The Honey Trap
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 14
The grant application went in on a Tuesday in late June, submitted through the tribal environmental office with the project coordinator listed as Alachooshe Lame Bull and the principal landowner partner listed as Branson Ranch, David Branson, and the letter of support signed in David’s handwriting with the language she’d sent him unchanged, which she appreciated more than she told him.
Her father read the full application the night before she submitted it and sat with it for a long time at his kitchen table.
“This is the best thing you’ve written,” he said.
“It’s a grant application.”
“It’s an argument.” He set it down. “A clear one. The reviewers will know what they’re being asked to fund and why it matters.”
She submitted it at nine in the morning and closed her laptop and sat in her quiet house and felt the particular flatness that follows a long effort completed, the absence of the thing that had been filling the space.
She drove out to the ranch.
She had not called ahead. This was new, the not calling ahead, something that had happened gradually over the previous three weeks without either of them remarking on it. She simply drove out and if he was in the field Pete would tell her where and she would find him or not, and either way she knew where the coffee was and where the good chair was on the back porch and that the gray would come to the paddock fence if she stood there long enough.
Pete was in the yard when she pulled in, mending a piece of equipment she didn’t recognize, and he looked up and nodded toward the south pasture without her asking. She drove the two-track out and found David moving a small herd of yearlings to the east pasture, he and the gray working the fence line together with the efficiency of long practice.
She parked and watched from the truck.
The gray moved the way good cattle horses moved, anticipating the cattle rather than reacting to them, cutting off the drift before it started, David still in the saddle with his hands quiet and his weight doing most of the work. The yearlings pushed through the gate and he swung it closed and rode back toward her truck.
“Application’s in,” she said through the window.
He pulled up beside her. “Good.”
“I’m not going to hear for eight weeks.”
“Then stop thinking about it for eight weeks.”
“That’s not how I work.”
“I know.” He looked toward the east pasture. “Come help me check the tank on the far end. The float valve’s been running slow.”
She got out of the truck and got up behind him on the gray without being asked, which she had done twice before, the horse accepting her weight without complaint. She put her hands at David’s sides and they rode across the pasture with the yearlings moving away from them in the new grass and the mountains standing white and enormous to the south.
The float valve was running slow because a piece of grit had fouled the seat, which David cleared with a wire in thirty seconds. They stood at the tank while the yearlings drifted back toward the water and the afternoon came on warm and the red-tailed hawk that seemed to live on the east pasture worked its long slow circles overhead.
“Pete thinks I should move the herd to the west pasture by August,” David said. “Let the east rest through the dry months.”
“That’s good grass management.”
“It pushes the yearlings closer to the creek trail.” He looked at the hawk. “Closer to your monitoring stations.”
“They won’t bother the equipment.”
“No. I just wanted you to know.” He looked at her. “You’ve been out here twice a week for two months and I’ve never once asked if it was inconvenient.”
She looked at him. “It’s not inconvenient.”
“Your work at the tribal office.”
“I manage my own schedule.” She paused. “Are you asking me to come less often.”
“No.” He said it flat and immediate the same way he’d said no second thoughts in the Billings restaurant. “I’m asking if what you have here is working for you. The monitoring, the access, the—” He stopped. “All of it.”
She looked at the yearlings at the water tank, the hawk overhead, the mountains beyond the fence line. “All of it is working for me,” she said.
He nodded once and looked back at the hawk.
That evening she stayed for dinner and afterward they sat on the back porch in the warm dark, the new roof solid above them, the creek audible somewhere in the cottonwoods below. He had the kind of comfortable silence she had come to understand was simply his natural state, a man who did not need to fill the dark with words.
She had her notebook and was making field notes from the afternoon’s monitoring while the light lasted and then by feel when it didn’t, the pen moving across the page in the dark.
“My wife never came to the east pasture,” he said.
She stopped writing.
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