The Honey Trap
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 6
The lawyers took three weeks to turn the framework into a document, which was faster than anyone expected and slower than anyone wanted. During those three weeks the creek ran at spring volume, cold and clear, and the contractor Carl Briggs recommended came out to walk the grade control structure site and produced an estimate that came in at fifty-eight thousand dollars, which split to twenty-nine thousand each, which was fourteen hundred dollars more than the fifteen thousand Alachooshe had told the council.
She drove out to the ranch on a Wednesday afternoon to talk about it.
She told herself that was why she drove out.
Pete Hargrove met her in the yard and told her David was on the south pasture fixing the fence line he’d mentioned and pointed her in the right direction. She drove the truck out on the two-track through a gate and found him three-quarters of a mile in, crouched at a post that had heaved out of the ground over the winter, the gray horse standing tied to the fence wire twenty yards off with the patient expression of a horse that had been doing this all day.
He heard her truck and looked up and went back to the post without changing his expression, which she was learning meant he was neither surprised nor displeased, just focused on what he was doing.
She got out and walked over. He had dug out around the base of the post and was tamping new gravel in with a steel bar, working it down in layers. The post was a good eight inches of treated pine and had been in the ground long enough that the soil around it had gone dark.
“Contractor came in at fifty-eight,” she said.
“I know. He called me this morning.”
“That’s twenty-nine each.”
“I can do twenty-nine.” He tamped another layer. “Can the tribe?”
“I need to talk to my father. We budgeted fifteen.” She crouched down and looked at the post base. “You want me to hold that while you tamp?”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he handed her the post without comment and picked up the tamping bar and worked the gravel down on the far side. She held the post plumb by feel, the wood cold and solid in her hands, and he worked around the base methodically, not rushing it.
“The overage is mostly equipment mobilization,” she said. “The contractor’s coming from Billings. If we can find someone closer we save ten, maybe twelve thousand.”
“You know someone closer?”
“There’s a civil contractor out of Hardin. Crow-owned. They’ve done riprap work on the reservation. I don’t know if they’ve done channel grade control but the methodology isn’t complicated.”
“Get me a name and I’ll call them.”
She held the post while he finished the last layer and then stood and tested it with both hands, rocking it front to back and side to side. It held. He picked up a can of post mix from the ground and poured it dry around the base and poured water after it from a jug and tamped it once more.
“That’ll set overnight,” he said. He picked up his tools and carried them back to the saddlebag on the gray and she walked beside him. The south pasture ran flat to the tree line, good grass coming in green from the wet spring, a pair of meadowlarks working the fence line fifty yards ahead of them.
“How many posts?” she said.
“Fourteen heaved. Fixed eleven. Three more down by the creek bend.” He untied the gray and led him forward along the fence. “You want to walk it?”
She looked at the fence line running south toward the tree line and the afternoon light on the grass and thought about the drive back to Crow Agency and her desk and the water law comments she was supposed to be finishing for the federal review.
“All right,” she said.
They walked the fence line with the gray following loose behind David, not tied, just following because he wanted to. She noted this about the horse. A horse that followed loose was a horse with a particular kind of trust in the person it was following, the kind that didn’t come from training so much as from daily accumulated evidence that the person was worth following.
The second post was easy, just needed tamping. The third had split at the ground line and needed replacing. David pulled a new post from the bundle tied to the saddle and set it while she held the wire off the ground with a fence stretcher he showed her how to use without making a tutorial of it, just handed it to her and demonstrated once and moved on.
“Your father called me,” he said, working the post into the hole.
“Yesterday. About the formal signing. He wants to do it on the reservation, at the council building.”
“Is that a problem?”
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