Cowboy and Cowgirl Hated Each Other at First Sight—Then a Broken Fence Forced Them to Work Together

Sidin Kerr and Wes Garrett disliked each other on site, and they had the good fortune, or the bad, to own the two ranches that shared the longest boundary fence in Sweetwater County, which meant that a mutual dislike had a great deal of room to grow. Sid ran the Kurr place alone, had run it since her father died two years back, and she ran it well, and knew she ran it well, and had grown thoroughly tired of the county’s steady assumption that a woman could not.

Wes Garity had bought the Garity spread the year before with money earned trailing cattle up from Texas, and he had arrived with the easy confidence of a man who had never once in his life been told he couldn’t do a thing, and the two of them had rubbed each other wrong from the first week he’d moved in.

The first real quarrel had been over water, as the first real quarrel between Wyoming neighbors usually was, a matter of which of them had the right to the creek that formed part of the boundary, and it had been settled in Sid’s favor, legally and correctly, which had not endeared her to a man unaccustomed to losing.

The second quarrel had been over a strayed bull, and the third over a rumor Sid was sure Wes had started about the state of her fences. And by the time the story properly begins, the two of them had achieved the kind of settled, lowburning hostility that neighbors can maintain for years without either party quite remembering how it started.

Sid thought Wes Garrett was an arrogant Texas newcomer who thought money and a big hat made him a rancher. Wes thought Sidker was the most stubborn, prickly, impossible woman in the territory, and privately, though he’d have died before admitting it, the most interesting. He had charmed his way through a decade of cow camps and trail towns, had never met a person he couldn’t eventually win over with an easy grin and hard work, and Sidker had looked at his easy grin the first week, and been entirely unmoved by it, which had annoyed and intrigued him

in roughly equal measure. A man who has always been able to charm everyone develops a peculiar fascination with the one person he can’t. And Wes had spent two years telling himself that fascination was dislike because dislike was simpler and safer and did not require him to examine anything. They were, though neither would have accepted the comparison, remarkably alike, which was the real root of the trouble.

Both were proud to a fault. Both had built or held their places through hard work, and refused all offers of help, as though help were an insult. Both had a temper that ran hot, and a tongue that ran sharp, and both were entirely certain they were right about everything, and two people like that, sharing the longest fence in the county, was a situation with only two possible outcomes.

And for 2 years, it had been trending firmly toward the worst one. The county had taken bets, some of them only half in justest, on whether the feud would end in a lawsuit or a shooting, and no one at all had suggested the third possibility, because the third possibility seemed the least likely thing in Sweetwater County. That was the trouble with two people so alike and so proud.

Everyone, including the two of them, mistook the heat between them for the wrong kind of fire. They agreed on exactly one thing in the world, and it was that they could not stand each other. They were about to find out how wrong they were. The thing that changed it was the fence itself, or rather the storm that destroyed it, a tremendous late spring blizzard, the kind that comes down out of the wind river range when the season should know better, and drops 3 ft of wet, heavy snow, and drives cattle before it like leaves. When the storm cleared, the long

boundary fence between the Kurr and Gity places had been flattened for the better part of two miles by the weight of the snow and the press of panicked cattle, and the herds of both ranches had mixed themselves into one milling. Confused, thoroughly intermingled mass spread across both properties and into the broken country beyond.

Sid rode her boundary the morning after the storm and found her fence gone and her cattle gone with it, tangled up with gartock, and she knew before she’d finished cursing that there was exactly one person in the county she was now going to have to work with to sort it out, and that it was the one person she’d sworn she’d never speak to again.

She sat her horse in the trampled snow and looked at the ruin of two mi of fence and two mixed herds, and she indulged in a full minute of cursing the storm, the cattle, the fence, and most especially Wes Garrett, who had done nothing to cause any of it, but whom she blamed anyway on general principle. Then she squared her shoulders and rode to find him because the cattle would not sort themselves, and a Kerr did not sit down in the snow and feel sorry for herself, whatever else a Kur did.

