Ride a dark trail, p.1
Ride a Dark Trail, page 1
Ride a Dark Trail
A Bounty of Shadows Series
Winter Austin
Ride a Dark Trail
Copyright© 2025 Winter Austin
EPUB Edition
The Tule Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
First Publication by Tule Publishing 2025
Cover design by ebooklaunch
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AI was not used to create any part of this book and no part of this book may be used for generative training.
ISBN: 978-1-967678-08-2
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Dedication
For my beta readers Jenn and Rachel, who have been with me
through the thick of it and the thin of it. They’re my frontline warriors.
If it doesn’t agree with them, it won’t agree with you.
Here’s to a lot more books.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
More Books by Winter Austin
About the Author
“A guilty man always has a fear on him which he cannot hide.”
US Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves
Chapter One
His ghost always joined her for the final drag on an Ave Maria Dark Knight cigar.
He started appearing two months into her newly formed habit. Always in his sweat-stained, gray Open Road Stetson and wool-lined coat with a few less wrinkles in his face. Here, in the goats’ lean-to, where she’d taken to hiding out to have her smoke so as to not offend her mother’s senses.
At his first appearance, she swore it was a hallucination. The second time, she flipped out. With each appearance since she became more belligerent, while he grew more persistent.
“Biloba, why do you keep doing this thing?”
She blew out the smoke. “Go away, Aitonatxo.”
Her grandfather shook his head. One of the goats meandered through his transparent legs, disrupting his stern reproach. Aitona turned his withering look to the red-brown doe munching on hay.
“Goats. She just had to get goats.”
A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth as she drew on the cigar for the last time. One year after her grandfather passed, her mother had sold the last of the sheep, turned the ranch into an outfitter and hunting business, bought horses and mules for it, then goats just for the hell of it. The small herd had come in real handy in keeping the overgrowth of underbrush and weeds under control, saving the ranch a time or two from wildfires. The milking goats also made convenient pack animals when there was need for nourishment up in the mountains.
Aitona didn’t roll over in his grave. No, he came back to fucking haunt her and complain about the goats.
“Dorothy Ybarra, where are you?”
His specter vanished with her last puff of smoke. Before her mother could barge into the goats’ lean-to and give her hell for smoking in the building, Dorothy ground the butt into the bottom of her boot. One disapproving familia was enough, even if Aitonatxo was an apparition of her mind.
Angela Ybarra rounded the edge of the lean-to’s weathered support post, her pack of mutts in tow. The goats scattered, except for a leggy dark brown female who’d taken a liking to Dot and exuded copious amounts of stubborn. That doe would not be deterred by no dog.
Exactly twenty years older and just as whipcord lean as her daughter, Angela Ybarra was the polar opposite when it came to Dot’s tornado in a trailer park personality. But that didn’t stop Angela from pulling the matriarch card every chance she got.
Angela wrinkled her nose and gave Dot a pointed look but held her tongue. Dot hadn’t burned down any buildings. Yet.
Her mother reached out and scratched the doe’s withers. “I’ve got a new elk hunting party coming in later today. We’re taking them out to that nice valley for their hunt. I need to grab a few supplies for the trip. In the meantime, would you round up your gear and check it over?”
“You sure you want me up there with you?”
“I need you, Dot. This is a new group to me.”
In other words, Ama wasn’t comfortable being on her own with this bunch. Most of the hunters Angela outfitted were longtime customers she had built a strong rapport with and trusted. She took on new clients only if there was a long lull between her regulars and funds were tight.
Since Dot’s return to the ranch, she’d been her mother’s backup when one of the local sheep herders wasn’t available to ride out with Angela. Dot’s presence on hunts was a good deterrent for wannabe suitors or general dickheads. Not that Angela Ybarra couldn’t hold her own—she was Samo Ybarra’s daughter after all and had sent many a man intending ill-intent back to civilization with a limp and severe damage to his manhood. Dot, on the other hand, was less accommodating. The pervs usually woke up in the hospital, cuffed to the bedrail.
“Ama, you don’t need to earn the extra cash. I can spot you.”
“No.” Angela sliced the air with a disapproving finger. “Your army and pilot funds are yours. Don’t waste them on my business.”
“Come on!”
“I’ll hear no more of it.” Angela checked her watch. “I’m going. Be ready.” She slipped from view, her canine pack following.
Dot’s guard goat gave a very goat-like nicker as she munched on weeds bold enough to dare grow in their pen.
