Hope Rising (26 page)

Together we followed the helter-skelter pattern of the panicked herd’s tracks until darkness overtook us. We were both lightly dressed, not at all prepared to spend the night in the wilderness. The cold was beginning to penetrate what clothes we wore, and I knew we needed to get back to camp as quickly as we could. But without a moon we couldn’t even see our feet, let alone tell where we’d come from.

At last we stumbled on a forgotten old logging road that seemed to lead back in the right direction. Stumbling down it, jogging blind, shaking with cold and fever, I began to wonder,
Why
my
horses? Why, out of the three hundred horses in the camp, was
my
corral singled out? Why were
my
horses driven off?
Alarm consumed me as completely as the darkness that surrounded me.

Minutes ticked into hours. Anxiety rolled over me like ocean waves, each one cresting with a new fear.
What if their blankets get caught on a branch or jagged rock? What if they plunge over a bluff? What if they find their way out on the other side of the mountains? What if someone finds them and decides to keep them?

What if I never see them again?

I fought to keep the “what ifs” at bay and concentrated on what needed to be done.

Five and a half hours later we stumbled into camp.

My self-appointed guardian angel, satisfied that I was safe, encouraged me to get some sleep. Instead, I hitched up a trailer and continued searching. Because it was the weekend of Father’s Day, most of our team had gone home to be with their families. Only three of us remained in camp.

Nancy had located some logging roads leading more or less in the direction we thought the herd might have gone. We drove out and bumped and bounced over those roads for hours. Finally we were forced to turn around or risk getting stuck. After nail-biting minutes of tedious truck-and-trailer jockeying, we were finally able to bring both rigs around. I climbed out of the cab into the freezing darkness and began calling. I was certain that my mare would answer me as she always does at home, if she heard my voice. I called at intervals all the way back to camp.

It was early in the morning when Nancy and I collapsed into our sleeping bags. I had been on my feet for nearly twenty-four hours. My feverish body was crushed with exhaustion, but sleep wouldn’t come. My troubled heart ached for my lost family. Ninety minutes later I quietly slipped out and began the search again.

I walked until a hint of gray began to illumine the frozen hills. The world lay completely still, and the air was as silent and empty as my soul. My horses were nowhere to be found.

I returned to the camp where one of the race organizers, hearing of my heartbreak, kindly offered to help me track down the horses. He fired up his ATV, and I slumped gratefully against his back as we bumped down the same roads that I had just covered in the dark.

Daylight revealed the hoofprints we had struggled to follow in the night. The horses had split up, so we abandoned the ATV and first tracked the three that had veered off into the forest. Their plunging flight had taken them up a mountainside so sheer that we had to haul ourselves up with protruding limbs and rocky outcrops. Everywhere we found freshly broken branches, churned-up soil, scrapes caused by iron shoes on stones—all marked the course of their terrified stampede. Near the top we saw where one of the horses had slipped and become high centered over fallen logs. Tufts of bloody horsehair and flesh were left on the rough bark and caught on twigs and stones—evidence of the horse’s frantic struggle.

Eventually we came to a place where the trio had rested for a while before moving on. Up to that point, it was obvious they had been moving aimlessly—staggering up a high mountain flank and then zigzagging down the other side. Then, it appeared that they had sensed something to give them direction because their tracks suddenly converged and began to move purposefully due west.

We followed them to where the trail stopped. Hoofprints marked the ground in concentric circles as though the horses had been casting about like hounds for a scent. It was the exact spot where I had turned the truck around and had begun calling to them the night before. They must have recognized the familiar scent of my truck and trailer and followed it back. The marks of their hooves followed the tracks of my truck until they intersected the main race route, which led directly back to the camp.

The renegade and two of my horses had already arrived and were safely tied up. But Ele, the equine love of
my life, and one more of our team were still missing. Once again, Nancy and I drove back to continue the search. Forrest, a tireless volunteer at the ranch, saddled up his little black mustang and began tracking from where the horses had first separated.