They met at the downed fence line that first morning, both of them furious, both of them having independently arrived to survey the same disaster, and the conversation began about as well as 2 years of hostility would predict. Sid told Wes his cattle were all over her range. Wes told Sid her cattle were all over his and that half her fence had been rotten before the storm ever touched it, which was the old rumor come round again and did nothing to improve her temper.

They stood in the melting snow and traded blame for a while in the invigorating way of two people who have been wanting an excuse to say exactly what they think of each other, and it might have gone on until dark if the practical reality had not been sitting there in front of them both, which was that neither of them could sort out this mess alone.

It was Sid in the end who said the unwelcome sensible thing because for all her temper she was a rancher first and a rancher deals with what is rather than what she’d prefer. She told Wes that they could stand here insulting each other until the cattle wandered clear to Nebraska, or they could admit that neither of them could untangle two mixed herds and rebuild two miles of fence single-handed, and work together long enough to fix it, and then go back to hating each other in peace.

Wes looked at her with a particular expression of a man who has been outreasoned by someone he’d rather not credit with reason, and he agreed ungraciously, because he could no more sort it alone than she could, and because, though he’d not have said it, a small part of him was curious what it would be like to work alongside the impossible woman rather than merely across a fence from her.

So they worked and working together, it turned out, was a different thing entirely from feuding across a boundary. Because a feud lets you keep a person at the comfortable distance of your worst assumptions, and work does not. Riding the broken country side by side, sorting mixed cattle, Wes saw things about Sid Kerr that two years of hostility had hidden from him.

that she was a genuinely fine hand, better than most men he’d trailed with, that she read cattle and country with an ease that could not be faked, that the ranch he’d assumed she was barely holding together, was in fact run with a skill and care that put his own newer operation to shame in places, and Sid, watching Wes work, had to revise her own assumptions with equal reluctance.

The arrogant Texas newcomer turned out to know his business cold, to work harder than any hired man, to handle a rope and a horse, and a frightened steer, with a competence that had nothing to do with the big hat she’d sneered at. There was one moment near the end of that first long day when Wes watched Sid rope and throw a fighting steer that had gotten into the meltswollen creek, doing it clean and quick and better than he could have, and she looked up and caught him watching, and for just a second the hostility between them flickered into

something that was almost respect before they both remembered themselves. Neither of them said any of this out loud, of course, because 2 years of hostility does not dissolve in a morning, and they continued to bicker steadily through the work as a matter of principle. But the bickering changed in character over the first few days, without either of them quite noticing.

It went from the cold hostility of enemies to the sharp banter of two people who have discovered, to their mutual annoyance, that they rather enjoy arguing with each other. It is a fine and dangerous line that one, between the fighting that means you hate someone and the fighting that means something else entirely. And Sid Kerr and Wes Garrett walked straight across it in the broken snowy country of Sweetwater County without either of them seeing the line go by.

The sorting and the fence mending took the better part of 3 weeks because 2 mi of downed fence and two badly mixed herds do not write themselves quickly and 3 weeks is a long time to spend in a person’s daily company long enough to learn the truth of them beneath the assumptions. They fell into a rhythm without meaning to.

They met at the fence line each morning, worked the day through together, and parted at dusk to their separate houses. And somewhere in the second week, Sid noticed that she had started looking forward to the mornings, which alarmed her considerably. And Wes noticed that the ranch felt quiet in the evenings in a way it hadn’t before, which alarmed him just as much.

They talked in the way people talk when they’re working side by side, and the day is long, and the talk went places neither had planned. Wes learned that Sid had taken over the Kerr Ranch at 23 when her father died. That she’d fought the county’s certainty, that she’d fail every single day since, that the prickliness he’d resented was armor built over 2 years of being underestimated and condescended to by every man in Sweetwater County, including, she pointed out sharply, him.

