Chosen by a Horse (3 page)

I walked out of the shed feeling rejected and cold, soaked to the skin in filthy jeans. When I got to the house I’d take a hot shower, put on warm sweats, heat up some mushroom soup, and call Allie. I was past the pond, walking across the
lawn toward the back deck of the house, when I looked up and saw my three horses, still standing at the same spot along the fence, wet and miserable, too.

“Hey, guys,” I called in my cheeriest voice, wishing I could explain why I wasn’t stopping to visit.

When they realized I wasn’t coming, three pairs of ears swung flat back, and my mare snaked her head at me over the fence the same way the foal had earlier. I’d lavished food and attention on strange horses right under her nose and after this unbelievable affront, I walked right past her as if she didn’t exist.

When Georgia saw me walk up the stairs to the back deck to go inside the house, in one final gesture of fury, she bared her teeth and, turning on Hotshot, bit him on the flank. It was classic mare mind. If you can’t bite the one you hate, then bite the one you’re with.

A
S SOON AS
I got Lay Me Down home and settled, I called Allie, my best friend and horsewoman extraordinaire, and asked her to come over and evaluate Lay Me Down’s chances for survival.

“I have two more appointments,” Allie said. She was a massage therapist. “It’ll be several hours before I can get there.”

“I hope she lives that long,” I said, flipping through
Veterinary Notes for Horse Owners
, a book filled with graphic photos of running sores, tumors, and other ailments that could afflict a horse. I earmarked the chapter on respiratory diseases and pushed it away to read later.

“She’ll live,” Allie assured me and hung up.

I had my doubts. Three hours later, Allie walked through the front door carrying a beat-up brown leather doctor’s
bag. Her body was swallowed inside a dark one-piece canvas coverall from Agway made for an average-sized man, not a five-foot, three-inch slender woman. A single blonde French braid fell over her left shoulder, swinging in midair below an ample breast.

“Want some soup?” I asked, reaching for a bowl and ladling some in without waiting for an answer.

“Is that her?” She pointed through the living-room window to the back pasture, where Lay Me Down was only a dark shadow, standing deep inside the turnout.

“There’s a foal, too.”

Right away she said, “There’s nothing wrong with the foal.”

We couldn’t even see the foal from the house, and I hadn’t told Allie anything about her on the phone earlier, but sometimes Allie just knows things (I suspect that she’s a witch). She’s a deeply intuitive woman with a gift for healing and “seeing.” She sees through touch. Some of the things she sees are spooky, like the time a man came for a massage and as soon as she touched him she saw crying children. Afterward, she did some checking and found out he’d been fired from his teaching position on suspicion of child molestation.

She sees emotional and physical problems, too. If she sees something serious like cancer, she doesn’t tell the client, but at the right moment she’ll suggest a visit to a doctor. When she sees sadness it’s usually a long-standing hurt from childhood—an abusive parent or a family with
drinking problems. Sometimes it’s just a past where love was in short supply. She sends those people home with salves or essential oils made from flowers and herbs she grows in an organic garden.

Like any good witch, she could have been a doctor. She knows a lot about conventional medicine as well as alternative healing. Her shelves are full of medical books she orders over the Internet with titles I find intimidating and repugnant. However, Allie lugs them to bed for cozy reading and sometimes calls to report on breakthroughs in treatments for diseases I’ve never heard of. Talking about illness makes me uncomfortable, and I always try to steer the conversation back to safer ground. I laugh when I refer to Allie as my doctor, but the truth is, I’m not really joking and neither are the many others who seek her medical advice.

But all her knowledge of medicine for humans is peanuts compared to what she knows about horses.

While Allie finished her soup, I got up from the counter and opened the basement door around the corner from the kitchen and started pulling barn clothes off the hooks on the wall. Clothes bulged into the stairwell, going halfway down the stairs. There were pants and jackets for every season and every possible weather condition. I had just taken a shower and changed into dry clothes, and now I was going to get wet and dirty all over again. Sometimes this happened three times a day. I put on Gore-Tex everything and walked over to the door by the back deck and stepped into rubber boots.

