Broken Horse (5 page)

The three girls nodded.

“This is going to mean a lot of extra work for you three,” Max told The Saddle Club. “If the mare won’t let Red or me near her, you’re going to have to be the ones to take care of her, at least until she settles down.”

“We know,” Stevie said. “We can handle it. And don’t worry, we’ll be careful.”

“Good,” Max put in. “I’ll leave her to you girls, then. Call me if you need me. Come on, Red, we’d better get ready for
the adult riding class. And I have a feeling that once we’re out of sight, our guest will calm down a little.” He hurried down the aisle with Red right behind him.

As Judy started to give the girls detailed instructions for taking care of the mare, Lisa listened carefully. But a small part of her mind wandered as she glanced at the horse in the stall behind them. The mare was still standing in the same spot, her head once again sagging tiredly as she stared at nothing in particular. She didn’t even seem to notice the clean bedding and fresh water in her new home. In fact, her expression was no different than it had been when she was standing in CARL’s crowded corral—or in her owner’s soiled, muddy pen. Did she not notice the difference? Or did she just not care?

Lisa did her best to put such thoughts out of her mind and to concentrate on what Judy was saying. Once she was satisfied that the girls knew what they had to do, the vet excused herself to keep an appointment with another patient, promising to stop by later to check on the mare.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Carole said as Judy got ready to leave. “The Saddle Club is on the case.”

Judy nodded. “Call me immediately if her condition starts to deteriorate,” she said. And, with that, she was gone.

“Nothing like a little optimism,” Stevie muttered as the vet disappeared around the corner.

“You can’t really blame her,” Carole defended the vet. “She knows all the things that could still go wrong.”

“Come on,” Lisa said. Carole’s words had brought the image of poor, doomed Sal into her mind, and she wanted to forget about that for now. She wasn’t interested in discussing Judy’s state of mind, either. She just wanted to get to work taking care of the mare. She grabbed the antibiotic ointment Judy had left for the cuts and sores on the horse’s body. “Let’s get started.”

“T
HERE
,” S
TEVIE
SAID
an hour later, stepping back to admire her work. She had just finished applying fresh bandages to the worst of the cuts and scratches on the mare’s legs. “That wasn’t so bad, was it, girl?”

The mare ignored Stevie until she reached forward to stroke the horse’s nose. Then the mare moved as far away as her cross-ties allowed.

“Don’t worry, girl. We’ll leave you alone for a while now,” Carole reassured the mare. She slowly undid the cross-ties and set her free in her stall, reaching out to pat her on the neck as she did so. The horse shied away again and Carole’s hand missed its mark.

Lisa sighed. “She’s not getting used to us at all,” she complained, a note of frustration in her voice.

“We have to be patient,” Carole said, gathering the medical supplies and putting them in a bucket. “It takes a lot of repetition to teach a horse anything, and trust is no exception. Once she’s sure we aren’t going to hurt her, she’ll come around.” She paused, then added, “I hope.”

“It’s no wonder she’s head shy,” Stevie said. “If those marks on her back are any indication, she must have been beaten a lot. That would make any animal nervous around people, men or otherwise.”

Carole nodded. “We’re lucky she lets us touch her at all,” she said. “Some horses probably wouldn’t differentiate between us and men. They’d just avoid people altogether.”

“I guess you’re right,” Lisa said. “But I wish we could let her know somehow that we’re just trying to help.”

“We are letting her know that just by being here,” Carole assured her. “But we can’t rush her. She’ll trust us when she’s ready. Right now the only important thing is that she gets well.”

Stevie glanced at her watch. “I hate to nurse and run, but I’d better get over to Belle’s stall. If she doesn’t get some exercise soon, she’s going to be just as hard to handle as this girl here.” She paused. “By the way, it seems a little strange to just keep calling her ‘girl.’ Shouldn’t we give her some kind of name?”

“I guess so.” Carole avoided meeting her friends’ gaze. “But I can’t think of anything that fits right now, can you?”

“I don’t know,” Stevie said. “Lisa? What do you think?”

