Chosen by a Horse (2 page)

It was impossible to read the numbers on any of the tags. The herd jostled and huddled together on the other side of the paddock, as far from the two humans standing at the fence as possible. I felt a wave of fresh anger at this aberrant behavior, at what caused it. Horses treated humanely don’t run from people. I’d never seen domestic horses react to humans this way and here were forty, cowering against the far fence as though we’d come to shoot them.

More SPCA volunteers appeared, two women to help us find Current Squeeze and to herd her and her foal into the horse trailer that was backed up against the open paddock
gate. Ted climbed over the paddock fence and joined the two women, who were ankle deep in mud, waving their arms to try to separate horses enough to walk between them to check the tags for number ten. The herd seemed tied together as they moved in tight circles of exhausted panic. In their panic, some fell to their knees, unable to lift their hooves as the mud gripped and sucked them down. A few of the fallen mares groaned as they struggled to their feet, only to be knocked down again by the frantic movements of the herd around them. The high-pitched whinnies of foals momentarily separated from their mothers added to the terror in the paddock. I couldn’t bear to watch another minute.

“Never mind about Current Squeeze,” I called. “I’ll take anyone.”

A few minutes later, one of the bay-colored skeletons stumbled up the trailer ramp, followed by a muddy foal. Ted scrambled after them, securing a thick rubber-coated kick chain across the back, and then he lifted the ramp, locking it in place. He took the list of names out of his back pocket again and walked to the front of the trailer, disappearing inside for a minute. When he reemerged, he hopped onto the wheel fender and shouted across the paddock to me.

“Lay Me Down,” he called, waving the list. “Her name’s Lay Me Down.”

If the only criterion for choosing a horse was a name, I’d gotten a loser. Lay Me Down? It wasn’t a name, it was part of a prayer children recited before going to sleep at night. In
a different context—say, shouted across a pasture—it might even sound a little wanton.
Lay Me Down! Lay Me!
What would the neighbors think? Giving a horse a name like that was almost as bad as not feeding her. You couldn’t even get a nickname out of it. But it was too late. Lay Me Down was already in the trailer; this was no time to make a fuss because of a name.

The parking lot was beginning to fill with trailers as more people arrived to pick up horses. The SPCA had its hands full orchestrating this heartwarming but overwhelming response to its broadcasted appeal for help. Right now I had to move to make way for someone else who could load another horse. Timing was crucial. Every horse there was critically ill and needed immediate medical attention, a responsibility anyone fostering one had agreed to assume. This was the part I most dreaded. My medical phobia. Since Georgia had birthed her foal, when there had been strictly routine visits for a healthy horse, I had called in a vet once a year for vaccinations.

“We’re all set to go,” a thin thirtyish blonde named Laura called over to me as she climbed into the cab of the truck that would pull Lay Me Down’s trailer. After seeing the appeal for help on television, Laura had offered the use of her horse trailer. I’d met her for the first time when I was inside signing papers. She couldn’t foster a horse herself, she’d explained; she had too many of her own already.

I headed for my car, not at all anxious to leave this hub of support and expertise to begin caring for two sick horses
on my own. What was I thinking, taking on two animals I might have to bury in a back field by next week?

I drove around to the entrance gate and waited for Laura’s green truck to appear in my rearview mirror. It would take thirty minutes to get home, forty-five if I slowed down for the trailer. As soon as we got there I’d telephone my friend Allie. If anyone could help me to keep the mare and her foal alive, it was Allie.

W
E REACHED MY
home and drove back to the pasture.

“Ready?” Laura said, standing at the back of the trailer, waiting to pull the dead bolt that would release the ramp. Lay Me Down and her foal stood quietly together in the trailer, apparently too weak to raise much of a fuss.

“Ready,” I nodded, and we pulled out the bolts and let the ramp down slowly, unhooking the kick chain at the same time. Neither horse moved. Either they didn’t know the ramp was down or they didn’t want to get out. I was holding a lead line hooked to Lay Me Down’s halter to help guide her backward. I gave it a gentle tug. No response. Laura walked to the front and peeked through the little door at the front of the trailer, clucking softly to encourage them.
I called Lay Me Down by name and tapped my fingers lightly against her rump.

“She’s asleep,” Laura reported.

Asleep? I dropped the lead line and walked toward the front, ducking my head to walk through the trailer door, and stood inches away from Lay Me Down. She was a tall horse, sixteen hands—about five foot four at the shoulder. Face to face, my eyes should have been level with her nose. But she had dropped her head so low I could look along the ridge of her mane straight down her back to the top of her tail. She looked like a complicated wire coat hanger draped with a mud-caked brown pelt. Bones protruded everywhere. I watched her ribs heave up and down for a minute and listened to her wheeze. Her eyes were open but droopy, weeping a whitish discharge that streaked the dried mud on her face. The same discharge was coming out of her nose. I knew she had pneumonia and had been started on antibiotics before leaving the SPCA. She couldn’t keep her head up because she was too weak.

The foal was four weeks old and seemed healthier. She was the same color as her mother, a bay without markings, and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. When she saw me enter the trailer she put her ears flat back and glared. She wore a blue nylon halter that was already too small, cutting into the downy fur that covered her cheekbones. I wondered if she’d let me close enough to remove it. She stood edgy and hostile at her mother’s flank, waiting to see what I was going to do.

I felt overwhelmed. I’d never had a horse this sick; Lay Me Down could walk off this trailer and die. Then what? Even though I’d been around horses all my life, I’d never been present when one actually died. And I’d never had to hand raise an orphan foal. Lay Me Down sighed a wheezy sigh and blinked her runny eyes. If she could still stand, as soon as I got her out of this trailer I’d make her a warm bran mash.