On the walk, I told Allie what the SPCA had told me about Lay Me Down. She had been born in April of 1980 and had begun training as a trotter for harness racing when she was officially a year old, although she had really been only nine months old. The bylaws of Thoroughbred and Standardbred racing state that all horses turn a year old on January first, regardless of when they were actually born. This meant Lay Me Down was on the track, winning races (making her owner money) at twenty months, even though by racing standards she was legally considered two. This had stressed her still-developing musculoskeletal system, and she was given steroids and other anti-inflammatories to mask injuries and stiffness. This was a practice common in all forms of horse racing. For Lay Me Down, it resulted in permanent, debilitating lameness, ending her racing career by age four. She walked with a pronounced limp in both front legs—a real hobble when she got up until she’d been walking for a few minutes, and she had arthritis in her hocks (elbows) in both rear legs. Looking at her now, it was hard to believe that at the peak of her racing, she was valued at a hundred thousand dollars.

She would have maintained that value as a proven broodmare, a horse who consistently produced winning offspring, had she not been starved. During the twelve years she lived as a broodmare, she had been left in an open field with inadequate hay, feed, water, shelter, and veterinary care, yet still managed to produce twelve foals, including the one huddled beside her now. To hide the increasing emaciation
of his twenty broodmares, the owner had confined them to a small barn for the past year. Then, for reasons still unknown, he had stopped feeding them altogether.

“The court could issue an order to return them,” I told Allie.

“Over my dead body,” she said. “We’ll steal her first.”

Allie had been six when she stole her first horse and got her name in the police beat of the local newspaper. After attending the Dutchess County Fair in Rhinebeck, New York, with her parents, she’d thought the two Shetlands providing pony rides looked overheated and decided to save them. She sneaked back to the fair in the middle of the night (this was in the days before much security) and led the two ponies to the empty garage of nearby weekenders who didn’t come up much from the city. There the ponies were free to come and go, grazing on the lush turf of the unmowed backyard, unencumbered by hot, oversized western saddles and squirming children. It seemed to be a perfect rescue until the weekenders appeared and within hours, the ponies were back at their job, shuttling children around the dusty ring.

It was the first of many horse thefts (there were a lot of empty barns back then in Dutchess County, perfect for stashing rescued horses), but after the county fair incident, the police knew which little girl to follow to solve the crime.

A nearby horse vet read about the young horse rustler a year later and offered to channel Allie’s zeal by taking her along with him on his farm calls. This was the beginning of
what Allie referred to as “medical school.” At the same time, neighbors across the street who owned several horses made one available for her to ride. So, between the ages of seven and seventeen, she spent her free time either riding or in “medical school.”

At seventeen she left home to work on a large Standardbred racing farm. She started as a groom but quickly rose through the ranks from exercising horses to breaking, training, breeding, and imprinting. By the time she was nineteen, she was managing the entire operation.

Horse racing is a man’s world and a difficult arena for any woman to find success in. But Allie made it to the top, first at the Standardbred farm and later managing a Thoroughbred farm. I accused her of owing her success to her looks, because she is a voluptuous Norwegian blonde. And while it’s true that men were dazzled by her looks, sooner or later they always recognized her horse expertise. She was a good rider, but her specialty was horse management: training, breeding, and general health care. Even now, fifteen years after having left the horse business to become a massage therapist—a career she felt would be more age friendly—professional barns as well as backyard operations like mine continued to seek her veterinary advice.

We crossed Lay Me Down’s pasture (how quickly it had become hers) and stopped under the overhang of the turnout. Allie’s doctor’s kit rattled to the ground like a bag of dishes. I listened to the rain hitting the roof and watched Allie absorb the sight of the emaciated horse.

“You poor baby.” She shook her head and bent to pull a stethoscope out of her bag. She hung it around her neck and walked over to Lay Me Down, who had finished her bran mash and was eating hay again.

“The foal kicks,” I warned Allie. As usual, the foal stood on the far side of her mother, but she was eating hay, too, and didn’t seem interested in us at the moment. I wondered if she was less cranky because her belly was full, and she felt better.