Lisa gazed at the horse, whose thin body seemed to sag as if it was difficult for her even to keep standing. “I can’t think of anything right now, either,” she said. “Maybe we should keep thinking about it until one of us has a good idea.”

Carole nodded. She felt a little relieved to put off the decision for a while. As hard as it would be for all of them if the mare didn’t pull through, it might make it even harder if they gave her a name. She guessed that her friends were both thinking the same thing, though neither of them said so out loud. “Okay, then,” she said. “Starlight needs some exercise, too.” She glanced at Stevie. “How about if we work him and Belle together in the ring?”

“Sounds good,” Stevie said. “Lisa, do you want to come for a ride with us? I’m sure Prancer wouldn’t mind a little exercise.” Unlike Stevie and Carole, Lisa didn’t have a horse of her own. Prancer, a spirited Thoroughbred mare, was the stable horse she usually rode.

“No, thanks. I’ll stay here,” Lisa said. For once she was glad not to have her own horse. It freed her to spend all of her time with the mare. “I’d like to try to do a little grooming if she’ll let me. We got the worst of the filth off yesterday, but she’s still pretty grimy. I’d like to see what color she really is under all that dirt.”

“Okay,” Stevie said. “We’ll see you in a while, then.” She and Carole headed for the tack room.

After they had gone, Lisa leaned on the half door of the stall, hoping that her presence would help the mare get used to people. But the mare seemed to be doing her best to ignore the girl. She stood at the back of the stall, facing the wall. Lisa tried talking gently to her, and for a moment the mare seemed to be listening. Her ears flicked back and her
head lifted a little. But then her neck drooped again and her ears went slack.

After standing and talking to her for another twenty minutes, Lisa decided it was time to try some grooming. Picking up her grooming bucket, she carefully slid open the stall door, talking quietly to the mare all the while. The mare watched Lisa warily as she entered the stall but allowed the girl to put her in cross-ties with a minimum of fuss.

“There, that’s not so bad, is it?” Lisa murmured. She suspected that the mare’s relative docility had more to do with exhaustion than anything else, but she didn’t let herself think that way for very long. Instead she continued chatting while she wiped the mare’s back and sides with a soft cloth, doing her best to avoid the worst cuts and abrasions. The mare flinched a few times when Lisa touched an injured spot, but otherwise she stood quietly. Still, Lisa could tell by the tenseness in the horse’s body that she was far from relaxed.

Moving very slowly and carefully, Lisa ran the cloth down the horse’s legs one by one, stopping well short of the swollen forefoot. She decided not to press her luck by working on the horse’s face. That could wait for another day. Instead she picked up a soft body brush and carefully tried to work out some of the dirtiest spots from the mare’s coat.

“Don’t worry, girl,” she said soothingly as she worked, moving the soft-bristled, wood-handled body brush over her bony sides. “This won’t hurt a bit, I promise. I’m not even going to try to use a dandy brush on you until some of those
cuts heal. But this will be enough to get you cleaned up a little. I bet you have a pretty gray coat underneath all this dirt, don’t you?”

A few minutes later Lisa dropped the body brush into the bucket. “I guess you’ve had enough grooming for today,” she said as she carefully released the mare from her cross-ties and shut the stall door. Then she leaned against the opposite wall and watched the horse for a few minutes. The mare’s head drooped as she turned around to face the back of the stall. Within moments she looked just as she had for most of the time since Lisa had known her. The only difference was that this time a few patches of relatively clean coat peeked out from the mess of bandages and dirt that covered her. The clean spots shone gently in the dimness of the stall.

“I bet you were awfully pretty once,” Lisa said in a low voice, talking more to herself than to the horse. “Silvery gray and beautiful.” Lisa thought of Pepper, another gray she had known. Pepper had been her favorite horse to ride at Pine Hollow until his retirement. He had died of old age not too long ago, and sometimes Lisa still missed him. “It’s hard to believe anybody could be coldhearted enough to let you get like this,” she told the mare. At the thought, tears started to come to her eyes, and Lisa blinked them away quickly. This was no time to get weepy. She decided to go find Red and make sure he remembered that the mare needed special attention at feeding time.