During my desperate hunt to find my mare’s tracks, I began to fully understand the magnitude of the word “wilderness.” My numbed mind tried and failed to push away the awful logic of the situation. They were highly trained endurance horses. By now they could have traveled fifty miles in
any
direction.

The combined effects of sleepless exhaustion and a persistent fever were slowly dimming the light in my head. My world began to spin. I grabbed at a tree branch as I fell to my knees. I blinked hard as if that would somehow clear my mind of the horrible conviction that was beginning to overwhelm my thoughts and my heart: It was likely that Ele would never be found.

I studied the earth in front of my knees, straining to focus on a single object—a rock, a pinecone—it didn’t matter. I fought to stay conscious. Huddled on the forest floor, I prayed.

From somewhere below, the faint sound of Nancy’s cell phone drifted through the trees. I could hear my friend calling for me, and I staggered back to my feet. I turned toward the direction of her muffled voice and willed my body to move forward …

From childhood, I have always been fascinated by violent weather. Thunderstorms especially intrigue me with their
combination of sheer power and beauty. Like many avid hikers I have a backpack full of high-altitude, near-miss lightning stories; even so, a lightning storm still ranks high on my must-see list.

In our area, rising nearly four thousand feet beneath the shadow of the Cascades, thunderstorms can be particularly vicious. It’s not uncommon for twenty-five hundred or more ground strikes to be recorded from a single storm cell. Many storms are accompanied by a violent rain that extinguishes most strike blazes before they get out of control. Nevertheless, wildfire in the Northwest is a fact of life.

One turbulent midsummer day, leaving my morning job at the fitness center in Bend, I ran to my truck through pelting rain. After diving into the cab, I pushed my hair back and could do nothing for a moment but watch. Winds howled through the ponderosa pines above me. Needles were driven to the ground in great windswept waves and then washed away in the mini flash flood. Water poured from the sky, splashing off the already standing water with the sound of riotous applause. It was as though all nature, every living thing, was shouting in joyful celebration.

I tried to comprehend the forces at work around me, this feast for my senses. I gazed and listened. I breathed in deeply the earthy wetness of the air. At last I started up the truck and made my way cautiously through the flooded streets toward the main road that led back to the ranch.

Soon the heavy gray skies gave way to deep purple as shafts of sunlight burst through the turbulent layers of clouds. Thunder crashed with deafening blows hard on the heels of each lightning flash, causing my shoulders to jump. The countryside rolled down and away before me,
revealing a landscape laden with diamonds. The earth dazzled with reborn colors beneath the broken sky.

Suddenly in the distance an evil-looking coil of dark smoke caught my eye, writhing its way into the freshly cleansed sky. The belching, acrid cloud of black declared that this was no brush or timber fire. This was someone’s home.

Even as I watched, the angry blaze unfurled like an ugly beast rising from sleep. My heart stopped, clenched with the cold hand of fear. This monster was growing in the approximate area of the ranch!
Dear God, the horses!

I shoved the gas pedal to the floor …

Kids are masters at finding unique and creative ways to hurt themselves. In all families the law of averages holds true: the more kids, the more trips to the doctor. It’s no different with equine families—as all horse owners are painfully aware. Since we have twenty-five four-legged “kids” at the ranch, we practically have ownership of a designated parking space at the Redmond Veterinary Clinic (RVC).

The RVC team has guided us from the very beginning, through dozens of crises and injuries, from stitching split lips and gashed legs to treating life-threatening colic, from ending a horse’s suffering to assisting with newborn foals. These highly competent and compassionate professionals have soldiered on with us through all our ups and downs. Quick to laugh and unashamed to cry, they have become a cornerstone in our foundation of support at the ranch.

Our small pinto mare, Shelby, had come up severely lame, so I drove her into RVC for examination. Darrin, one of my dear veterinarian friends, watched with arms folded across his chest as I led Shelby around the yard at the clinic. He analyzed her gaits with the dark eyes of a predator measuring its prey.

Methodically, Darrin worked his way up from the simplest of tests—checking the mare’s pressure points and joint flexion—to nerve blocking and finally X rays.

