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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 165342" data-attributes="member: 22">Chapter 21Bobby grinned and settled back. The air had a spiced smell of sage and mesquite, cow and dust, and carried memories on the wind. It had been pretty good being a kid here. Off by himself lonesome didn’t matter, because everything out here was a moving part of the Big Lonesome, coming together with another moving thing only in passing. How long did wideblue and empty sky remember the cruising hawk, or brown dust form the track of a rabbit?There had been Gary, sometimes; at a slow lope so Bobby’s short horse could keep up, Gary explaining about cactus and rattlers, telling tall stories of Gilas, tarantulas, and Indian ghosts. But it wasn’t all scary; some of it was measuring up to Gary when they hauled an orphan calf out of a bog, when they fought blow-flies or blackleg. Some of it was good tiredness, good closeness and purple twilight blanketing down in warm quiet.‘Gary,’ Bobby said. ‘I just realised I haven’t even thought of him in years. Our brother, and we don’t even know where he is; we don’t care. Dead or alive, he could be found, but we don’t care.’‘That’s right,’ JR said. ‘Rogue, locoed, or diseased, you cut that animal out of the herd, right? So it don’t infect the rest, don’t hurt the good stock.’</blockquote>