I unclipped the lead line from her halter so she wouldn’t trip on it and put both hands on her chest, pushing backward. She opened her eyes a little wider and looked at me, then started backing up.

“Good girl,” I urged, keeping the pressure on her chest. I ducked under the breast bar (a padded horizontal bar at a horse’s chest height that keeps it from going too far forward in a trailer and also provides support when the trailer brakes) and stayed with her as she backed down the ramp. Her foal turned and walked out head first, pausing at the end of the ramp to wait for her mother, her ears flickering back and forth in a jealous fury. Who was I to touch her mother? She waved her head at me at the end of a snaky neck. She would have liked to nip me the first chance she got.

We got to the end of the ramp and stood on flat ground. Lay Me Down sighed again, and I took her by the halter and decided, instead of leaving her at the gate to find her own way to the turnout (a twenty-by-twenty-foot lean-to—like horse shelter in the middle of this three-acre pasture), I’d
walk her there myself. In her condition I wasn’t sure she’d see it or have the energy to get there if she did. When we walked past the watering trough, I paused and flicked the surface with my fingers to entice her and, sure enough, she lowered her head and drank. I felt a small surge of joy because I thought it meant she trusted me.

The foal pranced ahead of us, carrying her little tail aloft to remind me she was alert to any funny business. She had long skinny legs that looked awkward until she ran, and then they became instruments of pure grace. She circled in front of her mother, never farther than a few yards away, dancing out her protest to my presence. She seemed wild. I doubted she’d ever been handled, save for being fitted with the halter.

When Lay Me Down finished drinking, she let me lead her the rest of the way to the turnout. She discovered the fresh hay and nudged it around with her nose, looking for the sweetest grasses. It was such a horsey thing to do, so normal and reassuring, that I stopped worrying momentarily. The foal slipped into the turnout, keeping her mother’s body between us, and with one final glare at me, ducked her head to nurse.

Laura and I stood outside the turnout in the rain, watching the two of them for a few minutes. This was a scene I never tired of, watching a horse eat hay. I found the image soothing, like watching logs burn in the fireplace. There was something warm and mesmerizing about it. Now that Lay Me Down was safe, I was eager to make the bran mash.

Laura was anxious to leave, too, so she could return to the SPCA to help transport more horses. As soon as we said our good-byes, I headed for the house to mix the bran mash. There I mixed two quarts each of grain and wheat bran in a feed bucket, adding boiling water and stirring until it was the consistency of hot oatmeal. The whole house smelled sweet and nutty. I broke a few carrots into the mixture, then covered the bucket with a towel. It would still be warm but cool enough to eat by the time I carried it back to the turnout. I’d start the foal on a quart of high-protein grain mix and see how she did. In all the confusion at the SPCA I had forgotten to ask about feed and had no idea what feed schedule, if any, had been decided on in the few hours the horses had been there.

I headed back to Lay Me Down, feeling guilty walking past my three horses, squeezed together at their pasture fence, a triumvirate of quivering indignation. They held their heads aloft with nostrils flared toward the scent of the intruders who were visible to them in the far pasture, which lay on the other side of a small pond. It was my Morgan, Georgia, who set the tone for this hostile reception. Her arrogance was partly my fault, the result of being raised in a barn where “no” was just a theory.

Because of Lay Me Down’s pneumonia, it wasn’t safe to pet my three horses until I had changed my clothes and disinfected my hands and boots with bleach. I ducked my head and walked fast, wondering what Georgia would have to say about this later.

Lay Me Down was still eating hay when I arrived with her bran mash, but the foal was asleep in a nest of wood shavings, her long legs sprawled out to one side. I worried about mares stepping on these fragile foal-legs, but Georgia never had, and I imagined Lay Me Down wouldn’t either.

The foal woke as soon as I entered the shed and scrambled onto her legs, rear first, so for a moment her butt swayed in the air as she wobbled herself upright. She tossed me one of her nasty looks and gave her mother’s side a few rough jabs before she turned and lowered her head to suckle again. I wondered if she would ever like me.

There were two feed bins in the shed, one for an adult horse mounted on the wall too high for the foal to reach and one mounted lower called a creep, which had metal grating over the top that only a foal’s slender nose could fit through, preventing the mother from stealing the foal’s grain. I poured the bran mash into Lay Me Down’s bin and right away the droopy eyes looked up, the ears flickered forward, and Lay Me Down stopped eating hay and came over. She hesitated briefly, letting her nose hover over the warm feed bin, perhaps worried about the strange steam, or perhaps reacquainting herself with the unfamiliar smell of food. But after a moment she lowered her head and began to eat.

I stood near, close enough to touch her if I wanted to, but I didn’t. Not yet. I just watched. I was trying to understand who she was, what she was like, and how the way
she’d been treated would affect her. So far I felt none of the animosity toward me that I was getting from the foal. If anything, I felt a shyness, as though Lay Me Down was also waiting and wondering.

Meanwhile, the foal trotted in tight circles safely on the other side of her mother, adding little bucks and squeals to her nonstop display of fury, this time because her mother had food and she didn’t. I hurried into the storage room at one end of the turnout and returned with a quart of grain. As I poured it into the foal’s creep, I felt the slightest puff of air ruffle the hair at my temple and, confused about what it could have been, turned to look for whatever feathery lightness had passed so close to my head. And then I noticed the foal staring at me from the corner of the turnout, bouncing around on those jittery new legs, almost useless until they were flying across a field or aiming a kick at someone’s head. Her kick had just missed me. I couldn’t believe how fast she’d moved or how close she’d come to my temple. I’d been kicked many times by horses, most of the time by accident, occasionally on purpose, but no horse had ever tried to kick me in the head. I knew this foal needed expert handling before anyone would be safe around her. Until then, all I could do was stay aware of where she was and keep my distance.