Each test yielded only limited information, and the sum of all still didn’t point to a definitive diagnosis. Darrin carefully explained each X ray to me, pointing out clean, hard margins of bones, and the total lack of any sign of pathology. But he wasn’t satisfied. Something was wrong. As he studied each film, he rubbed his chin with his thumb and forefinger, a gesture that by now I knew well.

After two hours of sleuthing, he followed an educated hunch and took one more X ray. I stroked Shelby’s face as Darrin disappeared inside the clinic to develop the new film. It seemed only moments before he reappeared with a portable X-ray machine.

He wore a good poker face, but it was no match for a woman’s intuition. “What is it?” I asked apprehensively. “What have you seen?”

“Probably nothing,” he reassured me. He positioned the plates with the studied precision of a marksman focusing on the bull’s-eye. I could tell he knew exactly what he was looking for. My heart shuddered.

I looked intently at the three latest X rays on the light bank but still saw nothing sinister. I glanced at Darrin. Grimly he pointed to each shadowy picture in turn.
Squinting, I leaned toward the light. My heart sank. What had looked to me at first like a strand of dust on the film was actually a very fine black line. The last X ray showed it most clearly—a thin crack that ran from the back of Shelby’s right front cannon bone more than halfway across the diameter.

“It’s a hairline fracture,” Darrin said. The words fell between us like stones. My mind crumbled under their weight. “Fracture” usually means death for a horse.

In his usual calming voice, Darrin explained that it was technically a “greenstick” fracture. In all of his years of practice he had never seen this type of injury on a pleasure horse. Except in racehorses, he confirmed, they’re
extremely
rare.

The good news was that the area of intact bone was still supporting the leg. The bad news was that under even the slightest exertion the bone could shatter at any time.

Our only course of action was to wrap Shelby’s leg for support and completely confine the mare. Horses carry about 70 percent of their weight on their front legs. In Shelby’s case, with only one useable foreleg, simply loading and unloading her from the horse trailer became life threatening. The prognosis was guarded at best. Now there was little else we could do but submit to the dreaded regime of “watch and wait.”

Only days later I was back at the clinic with another baffling condition. Blood was erupting from the left hind hoof of my Anglo-Arab mare Misha. Darrin saw me as he pushed through the clinic doors and shot me a commiserating smile. Within moments he had settled Misha’s bleeding hoof firmly in his lap and, armed with a hoof knife, began to gently explore the mysterious hole that had
appeared in the center of the mare’s sole.

With his usual systematic precision, Darrin’s diagnostic process ruled out one condition after another. His mental checklist neared the end, with still no answer in sight. Then his words came out one at a time—evidence of his deep concentration.

He had found granulation tissue inside the sole of the foot—a type of tissue commonly associated with wounds above the hoof. Granulation tissue is highly vascular and grows at an exponential rate. These qualities make it a vital resource in the healing process of soft tissue wounds.

But it was highly mysterious that this soft, bloody tissue should be found growing inside the sole of a hoof. The sole of a horse’s hoof is made of keratin—the same material that forms human fingernails. It is a bloodless, hornlike structure that can withstand tremendous abuse. It was very unsettling to find blood coming from tissue that normally has no blood supply.

Finally, Darrin’s diagnosis was narrowed down to one of two conditions: one was bad, the other worse. Either Misha had canker or cancer of the sole. Both were
extremely
rare conditions.
How strange
, I thought while contemplating what I had just heard the week before.
Now I have two horses with
extremely rare
conditions
.

While September and October herald the coming of winter and blessed rest, they are in themselves exceptionally busy months. Between us, Troy and I hold down six jobs, and they all seem to converge in the fall—an enormous weight riding on the back of an already exhausting summer
workload.

Troy’s landscaping business requires long hours of hard physical labor. Then, when he comes home at night, he switches to his role as administrator of Crystal Peaks—probably the least enjoyable task on the ranch. Handling all the paperwork associated with running an enormous nonprofit organization is nearly a full-time job in itself. Finally, he is a professional videographer, shoehorning his studio time in from late evening to the small hours of the morning. Like many self-employed people, he balances a superhuman schedule to make ends meet.