Sid learned that Wes’s easy confidence was newer and thinner than it looked. That he’d grown up dirt poor in Texas and trailed cattle for a decade, saving every dollar for the Garity Place, that the big hat and the swagger were partly the costume of a poor boy who’d made good, and was terrified of anyone seeing the poor boy underneath.

They were, they discovered, both performing a kind of toughness to keep the world from seeing where they were soft, and recognizing the same performance in each other, made it impossible to keep pretending the performance was the whole person. The turn came, as these turns do, in a moment of genuine trouble rather than any softer occasion.

A hepher went down in a snowmelt bog on the third week, mired and panicking and sinking, and Sid went in after her without thinking, the way a good rancher does, and got herself half mired in the freezing muck alongside the animal. And Wes Garrett was off his horse and into the bog after her before he’d made any conscious decision about it.

And the two of them hauled the heaer free together and then hauled each other free. And they ended up sitting in the snow at the bog’s edge, soaked and freezing and filthy and alive. And they looked at each other, and instead of bickering, they laughed. They laughed until they could not breathe. The helpless laughter of two people who have just been frightened and are giddy with the passing of it, and somewhere in that laughter, the last of the hostility drained out and left something else in its place.

and both of them felt it go, and neither of them knew what to say about it. Sid had mud in her hair, and her hat was gone downstream, and she was shaking with cold and laughter both, and Wes was looking at her with an expression she had never once seen him aim at her in two years of feuding. And for a long moment, at the edge of that freezing bog, the whole world narrowed to the two of them, and the steaming rescued Heer, and the enormous unspoken thing that had just changed.

So they said nothing and got up and went back to work. But the silence between them was a different silence now. It was not the cold silence of enemies waiting for the next insult. It was the warm charged silence of two people who have just discovered something they are not ready to name and who are each acutely aware of the other in a way that was entirely new and thoroughly inconvenient.

Sid rode home that evening filthy and frozen and could not stop smiling and grew annoyed at herself for smiling and smiled anyway. Wes stood in his own yard a long time watching the last of the light on the mountains and thought about the sound of her laughter at the bog’s edge and could not make himself go inside.

The fence was nearly rebuilt when they discovered that the storm was not the only threat to either ranch, and that they had a common enemy who had been quietly working against them both. Cattle had gone missing during the chaos after the blizzard, more than the storm alone could account for, and Sid, doing her count, found her tally short by a dozen head, and Wes, doing his, found the same.

At first each suspected the other in a bitter flare of the old hostility, and they had a fine, loud quarrel about it at the fence line, but the quarrel burned out fast this time, because they had spent 3 weeks learning each other, and Sid knew now that Wes Garrett was too proud and too honest to steal, and Wes knew that Sid Kerr would sooner lose the ranch than take a single head that wasn’t hers.

And once they’d both admitted that, they were left looking at the same unwelcome conclusion. Someone else was using the storm’s chaos as cover to rustle from both of them at once. They worked it out together, tracking and counting and comparing notes, and the trail led to a supposedly respectable neighbor, a rancher named Cyrus Beldon, whose spread lay to the north, and whose herd, they came to suspect, had been growing suspiciously fast on grass that couldn’t support it.

Beldon was a smooth, established man, well regarded in the county. exactly the sort no one would suspect. And he had counted clearly on the two feuding Sweetwater ranchers blaming each other for the losses rather than looking north, which was a shrewd bet given how the whole county knew Kerr and Gity couldn’t stand each other.

It was, Sid pointed out, almost insulting how thoroughly their feud had made them easy marks. Their well-known hatred had been Beldon’s best cover, and the storm that had forced them together had accidentally ruined his plan by making them compare notes. Sid found a bitter humor in it once they’d worked it out, that their famous feud, the thing the whole county had chewed over for 2 years, had nearly cost them both their herds by making them the easiest marks in Sweetwater County.

she said as much to Wes, and he agreed. And the two of them shared a rofful look over the tally books that held more genuine partnership in it than the whole of their previous acquaintance, because nothing bonds two people quite like discovering they’ve been played for fools together, proving it was another matter, and it required the two of them to do the thing that Beldon had bet they’d never do, which was trust each other completely and work as one.