When she returned to the gray mare’s stall some time later, Lisa saw that the horse had turned around and was facing out. Approaching carefully, Lisa made sure to keep her voice low and unthreatening. “Hi, girl,” she said. “Did you miss me?”

The mare pricked her ears toward her for a moment and didn’t turn away as Lisa stood outside the stall. Still, Lisa couldn’t help starting to feel sad again as she looked at the poor, pathetic creature. It seemed like such a long shot that the horse would ever recover completely from the terrible state the girls had found her in.

S
EVERAL
HOURS
LATER
Carole and Stevie found Lisa perched on a stool outside the mare’s stall, reading a book about equine foot care. She had borrowed both the stool and the book from Max because she had wanted to read about thrush. She knew a little about it already—for instance, she knew that it was an infection of the frog, a part of the horse’s foot, and that it was generally a sign of poor care, since it occurred when a horse’s feet were allowed to remain wet or dirty for an extended period of time. But she’d never had to treat a case before and she wanted to make sure she knew exactly what she was doing.

“We’re going to call it a day,” Stevie said. “Are you ready to go?”

Lisa looked up from the book, marking her place with her finger. “You go ahead. I’m going to stay for a while.”

Carole peered into the stall at the mare, who was standing in her usual position with her head drooping down tiredly. “How is she?”

“About the same,” Lisa admitted. “She’s definitely calmer here than she was at CARL. But her mood doesn’t seem to have improved much otherwise.”

“Too bad,” Stevie said. “I guess I was hoping that just coming to Pine Hollow would make her feel better.”

“Me too,” Lisa said. “But when you’ve been through what she’s been through, that kind of thing probably doesn’t seem so important.”

Carole nodded. “She’s pretty far gone. We shouldn’t expect too much, especially at first. Her recovery might be very slow.”

“I just hope she starts to get better soon,” Lisa said. She hesitated for a moment, then added, “I can’t help wondering sometimes if she even
wants
to get better.”

“I was wondering the same thing,” said Carole, turning away from the stall to look at Lisa. “It seems like more than her body is broken. Her spirit is broken, too. And that can be much harder to treat.”

“Well, we’ll just have to find a way,” Stevie said with determination.

Lisa sighed. “Once or twice today I thought there were little signs that she recognized me, but they were too subtle for me to be sure. And it doesn’t seem to make her trust me any more than she did.”

Carole squeezed Lisa’s arm. “She’ll come around,” she said. But Lisa thought her friend didn’t sound totally certain about that.

Carole and Stevie said good-bye to Lisa and left. Most of the other riders had also left, and the stable was quiet except for the sounds of horses settling down for the evening.

Lisa leaned back against the wall and returned to her book. But as she tried to read, her mind started to wander. She thought about what Carole had said about the mare’s spirit being broken. It seemed to be true, and the thought disturbed Lisa. With Judy’s guidance, Lisa was confident that she could do a good job taking care of the mare’s physical ailments. But what if that wasn’t enough? The best medical care in the world wouldn’t make much of a difference if the patient had lost the will to live.

Lisa didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there alone when she heard footsteps coming toward her from the direction of the entrance. It was Red O’Malley. “Lisa? There you are,” he greeted her. “Your mother just called looking for you. She’s wondering where you are.”

“Oh, thanks, Red,” Lisa said, glancing at her watch. “I’ll call her back right away.”

The groom nodded and hurried away. Lisa picked up the book and the stool and returned them to Max’s office. Then she headed for the phone to call home. Unfortunately she wouldn’t be able to come to the stable until after school the next day. Once again she found herself wishing that Christmas
vacation would come quickly. This time it had nothing to do with the Starlight Ride—somehow that didn’t seem nearly as important now—and everything to do with spending time with the sick mare. Lisa wanted to do all she could to help the mare get better. She just hoped that all she could do would be enough.