun.

For the first year after his parents’ death, Monty had thrown himself into ranch work, working alone outdoors from earliest light until it grew too dark to see, then on projects in or around the buildings under lights. But he had seen that there were a lot of jobs which really could be done better with two people, so he had hired a succession of men who stayed for a year or two, then drifted on. A few years ago a neighbor had mentioned a hard-working young Mexican who was looking for a place to live, and Monty had checked him out. Roberto was eager and ambitious, and when they met each had liked what he saw in the other. Since ranch work wasn’t all-consuming, they adopted a flexible schedule so that Roberto was free to register with his cousin, a farm labor contractor in King City. Whenever the cousin got a particularly lucrative job lined up with the potential of high earnings through piecework or overtime, he made a phone call. Unless there was some especially pressing ranch work, Monty always sent his cowboy off to pick up some extra cash. If it was work which was not too heavy, Mercedes went too. Neither of them spent money smoking or drinking, and although they loved their relatives’ kids, they were postponing children until they had enough money to buy a house of their own. Monty was glad to help them realize their dream, and he enjoyed Roberto’s company when they worked together. He rarely saw Mercedes, since he was usually away from the buildings, and when he did, she was just a figure in the distance wearing jeans and a shirt. But today when he rounded the corner of the house she was not more than twenty feet away, and today she was not wearing jeans and a shirt.

She was stretching up to remove the clothespins holding a bedsheet, and the brilliant white sheet reflected the intensity of the sunlight like a photographer’s backdrop lit up by studio lights. Millions of California girls, in pre-melanoma days, had spent countless hours baking on beaches, their nubile bodies slathered with lotions guaranteed to produce a Coppertone tan, and this girl had achieved that perfect tint through nothing more than genetic inheritance and a minimum of exposure to the sun. So incredible was the picture she made, with her bronze skin and long black hair against the blinding pure whiteness of the sheet, that Monty felt as though his eyes were a camera lens which had snapped open and were recording this scene for eternity. Certainly, Monty knew that it was a picture which would never fade from his memory.

She had been inside, and to escape the heat had dressed in cutoffs and a halter top, slipping on a pair of low white tennis shoes as protection against the yellow star thistles when she went out to get the clothes. She was up on the toes of those shoes now, the muscles in her shapely calves and thighs taut under that burnished skin, the muscles of bare shoulders and arms tensed too as she stretched both arms skyward to reach the clothesline above. Her head was thrown back, and the mass of wavy black hair gleamed in the sun, cascading down her back so that it almost hid the narrow straps of her white halter top. Below that, her back was an expanse of that perfect tan, the sides curved in to define her small waist before curving out again to disappear into the waistband of her cutoffs.

The cutoffs, too, were almost white: they had been created from very faded jeans, and had been washed countless more times in their reincarnated form. They now hugged her hips like a second skin. And very nice hips they were, Monty noticed, with the muscles smoothly bunched against the strain of her stretching. Whether she had miscalculated and cut the jeans a little too short originally, or whether the repeated washings had frayed material from the bottom, the cutoffs were definitely so short now that the faint beginning of a curved cheek could be seen where the denim fringe ended. That little detail, however titillating, was not what caused Monty to catch his breath and simultaneously stumble so that his boot heels thudded on the hard ground, causing Mercedes to turn around and break the tableau.

Monty had a theory that every man had some particular part of a woman’s anatomy which he found especially seductive (assuming that he was a man who found women appealing). Not at the gross level where men identified themselves as leg men or breast men, but down at a finer level where one man would be totally captivated by a jaw line, another by the curve behind a knee, yet another by just the right shape of eyebrow. For him, it was the middle back, and the one in front of him today had all the qualities which triggered the reaction which had made him suddenly weak-kneed. There was something about the contrast between the strength of those two smooth ridges of muscle and the fragile little valley where the spine lay between them, and the proximity of that most perfect curve in all of nature, the concave curves at the sides of a woman’s waist. Something deep in Monty’s genetic makeup told his mind that when he saw such a back, he should spend hours gently sliding his long fingers up and down that precious valley, his palms cupped to caress those muscle ridges, until he finally enveloped that curving waist in his large hands, and he and the owner of the perfect back abandoned themselves to mad, passionate, animal love-making.

But this back belonged to a married woman, the wife of a friend. Monty had always held very strong moral convictions, and the civilized portion of his brain easily overrode the older animal instincts. Sexual lust hardly had a chance to rear its ugly head before it was replaced by nothing more than pure admiration of an exceedingly beautiful sight. Still, the shock of suddenly coming across such an unforgettable vision had upset him enough to cause him to stumble, and he felt another unwanted physical reaction begin to manifest itself. In elementary school the teacher had taught about autonomous muscles over which a person had no control, the example given being the heart muscle. Since pre-puberty, Monty had been one of those boys afflicted with a different autonomous muscle, which frequently began flexing itself at inopportune times, as it was doing now. “Oh, God, no!”, thought Monty desperately. “ I hope I can get past and up to the house without her seeing me like this!”.

But to camouflage his problem in the meantime, Monty resorted to the maneuver he had developed as a youth. A teen advice column in the Sunday supplement had advised wearing loose-fitting pants: that had been a total disaster, giving as it did the impression that some Lilliputians had pitched a tent in there, down below his belt buckle. Instead, he wore tight-fitting jeans low on the waist, and perfected a gesture which involved tucking his thumb into his belt, then sucking in his stomach to make room as he gave a couple of quick, surreptitious digs with his dangling fingers so that the offending member rose to a vertical position just behind the zipper. While Monty wasn’t in the same league as porn movie stars, he was endowed in the upper percentile range, and he had no trouble tucking in behind his belt buckle until nature eventually took its course in reverse. And so, even as he was recovering from his misstep, he almost automatically hooked a thumb into his belt and remedied the problem .

“Oh, Meester Marteen?” came Mercedes’ voice shyly, as she turned to face him, her questioning inflection destroying any hope that he was going to be able to escape with just a smile and a nodded greeting.

He turned to face her, just as she turned toward him and leaned over to drop the sheet in a large wicker hamper. Monty winced as she bent from the waist, and the halter top did little to hide the shape of her firm breasts, looking like some wonderful, exotic ripe fruit, barely constrained by the flimsy material of her halter top. He tried to take his eyes off her, but when she straightened he was confronted with a bronzed midriff which mirrored her back, the two shallower ridges of vertical muscle on each side of a faint declivity which ended in a tiny navel, and below that a couple of inches of perfectly flat stomach which disappeared into the cutoffs.

“Get a grip, Monty!”, he told himself. “Quit behaving like a teenager, and act your age!”.

It was hard to tell which of them was more ill at ease. Although Roberto was on a first-name basis with Monty, Mercedes retained some ancestral deference to large landowners and could not bring herself to use his first name. She also had little contact with him: she was hired to clean his house, but she always did that while he was out on the ranch. This was one of the first times they had been together alone, and she was clearly nervous about addressing him, too nervous even to be conscious of the scantiness of her clothing. On his part, Monty was still in shock over the sudden revelation of the incredible figure possessed by this woman living here. He decided that he would seem awfully unfriendly if he looked away while she was talking, and he couldn’t trust himself to look at any part of that body, so he looked her in the eyes and said, encouragingly, “Yes, Mercedes? Did you want something?”.