They laid a careful watch on the northern boundary together, taking turns through cold nights, and they caught Beldon’s men in the act of moving altered cattle. Kerr and Garity Brands clumsily worked over into Beldon’s, and between Sid’s meticulous tally records, and Wes’s tracking, and the two of them as mutual witnesses, they built a case that the county sheriff could not ignore, respectable neighbor or not.

Beldon’s operation came apart and the recovered cattle were sorted back to their proper ranches and Sweetwater County had to substantially revise its opinion of both the woman who ran the Kurr place and the Texas newcomer who had together caught a rustler the county’s respectable men had never suspected.

But the real thing that had changed was not the county’s opinion, and both of them knew it. working the case together through those cold, watchful nights, had finished what the fence mending started. Sid had sat beside Wes Garrett on a dozen freezing stakeouts, and had stopped entirely being able to remember why she’d hated him, and had started dangerously to notice the warmth of him beside her in the dark, and the dry humor that came out when the swagger dropped, and the steadiness underneath everything he did.

And Wes had come to understand that the most stubborn impossible prickly woman in the territory was also the bravest and sharpest and most genuinely admirable person he’d ever worked alongside, and that he’d been picking fights with her for 2 years for the same reason boys throw rocks at the thing they can’t stop looking at.

The trouble now was that they were both too proud to say any of it, and pride had been the whole foundation of their long feud, so there was a great deal of it to get past. The cattle were sorted, the fence was rebuilt, the rustler was caught, and the practical reasons that had forced them together were one by one resolved, which meant that the daily mornings at the fence line no longer had any excuse, and both of them felt the excuses running out with something close to panic.

They had spent two years insisting they couldn’t stand each other loudly and to everyone in the county, and neither of them could figure out how to walk back a hatred they’d been so public about, without looking a fool. And both of them would sooner have faced another blizzard than look a fool in front of the other.

So they did what proud people do, which was nothing, and it nearly cost them everything. The fence was finished on a Friday, and they parted at the completed line with an awkward formality, each waiting for the other to say the thing neither could say, and each taking the other’s silence as proof that the last 3 weeks had meant nothing after all.

Sid rode home and told herself it was for the best. That a woman who’d fought so hard to be taken seriously as a rancher had no business mooning over a neighbor, that the whole thing had been the false intimacy of shared trouble and would fade now that the trouble was passed. Wes rode home and told himself much the same, that a woman like Sidker would laugh in his face if he ever admitted what he’d come to feel.

that the safest thing was to go back to the comfortable distance of the old hostility before he made an idiot of himself. It was Sid in the end who broke, and it cost her more than facing down the whole county’s doubt ever had, because facing down doubt only required her to be right, and this required her to be vulnerable, which was a muscle she had let go entirely slack.

She rode over to the Gity place on Sunday before she could talk herself out of it. And she found Wes mending tack on his porch, and she sat her horse in his yard and made herself say it plainly, because plainness was the only courage she had. She told him that she had spent two years believing she hated him and about 3 weeks discovering she’d been wrong, and that she was too proud by half and knew it, and that she was saying this badly because she had no practice at saying it at all, but that the mornings at the fence had become the best part of

her days, and she did not want them to stop just because the fence was mended. And then she braced herself because she had just handed the most guarded thing she owned to the one man in the county most likely to have a sharp answer ready. Wes Garity set down the tack he was mending and stood up slowly, and Sid watched his face and could not read it, and for one terrible moment she was sure she had made exactly the fool of herself she’d feared.

Then Wes came down off the porch and crossed the yard to her horse. And he looked up at her with the swagger entirely gone, and the real man underneath it plain on his face. And he told her that he’d been sitting on that porch for 2 days trying to work up the nerve to ride over and say the same thing, and that she’d beaten him to it, which he supposed he should have expected since she beat him at most things, and he’d finally stopped minding.