It might have been a year since the crash. She might have been released from physical therapy with a clean bill of health two months ago. And she might be in the best physical shape of her life since basic training and flight school. Still, Dot hadn’t spent more than two hours horseback in the last six months. Riding into the foothills of the Payette National Forest and getting to that valley her mother spoke of meant at least an eight-hour ride. Probably longer if this new hunting party wasn’t used to long hours in the saddle.
Dot groaned. Good thing she loved her mother.
She rose from the goats’ favorite climbing stump and vacated the lean-to. At the corner, she glanced back at the spot where Aitona had appeared.
He’d died while she was away at training. It ate at her for years that she hadn’t been here to see him crossed over to the other side and be with his beloved Dorothy—Dot’s namesake. Though somehow he hadn’t quite left the ranch.
He wanted to know. Or maybe she was using his specter to ask herself the question.
Why did she do this thing? She was hale and hearty, ready to get back in the air. God knew the forest service hadn’t stopped calling. Yet she couldn’t pull herself away from her current predicament.
Why?
“I’m doing it for Ama,” she said to the air.
*
Alone in the barn, Dot worked the bowstring for her recurve. The tang of warm horseflesh and sweet summer hay soothed her. In the paddock beside the barn, a horse gave a low throaty greeting to a friend and was answered in kind.
Dot lifted the tightly woven string and inspected it. The best way to ensure reliability was to nock arrow to string and let it fly at a target. Her earliest memory was standing with Aitona, his muscular arms haloing her tiny form and helping her draw back a bowstring on an equally tiny recurve. Hunting and fishing in all their forms had been ingrained into Dot from the moment her small h ands could navigate the intricate details of each instrument. When not advocating or educating for the Basque community or tending to his beloved sheep ranch, her grandfather was hunting or fishing.
During her years as an army aviator, she’d fine-tuned her tracking and aiming skills in a different way. She now possessed uncanny abilities that made hunters visiting their outfitting business envious.
Dot checked her watch, a parting gift from her squad commander the day she DD214’d out of the army. Mom should be returning soon. Hopefully, she would be bringing something from Euskadi to eat. Dot was starving.
She was repacking her gear when the dogs started up a ruckus. She set aside her equipment bag and rose from the makeshift haybale seat.
A stranger was near.
Dot emerged from the barn’s darkened interior and leaned a shoulder into the wall. Beneath her cream-colored, felt Stetson she scanned the drive. Nothing.
One of the blue heelers shot past her pos, toward the dirt path ringing the homestead. Fast on the bitch’s trail came the rest of the pack.
Intrigued, Dot left her spot and followed the dogs. If no one was coming up the drive, then what did they hear and smell? She passed the house and the goat pasture, where the Great Pyrenees and Anatolian guard dogs’ deep barks echoed over the valley. Dot stepped out from under the low branches of the shade trees and spotted the pack running to the wood fence separating the yard from the empty summer pasture.
With the start of elk season, there were times when hunters—on their own—would get lost or turned around in the forest and somehow end up here. On a few occasions, they would mistake the Ybarra ranch animals for the prey they hunted and take shots.
Dot scanned the horizon. A black shadow broke the pristine lines, wobbling about through the pasture’s long grasses. She tilted back the brim of her hat and let her hawk eyes take in the sight coming toward her. The continued barking grated on her already frayed nerves.
“Nahikoa!”
The pack fell silent, but the dogs were not done. They kept their collective gazes trained on the oncoming intruder.
Dot lowered her right hand to her hip and removed the ever-present sidearm strapped to her leg. The intruder was too far away to tell if this was a predator or not. Wild animals were known to venture out of the Payette National Forest in search of easy game if conditions forced them.
She closed the distance between her position and the fence.
“Itzalita,” she said, ordering the dogs off.
They scuttled back to the trees, refusing to leave her alone. She never had anything to fear with those four-legged wingmen.
A cry echoed over the wide span of ground—a very human cry. The figure took shape as they raised an arm. Another cry went up right as the person floundered and went down, disappearing behind the waist-high grass.
“Shit.” Dot rushed to the fence and vaulted over it.
The dogs once again started up their chorus of intruder alert. Dot snarled at their persistence.
She raced across the field, keeping her sidearm ready, straight for the spot where the figure had gone down. The faint cries increased in volume and distress the closer Dot drew.
