Boukay waits for Mandy, who has agreed to meet him in his quarters. While he waits, he opens his fieldbook again.

2584:04:1 - I think I am close to a pocket of Earthling descendants: I suppose I would have come here anyway sometime, just to see the Polgarrian rodeo, but I never realized that the planet was so beautiful. We land at Salbach Port late at night. I walk out into the air, and am suddenly drunk. I have never known such an ecstasy. What is it from? In this high, sober, but drunken state, I am taken by an enterprising local to the only hotel, it seems. I fall asleep, and dream (note: see entry in Dreambook under today's date). At daybreak I am awake. I look out of my dirty hotel window, and as far as I can see there are waves of high flowers. The planet is almost completely ancient tallgrass prairie. I dress, shaking with happiness, and go out onto the battered streets of this cowboy town, and run towards the waving grass. I embrace it, roll around in it, breathe it, plant to plant to plant to plant. They say to me, here, songcatcher, catch this song, and it is the wind, and I catch it, and I let it go, and it catches me, and we wave over the sky.

2584:05: 2 There is something strange going on. The grass says. Quick note: young woman in tavern, with Cybanian slave slash down her cheek. Playing bar piano, usual "Mist over Mondargloom" and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon round Sirius-3" and in the turnaround plays something that vaguely sounds like "Pretty Saro".

2584:05:3 There is a Polgarrian cattle drive coming through. I have only brief moments to go to the prairie at dawning, not enough time to learn more. The prairie wind gusts fitfully, little queer catspaws of high grass counterpatterns. Late in the morning the skyhorses appear on the horizon, like bucking ghost riders, cowboys and cowgirls buzzing in high circles. Below them, first the sound, and then the sight of the vast swirling herd of Polgarrian cattle, and the hooting sounds, and the lasariats circling. There must be Earthlings here: everyone knows that Earthlings have a feel for this kind of work across the cosmos.

2584:05: 3/2 I am in luck. I am sitting in the tavern, and a bunch of dusty cowboys come in. One of them is pale green -- he turns out to be a scion of my Father's, Buddobud by name. We sit and talk -- he came to Polgar for the grass, he says, and stayed for the life. He introduces me to his pals. "What are you doing here?" he says. I say," I am doing a little anthropology. Songs mostly. Old earth songs. Anyone here know any?"
"Well sure," says one man, straight and tall like, well, like a cowboy. "Me and Pedro know all kinds. Pedro's out branding or whoring or something. " He smiles, and starts to sing:

"As I wandered out on the Streets of Laredo,
As I wandered out on Laredo one day,
I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen,
Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay."

About halfway through the song, the woman at the piano starts to play. Then somewhere in the last line, the music stops.
"Heard that one before?" he says to me.
"Did you change the last line?" I say. "The original has: "Wrapped in white Disney as cold as the clay""
He looks at me sheepishly. "Yeah, shit, I never did like that line. It never really worked for me. What would a white Disney be, anyway? I guess I just repeated the linen. ". Anyway, I don't guess I fiddled with many more. Want to hear: "O Bury Me Not On the Lone Disney?"". So he sang that. But I had that already.

2584:05: 4 The cowboy invites me to come to the chuckwagon that evening -- maybe there will be another singalong. I eagerly say yes. I get up from the table and as I am going out of the room to go back to my hotel, I catch a glimpse in the barrom mirror of the woman with the Cybanian slash across her cheek. She looks terrified, as if she has seen a ghost. A ghost rider. What can be going on?

2584:05:5

A terrible accident has occurred out on the cattle drive. It seems that two of the skyhorses collided during an attempt to turn a sudden stampede.

2584:05:6

It is a strange, beautiful, sight. We are on a low hill overlooking the town. Many of the townspeople, and all the riders on the drive have followed the two caskets on their journey. Some are in formal mourning, others cleaned up as best they can. Both cowboys seem to have been much loved. I know now that somehow I am responsible for their deaths. The cowboy who sang to me, and his comrade, Pedro. They are the ones who were killed. I have inadvertantly, for some reason, become a bringer of death. In the circle of people around the gravesites, I see the woman with the Cybanian slave slash. She is carrying a cluster of what look like roses, wild roses I guess. When the service is over, and we have sung "Nearer My Disney To Thee", the diggers are about to spade soil on the coffins, and she puts up her hand for a moment, and throws down the roses onto the coffin lids. Then she walks away to the sound of the spades, slowly, back through the whispering grass down the hillside to Salbach Port.