Allie ran her hands all over Lay Me Down’s neck and chest, keeping up a soft chatter. Allie’s approach to life was so different from mine. I was standoffish, cautious, an observer. Allie jumped in, fast and fearless: a hugger, a toucher, a player from the first moment. I wasn’t sure if she was just petting Lay Me Down or doing something diagnostic. Maybe she was getting Lay Me Down used to her touch so she could listen to her heart and lungs with the stethoscope. Some horses get anxious at the sight of anything pulled out of a bag. Tempo would fix a wild eye on the object, nicker, and trot stiff-legged to a safe distance. But Lay Me Down looked untroubled, her ears fixed forward, a sign of openness, curiosity, trust. She gave Allie a wheezy sniff, leaving wet marks here and there on the dark coveralls Allie wore. Her eyes were intense and quizzical under a slightly furrowed brow.

“What a sweet horse,” Allie said, adjusting the stethoscope in her ears, then sliding the little disc under Lay Me Down’s ribby middle.

I was beginning to sense the same thing. Everything about Lay Me Down had been easy and obliging, starting with her willingness to get into the trailer at the SPCA, the only horse to “volunteer.”

“Her heart’s strong,” Allie said a few minutes later and moved the stethoscope higher to listen to the lungs. “Oh boy,” she said right away.

I immediately tensed, even though I already knew the mare was sick, I already knew she had pneumonia. “She’s on antibiotics,” I said, hoping to avoid hearing that her lungs might collapse or fill with fluid, that this horse could die at any moment.

“Could be worse,” Allie said. She pulled the stethoscope off her neck and folded it back into the bag.

I was so relieved I was willing to listen to any details she wanted to offer. But Allie ignored me as she pulled a thermometer out of her bag and lifted Lay Me Down’s tail to insert it. None of my three would have allowed this without being held or tied. Lay Me Down wasn’t restrained in any way and chose that moment to close her eyes for a little nap.

Standing by Lay Me Down’s rump, Allie got a good look at the foal for the first time. “What a cutie,” she said. “She needs a new halter.”

I was afraid she’d notice. It meant chasing the foal around a wet pasture, and if we could catch her, wrestling off the old halter and then wrestling her into a new one. Allie and I would surely get roughed up in the process. Two hundred
and fifty pounds of kicking, biting horse is a lot to contend with. “I don’t think she’s been handled at all,” I said.

“We’ll need a third person then.”

I tried to think of all the people who wouldn’t mind risking their necks. The list wasn’t too long, even among my horsey friends. It might be better to ask someone who didn’t know anything about horses, a big strong man who wouldn’t think twice about helping with a baby horse. That’s what I’d call her, a baby. It sounded so innocent.

Allie pulled out the thermometer, told me Lay Me Down’s temperature was slightly elevated, and then talked to me about feed, supplements, and vitamins. We discussed moving her into a stall in the barn, someplace I could completely enclose in order to run a vaporizer to help clear her lungs. It wasn’t a bad idea except we both knew it was out of the question. I didn’t want to expose my other horses to a sick horse, and even if I had been willing, Lay Me Down was too weak to introduce to an established herd. Even if Lay Me Down had been in perfect health it would have taken a few weeks of controlled introductions before my mare would have allowed another mare in the same pasture. I had seen how ferocious Georgia could be. And then there was the foal.

Thirteen years earlier, a few days before Georgia birthed her own foal, I had moved the geldings (who had been with us for almost a year by then) to the pasture where Lay Me Down was now. After Sweet Revenge was born, I gave mother and foal eight weeks together before reuniting
them with the boys. Even then, I divided the communal pasture in half with a single strand of electrified fence wire—boys on one side, mother and foal on the other. Weeks passed. There was much nose sniffing and getting acquainted across the fence, a barrier that was mostly psychological. Yet it allowed Georgia to feel she controlled how close the boys could get to her foal. When it looked like the herd was as reintegrated as possible with the electrified wire still between them, I took the wire down.

It was as though I had allowed men with machine guns into the pasture. The minute that single strand of fencing disappeared, Georgia flew at Hotshot, driving him into a corner, where, it was clear, she intended to kill him. Poor Hotshot was as unprepared for this explosion as I was. He seemed incapable of defending himself against the barrage of hooves and teeth that attacked him from one end of his body to the other. He kept his head low, facing into the corner, trying to let his hindquarters absorb the worst of the blows. Blood spilled, horse hair flew, and into this fray stepped the foal.