Saturday Afternoon

The dispatchers’ voice had sounded calm when it came across the radio, but you could always tell when calm was covering panic. “Nearest repair equipment from Havre can’t even get a track warrant until tomorrow morning. best case we’re looking at thirty-six to seventy-two hours. Hold tight.”
Hold tight.
The engine had blown a main bearing forty-even miles from Havre, thirty-some miles from Harlem, sitting in the middle of nowhere north-central Montana, January winds hammering sideways at 40 mph across the prairie like it had something personal against them.
The conductor, Rafe, kicked the ballast rocks and said what they were thinking: “We are absolutely screwed.”
The engineer, Hallie, pulled her coat tighter at the collar and stared toward the horizon. She could feel Fort Belknap out there in the dark, to the southeast – not in some mystical way, just in a way people who run freight lines in Montana get a sense of geography in their bones. You learn where reservations are, where ranch country is, where wheat country is. You learn the difference between miles and miles.
Forty-seven miles here meant nothing and everything at once.
Their locomotive still had shelter. Heat would run off the auxiliary generator, but fuel was limited. If they kept the cabin warm like normal, they’d run out in maybe eighteen hours.
Hallie made the call.
“Ration it. We cycle the heat three times a day. Jackets and sleeping bags the rest of the time.”
Rafe cursed but nodded. Jax, the brakeman, already started inventorying food – two ready-to-eat packs, beef jerky, some vending machine garbage. Enough calories if they were careful.
That night, the prairie wind sounded like the old stories people tell about how the plains land hums when it wants to remind you who’s in charge. They slept in shifts.
Day two, around midday, they saw headlights in the distance – a pickup, bouncing over ruts and frozen dirt. It approached slowly. Hallie braced.
An older man stepped out, bundled, calm. He introduced himself, just a first name, said he lived on the reservation, said he’d heard over someone’s radio that a train crew was stranded without food. “Heard” could mean anything out here – word traveled weird on the prairie.
He handed them a cooler – sandwiches, oranges, bottled water – said “somebody oughta bring you real food” and then he left. No drama. No questions. No judgement. Just neighbor behavior in a place where distance means nothing and taking care of stranded people is just how you behave.
Hallie tried to ask his name again, to at least thank him properly. He just raised his hand like it’s fine, got back in his truck, and drove off the way he came.
Night two, the temperature dropped below zero. They rotated heat exactly as planned. The generator held. Barely.
By morning three, their radio batteries were nearly exhausted. They were exhausted. The sun rose slow. And then – like something cinematic – the high rail truck came around the curve. Two mechanics, bundled, laughing, like it was all a normal Tuesday. “You kids look rough,” one said. “You have no idea,” Hallie said.
When they were finally riding back to Havre in the warm repair truck cab, Rafe said quietly: “If that guy hadn’t come yesterday.” Hallie didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. Some things don’t need commentary.
Sometime survival on the plains is a mix of protocol and miracle. Some miracles look like paperwork, some look like lucky timing.
And sometimes a miracle looks like a man in a pickup who never gives his full name but brings sandwiches because it’s freezing and three strangers are stuck out in the tracks.
The railroad wrote the official incident report as mechanical failure / delayed response / recovered without injury.
That was technically true. But every single person in that crew knew a deeper truth: Out there, near, Fort Belknap, they were reminded that survival is always part skill, part steel, part neighborliness, and part grace.
They were halfway back to Havre when Hallie’s phone – which had been dead for a full day – suddenly lit up bars and buzzed like it was having a seizure. Dozens of missed calls. Three voicemails from the dispatcher. Once voicemail from a number she didn’t recognize. She pressed play on the unknown number. A man’s voice. Clean, steady, midwestern, hard to place.
“You got lucky. Don’t count on luck next time. Watch who you trust out here.”
Jax leaned forward, hearing just enough to make his face go pale. Rafe said: “was that – was that the guy with the cooler?” Hallie replayed the voice in her head. It didn’t sound like the man who brought food.
It sounded younger. Sharper. Less gentle. More deliberate. Who the hell even had her number?”
She turned toward the mechanic driving. “Hey – who else knew we were stuck out there?”
The mechanic shrugged like it was obvious.
“Everyone. The shortline boys. The grain guys. Some folks over at the blueline road crew. Once word hits the airwaves it spreads. Rail gossip moves faster than the trains.” Hallie stared out the window.
The prairie rolled by – long, endless, beautiful land. Big sky. Big silence. Big shadows.
She tried to picture who would want her scared. Who would want her to know she was being watched.
Jax said, low: “We should tell the feds.” Rafe said nothing. Hallie finally exhaled and said: “We tell nobody until we see if that number calls again.”

The next week they were assigned a new route, farther south. She tried to shake the feeling, but it stuck to her ribs. Three days later, at a motel in Billings, her phone buzzed.
Unknown number calling
She answered. The same calm voice: “You survived the plains. Cool. Now survive what’s coming next.”
Click.
No explanation. No threat spelled out. Just a shape of a threat – a promise of one.
Hallie sat on the bed in the motel’s dim lamplight and realized –
That breakdown wasn’t the threat.
The threat is whoever noticed them during it. and whoever that is… they didn’t stop watching when the train got rescued.
That night she didn’t sleep
She lay in the dark thinking about the prairie, not in a mystical way, in a logistical way.
If someone was out there watching them in that exact place between Harlem and Havre they weren’t just some random bored trucker
That was the kind of stretch where people only go because they need to go there.
Like they were checking something or meeting someone or guarding something.
The next morning, over motel breakfast waffles she told Rafe & Jax she got another call.
Jax said: “this is cartel stuff”
Rafe snorted. “This is Montana not narcos”
Hallie said nothing
Because she remembered another detail that she hadn’t said out loud yet, while they were stranded the day before that unknown man brought food she’d taken a walk down the line, just to see if maybe she could see headlight from traffic out on the highway. And she’d seen fresh tire tracks, tracks going away from the tracks down into a pasture toward nothing.
She hadn’t thought about it in the movement but, now it was in her mind like a splinter.
She pulled out her phone and brought up google maps offline zoomed in on that stretch.
There were ranch roads old fire roads coulee trails, a lot of ways for someone to get out of the line without being seen and then something hit her.
Fort Belknap reservation was the closet community
Yes
But not the only thing out there
There were privately owned parcels grazing rights parcels BLM & state land
Landlocked by ranch leases and tribal trust land interlaced between a patchwork so complicated the railroad itself barely even knew who owned which fence line.
Which meant someone could hide a lot out there.
Before they left Billings Hallie went down to the front desk and asked: “do you still have the caller ID record for calls to room 215?
The clerk printed to log like it was nothing, the unknown caller?
had an area code not local not North Dakota no Idaho it was Denver
Denver is the headquarters for a lot of things in the West.
Oil
Gas
Mining
AG supply brokers
Private equity land acquisition funds and railroad dispatch regions
Hallie stared at the printout whatever this was it wasn’t a random stalker, it wasn’t a ghost cowboy, it wasn’t even a personal threat.
This felt like someone telling her: “you bumped into something operational” and they weren’t threatening to kill her they were warning her not to interfere.
On the drive back home Rafe finally asked the question: “What do you think we stumbled into out there?”
Hallie didn’t answer right away. Then quietly: “Nothing good.” pause. “And something bigger than a broken bearing.”