Jack McCready's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Jack McCready wanted a hundred horses, and he owned one. That one stood swaybacked outside his house, chewing a dry stalk, too tired to wander far. Jack leaned on the porch rail of the weathered homestead and studied the open desert past it. Rust-colored mesas. Cracked, baking earth. Scrub that bit your boots. A man could gather wild horses out there by the dozen. But Jack had nowhere to keep them. He'd learned that hard the day before. He had roped three range horses, led them home proud, and gone inside for water. When he came out, the plains had swallowed them. No fence. No corral. No pasture. Just hoofprints heading nowhere. Every horse he caught would do the same. He couldn't build a herd he couldn't hold. So Jack set to work. He had no lumber and no money for any. But the desert gave him something else. All around the homestead grew tough prairie flowers, their faded orange petals riding thick, woody stalks. Those stalks were hard as kindling and grew in dense clumps. Jack pulled his knife and cut. He worked all morning. He hauled armloads of the woody growth and wove them between stakes he drove into the cracked ground. The old horse watched him, tail swishing flies. By noon Jack had a crooked ring of fencing behind the house. Low, rough, but standing. He shook a post. It held. He grinned and wiped his face. Then he tested it the only way that mattered. Jack led the swaybacked horse inside the ring and shut the gap with a bundle of stalks. The horse sniffed the fence, pushed its nose through, and stopped. It couldn't walk out. Jack stepped back and watched it circle. The corral held one horse. It would hold the next ten. For the first time, Jack had a place to put what he caught. His arc had its first floor under it. Tomorrow he'd ride out and rope wild ones, and this time they'd still be here when he returned. But as Jack coiled his rope, the horse inside leaned against the weave to scratch its flank. The woody stalks bent. A post tipped. Jack lunged and shoved it upright, heart pounding. The fence held one tired animal. It would never hold a pen of panicked wild horses slamming the walls at once. He had a corral now. He also had a corral that would not survive the very horses he meant to fill it with. Jack looked at his handiwork and knew his next problem had just arrived: he needed real posts, real rails, real strength. And for that, he needed a town.