That year the weather went from winter to summer with only a week of spring in between. The day Jacob left turned hot and windy. At first she enjoyed being on her own, not having to cook big meals. She worked in her garden, fed the livestock and milked the cow. But that night, lying alone in the drafty cabin with the wind huffing at the door, she heard coyotes nearby, their howling lonesome and eerie. Finally she drifted into frightening dreams and was awakened by the echo of a scream on the wind. She sat up straight in the bed, her heart pounding.
People said the cry of a panther sounded like a woman screaming. She didn’t want to know which one she had heard. She was afraid she was that woman.
What if she became pregnant and had to bear her baby out here alone, no friend or midwife to help her? What if the creatures from her dream were attracted by the sharp aroma of blood and came to devour the child? Leasie didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
The next morning she arose exhausted but with a sense of purpose. She put up her hair and made the bed and cleaned the kitchen. She threw the quilts across the clothesline to air out. The day was even warmer than yesterday, and windier. For miles around her the prairie grass rippled, undisturbed by animal or human. A lone hawk circled high above Silk Mountain.
She thought of writing a letter to her family back in Kansas City, but after the first few words she stopped. That world didn’t exist anymore; there was only this place, and the wind.
Leasie filled the big iron pot in the yard with soapy water and carried a bucket of it to the cabin. She took off her dress and left it outside the door. In her petticoats and camisole, she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the wood floor of the cabin. Her knuckles were raw and red. When she’d finished, she left the door open so the floor would dry.
She put both her dresses in the wash water, swishing them up and down, then rinsed them in a separate bucket. Dust whipped across the trampled yard and stung her bare arms. Her wet clothes would get dirty again just hanging on the line, but that couldn’t be helped. She turned the two dresses wrong side out to lessen fading by the sun and hung them on the clothesline next to the bedding.
She dumped the soapy water, poured the rinse water onto her garden and set out walking across the prairie.
It was late morning and the sun warmed her shoulders. She imagined her camisole and full petticoats as a white sundress, like a Kansas City girl might wear to a party. She picked a yellow flower from the knee-high grass and wove its stem into her hair. A jackrabbit startled from the grass and bounded away, and three shiny crows crossed the sky. She saw no people, no houses.
The sun was straight overhead when she reached Silk Mountain and began her climb. Her brown boots wedged in rock crevices and her palms reddened with shale dust where she grabbed on to boost herself up. She had forever, so she took her time.
She was sweating by the time she reached the flat rock at the top. From the ground it looked square as the bottom of a buckboard, but once she’d climbed onto it, she found the south edge was cropped off like a bite mark and it slanted slightly to the west. She stepped over two gaping cracks and stood at the flaking edge of a shale boulder that faced east. The slab jutted over the rocky slope below like the prow of aship.
Her hair had come undone and it whipped around her face. She held it back with both hands and looked across the land in all directions. Somewhere there were towns and people, but here the land was empty and endless and offered no respite from the wind. The only feature besides rolling grassland and a line of trees along the distant river was a rocky ridge, not as high as Silk Mountain, several miles to the north.
Leasie spread out her arms. Closed her eyes. Tipped her head back, and fell forward over the edge.
Only God knows what she thought of in those few seconds, the warm wind ripping past her white skin until she went to ground.
It was days before Jacob found her body. The vultures had found it first.
He didn’t bury her remains on his little homestead, nor on Silk Mountain. For reasons known only to him, he buried Leasie on the slope of that rocky ridge she’d seen in the distance. Later he married a Kiowa woman who’d received ownership of the ridge as part of her tribal allotment. Jacob Youngblood was one-eighth Indian himself, though no one remembers which tribe.
Gradually Jacob and his second wife bought or traded for her relatives’ allotments and the adjoining unassigned lands. They amassed two thousand acres, more or less, that became the original Killdeer Ridge Ranch. His Kiowa wife didn’t live long either, but she bore him three sons. One of those sons was my grandfather.
Jacob Youngblood was my great-grandfather; the Kiowa woman called Tia-Ma my great-grandmother. I never knew much about Tia-Ma, but the legend of Leasie was kept alive through the generations. Sometimes I think Leasie was my true ancestor, more than Jacob or the Kiowa woman whose death from influenza was much less dramatic.
Oklahoma gained statehood in 1907 and Jacob married again, a woman named Naomi who helped him build the ranch into a prosperous cattle operation. The ranch passed down to my grandfather, Stone Youngblood, who bought out his brothers, then to my father, J.B. And now to me. My name is Marik Youngblood.
Hard times took a toll over the years, and the ranch isn’t the sprawling two-thousand acres it was a century ago. I left it once, intending to be an artist and a teacher instead of a ranchwoman. But as the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. At my father’s graveside on Killdeer Ridge—in the family plot that grew up around Leasie’s bones—I promised J.B. two things, hoping to make up for all the ways I’d failed him. One of those things was to preserve what was left of Killdeer Ridge Ranch and keep it in the family. The other was to find his only heir and grandchild, the daughter I’d given away.
Chapter One
Killdeer Ridge Ranch
Before sunrise, Marik drove her father’s old truck along the white gravel service road that wound up the ridge to the giant windmills. Dust funneled up behind the pickup’s tires, and a chilly wind gusted through the passenger window, stuck permanently halfway open. The pickup’s heater poured warm air on her boots. A preseason thunderstorm had blown through the night before, with plenty of bluster but only a spattering of rain. Spring was weeks away.
She took it slow over a patch of graded ruts, coffee sloshing against the lid of its thermal mug in the console, the arthritic joints of the pickup creaking. Her dad had named the truck Red Ryder, after an old-time hero of cowboy comics. Every time she climbed into the cab to make her morning rounds on the ranch, she caught her father’s scent, though he’d been gone nearly two years.
She was nearing the apex of the ridge where she stopped every morning to watch the sun rise over the ranch and the river valley. Against a blue-gray sky, forty-five giant wind turbines towered above the horizon, catching the first rays of sun in their long white arms. Below them the earth waited in shadow.
The first time she’d seen windmills like these at the White Deer facility in West Texas, their stark beauty and clean design had stopped her breath. Their slow, rhythmic turning sounded like a heartbeat, the mystical pulse of the earth itself. Regardless of storms or heat, the white giants stood inscrutable, heads turned to the wind. These forty-five turbines produced enough electricity to power nearly a million homes, and this was only phase one of the wind farm.
Marik parked Red Ryder at her usual spot on the highest point of the ridge. That’s when she saw it—a dark mass on the rocky ground, something that didn’t belong. It lay at the foot of Windmill 17, where the service road wound back on itself before disappearing behind the low hill.
She leaned forward against the steering wheel and squinted into the predawn light. The blackish mound was about the size of a newborn calf, nearly hidden by last season’s sagebrush and dried yucca. But it couldn’t be