She slowed her pace and lifted the pistol, searching the tree line for any signs of a threat of the four-legged or two-legged kind. She parted the grass, revealing a pitiful creature in the fetal position on the ground.
“What the hell?”
The creature’s body jerked, and a disheveled head the color of dried wheat lifted from the ground. A pair of red-rimmed doe eyes peered up at Dot.
“Don’t shoot,” she pleaded, raising bloodstained and dirty hands.
Dot lowered the weapon. “Who are you?”
“I need help. He took her.” She gathered herself and pried her trembling body up from the earth, still keeping her hands raised. “He took her.”
“Who took who? How did you get out here?”
The woman—if she could be called that; she didn’t look a day over seventeen—continued to give mewling sounds.
Assured she was alone and nothing dangerous would come blowing out of the forest, Dot holstered her pistol. She catalogued the girl’s features—the skewed flannel shirt, the dirty and ripped jeans, the piss-poor excuse for shoes, and the bleeding cuts joined by a large purple bruise under her left eye. She had obviously been in the rocky areas past the Ybarra ranch, hiking or camping in the Payette. Something was off. Really off.
“My ex,” she blurted. “He took my daughter.”
“And why would he do that?”
Through the blood and bruises, sheer terror appeared on the girl’s face. “I don’t know.”
“Were you in the Payette?”
“Yes. I was hiking with my daughter. I don’t know how he found us.”
What she didn’t say was broadcast all over her face and body. He’d beat the shit out of her before running off with the kid.
“What’s your name?” Dot asked.
Giving a great shudder, the girl swiped away snot, blood, and tears from her face with the cuff of her torn sleeve. “My name is Ashley.” She flinched at the sight on her sleeve. “Ashley Cooper,” she added, her voice almost childlike.
Dot reached out and pulled the girl toward her. “Well, Ashley, looks like I’m about to disappoint my mother today.”
Chapter Two
The pack started up their rendition of Halt! Police!
Dot, leading her sure-footed gelding out of the barn, stopped to watch a pair of dark gray trucks with large, yellow, six-point star decals announcing Pyrenees County on the doors and gleaming aluminum trailers pull into the drive. Clear to the back of the parade of dust-coated vehicles followed her mother’s ancient Ford.
Dot glanced at Ashley. “Anything you’d like to tell me?”
Ashley, clutching the reliable mule’s reins, shook her head. The blood-crusted hair hung in clumps around her scratched features, giving the impression the woman was Jamie Lee Curtis à la Halloween.
“No,” she said, stroking the mule’s nose and inching back to use his neck as a shield.
Dot eyed the young woman but held her tongue.
Once the duo parked along the side of the gravel lane, Angela maneuvered her 1965 robin’s egg blue F-100 around them and parked in the drive. She was out of the cab in a flash and marched back to the lead vehicle.
Dot dropped the gelding’s reins, officially ground tying him where he stood. She left Ashley and crossed the yard.
The lead truck’s driver’s side door opened, and a beefy man decked out in jeans and a dusty-brown uniform top and Stetson emerged. A pair of reflective aviators blocked his eyes, but his head swiveled—he was surveying the lay of the land. Until he spotted Dot. He shut the door and was about to take a step forward when Angela waylaid him.
“Richard T. Ford, what the hell do you think you’re doing on my land?”
Dot managed to intercept her mother before all five-feet-four, one-hundred-twenty-five pounds of angry Ybarra was unleashed. She propelled Amatxo behind her back, putting herself between the sheriff and his pending doom.
Sheriff Richard T. Ford was one of those men Angela had always loathed and never divulged a single justification for her animosity. For whatever reason, Ford had been nothing but respectful and cordial toward Dot and barely tolerant toward Angela. Aitatxi used to say it was because there was history between the two, refusing to elaborate any further.
“Sheriff.” Dot blocked her mother’s attempt to get around her.
“Dorothy.” He was the second person on earth who used her given name, Angela being the first. Ford probably did it to get a rise out of his tiny adversary. “I’d heard you were still at home.” He tilted down his aviators and peered over the tops at Dot. “I figured you’d gone back to flying the wheelie birds.”
Angela began muttering in Basque. Dot did her best to not laugh at the curses her mother rained down on the sheriff and certain portions of his anatomy.
“Haven’t had any callouts,” Dot interjected over her mother’s mutterings. “Why are you…” She pointed at the second truck and trailer. “Out here?”
A horse whinnied from the trailer. Dot’s gelding answered.
