a once again time-delayed drabble...from the 25th's prompt...
(and too long for the rules by far
, but since the prompt inspired it, here it is)
Footprints No matter how he rushed his chores, no matter what clothes and cans and gear he stuffed into a sack the evening before, there was always something. Somebody wanting something. Alma needing him to fix a handle on one of the kitchen cupboards. The foreman keeping him talking over the spurge situation that they couldn't let get out of control, or about the latest cowboy who'd come in on the grub line and might or might not be worth keeping on. The girls needing him to read and sign their homework, like he understood what the charts or graphs or reports were about anyway. Only thing he really felt bad about was skimping over Jr. and Jenny's work, but he did enough to make the girls happy, and to keep Alma and the foreman from talking at him even longer. So he never escaped in time to get to the mountains covered thick with trees, not like barren Riverton, to the deep or rushing water they liked to camp beside, before Jack, who had to drive ten times farther, got there and had a fire burning.
When he showed up this time, the lid of the coffeepot was rattling from the heat, but Jack was nowhere in sight. Ennis led the horses off the trailer and picketed them where grasses and low bushes grew in the sun. Jack still hadn't come back, so Ennis pulled the battered pot far enough over on the grate that the coffee wouldn't boil down to nothing, and looked around for where Jack might have gone off to. Found Jack's footprints easy enough, right boot leaving a deeper mark from the limp he'd never shook from rodeoing, but steady otherwise. Ennis walked along the side of the river, moving faster and faster across sand and then gravel and narrow curves of half-dried mud where small creeks had run, in wetter months, into the river. His mouth was going bone dry, but he didn't try to figure if it was from worry that maybe Jack had come across a bear, or instead from how he felt every time he was this close to Jack, but still hadn't touched him. He saw where Jack must have stopped, looking at something or listening, or just thinking like he did sometimes, scared Ennis when Jack got quiet like that, and his footprints were one over the other where he'd walked in circles, then stood for a while, smoked, then crushed his cigarette into the dirt.
He found him in the trees, tracked him easy even though his boots had left no more than scuff marks in the thick pine duff. Stood still and gave himself enough time just to look, let himself believe Jack would really be there, that long second later, when he couldn't wait and started moving again to where Jack stood, green and gold sunlight on his shoulder and marking the side of his face. Then Jack was moving and they came together, saying no more to each other than their names, once, disappearing into each other until the two shapes of their bodies were no more distinguishable than two trees grown together into one.
Two weeks after they had returned to Riverton and Childress, their footprints along the river had disappeared, blown away by a fierce wind even before the rain that would have washed them away poured down, refilling the creeks. But the marks left by their steps under the trees lasted for months, sheltered by the wide and spreading branches, and then, even through the winter, if someone had come back and dug through the drifted snow, looking for sign, they could have found them, though never read what they meant, those footprints separate and together, and filled, until spring came again, with uncountable pieces of ice.
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