The Bird Saviors by William J. Cobb Page A

your magic charms by which you hunt souls there like birds. I will tear them from your arms, and let the souls go, the souls you hunt like birds. But look at you. You're young yet and know nothing of the world. All that will come with time. You don't even know what a bird is, much less magic charms! You will learn, though. You will learn.
    Â Â Â Â Ruby listens and squeezes her eyes shut tight, holding on to the house in a rush of dizziness. She feels the world turning, as if pinned by the weight of its centrifugal force. She looks across the prairie fields at the mountains in the distance like a castle wall over which she can never climb, and above them the brooding, cloudy sky. There's nowhere to run. The porcupine grass sharp as nails beneath her socks as she hobbles back to her window.

    I s r a e l  J a m e s  s i t s slumped and half frozen in an old bulb- fendered pickup, rusted and broken- windowed, wheelless and a home for deer mice and packrats. On stakeout duty, he's glassing a rancher's back pastures. After guests at the Buffalo Head complained about a woman being abducted and other officers answered the call, he had to explain his role in adjudicating the domestic dustup between Rebecca Cisneros and "William Smith." He ended up looking the fool and having to pay for it. Worse yet, the crime was shelved as a "domestic disturbance," not a kidnapping at all, and the law washed its hands of the whole sordid affair.
    Â Â Â Â He wears long johns beneath his jeans and a sheepskin- lined hat but still he's cold. Loose hay fills the cab and he can hear the mice scrabbling and burrowing. Elray crouches low to where he can see out the broken windshield for any signs of vehicles on the ranch road. Stakeout for cattle rustling is grunt work. Elray takes this demotion with quiet and vengeful anger.
    Â Â Â Â He keeps a pair of night- vision 'nocs to his eyes. Three coyotes trot like ghost dogs out of the moonscape darkness of the prairie. The cattle herd grunts and shuffles. A cow nudges her yearling calf and maneuvers her body between the calf and the coyotes. One of the coyotes places its front paws on the water trough and laps quickly, drops back down, sniffs the dirt, hikes a leg.
    When Elray sees headlights flash over the prairie, disappear
    in a swale and moments later rise up again, he gets out his wireless to call the dispatcher. He pulls off his gloves and trains the 'nocs on the small herd of cattle clustered around the water trough and feed tank. Half of the cattle stand and the others sit knees buckled and heads up. At the sound of the approaching trucks all start to move. The kneeling stand and the standing bump each other, yearlings cantering on the edge of the herd.
    Â Â Â Â Four trucks come down the ranch road like they own the place until slamming brakes and skidding to a stop at the fence. Two of them haul cattle trailers, the other two have ATVs in their cargo beds. They stop and idle. A cloud of road dust follows the trucks, catches up and engulfs them, muffling the headlights in road fog.
    Â Â Â Â A man in a cowboy hat emerges from the passenger- side door of the first truck and hurries to the gate, carrying bolt cutters. He wears a bandanna over his face. A big man, something familiar about him. A big man has a way of moving that marks his identity.
    Â Â Â Â He works the bolt cutters into position, snaps the padlock, and yanks the chain free, dragging the swinging gate open wide for the trucks to pass through. The corrugated metal of the gate scrapes dirt, stirring up a cloud that grows thicker as the trucks move forward. The big man stands off to the side. He raises his hat and wipes his forehead, puts the hat back in place. He wears his thick black hair in a ponytail.
    Â Â Â Â The cattle trailers head in first. Dust rises as they rumble over the cattle guards. As the trucks maneuver into place, strobes of the headlight beams splash the old