He said he’d started their feud, most likely because she was the first person in Sweetwater County he couldn’t charm and couldn’t outwork and couldn’t stop thinking about and that a man doesn’t know what to do with a woman like that except pick fights until he grows up enough to do better. He said he thought he’d grown up enough now.

He asked if it was too late to find out. Sid looked down at him from her horse, at the arrogant Texas newcomer she’d hated on sight, and spent three weeks falling for against her own stubborn will, and she found that all the sharp things she was so good at saying had deserted her entirely, and that for once in her life she had nothing to offer but the plain truth.

She told him it was not too late and that she’d raced over here on a Sunday morning precisely because she’d been afraid it might become too late and that she’d never in her life been afraid of losing anything the way she’d been afraid these two days of losing him. It was the most she had ever admitted to wanting anything and she said it looking him straight in the eye because a Kerr did not look away, not even when she was terrified.

They were married in the early autumn, which gave the county a fine long summer to marvel over the news, because there was no gossip in Sweetwater County, half so delicious, as the two ranchers, who had feuded loudly for 2 years, suddenly and inexplicably courting. The men who had assumed Sidker would fail as a rancher had to swallow that assumption along with a second one.

And the whole county enjoyed the story enormously, and Sid and Wes let them, because they had discovered that being talked about together was a great deal more pleasant than being talked about apart. The wedding was held at Sid’s insistence and Wes’s hearty agreement at the exact spot on the boundary where the fence had come down.

the fence that had forced them together and in a sense married them long before the preacher did. They did not combine the ranches, not at first and not entirely ever, because both of them had built or held their places with too much pride to simply dissolve them, and both understood that about the other, and would not have asked. Instead, they ran the two spreads as one operation, while keeping both names on both deeds.

Two proud people who had learned to work as partners without either one having to disappear into the other, which suited their natures far better than any tidier arrangement would have. The long boundary fence that had started the whole thing was kept up meticulously, better than any fence in the county, though it no longer divided anything that needed dividing.

They kept it, Wes said, as a monument. And Sid said they kept it because a well-built fence was a well-built fence and had nothing to do with sentiment. And both of these things were true. The bickering never entirely stopped, and neither of them wanted it to, because it turned out the sharp banter that had grown out of the old hostility was one of the great pleasures of their life together.

two quick-tonged, strong-willed people who had finally found the one person each could argue with as an equal and a delight rather than an enemy. They argued about cattle and water, and the best way to mend a fence, and whose ranch had the better grass, and they argued about it the way some couples hold hands.

and the hands they’d hired on both places learned quickly that the arguing meant nothing bad and often preceded the boss and his wife riding off somewhere together looking entirely too pleased with each other. It was not the marriage either of them had imagined back when they were sure they hated each other. It was a great deal better.

They had each spent years building a wall of toughness against a world that underestimated them. Sid against a county that doubted a woman could ranch. Wes against a past that had left a poor boy determined never to be small again. And they had found in each other the one person who did not need the wall, who had seen straight through it from the start, and pushed against it precisely because they saw what was behind it.

A person who can put down the armor they’ve worn for years is a person set free. and Sid and Wes had set each other free, which is a rarer thing than romance, and a better foundation for it. Sidker Garity was asked once by a young woman new to the county who’d heard the famous story how she had gone from hating a man for 2 years to marrying him, and whether it was true they’d fallen in love over a broken fence.

And Sid, who had grown no less sharp tonged with the years, gave the young woman the truest answer she had, which made her laugh even as she said it. “We didn’t fall in love over the fence,” she said. “We fell in love the whole two years we were pretending to hate each other. We were just too proud and too stupid to notice.

It took 3 ft of snow and a flattened fence to make us stand still long enough to see it. I’ve never been so grateful for a blizzard in my