Roped (Gail McCarthy Mysteries) (3 page)

The steer took a funny bounce as Lisa threw her rope, and she only caught one hind leg. She shook her head in disgust as she put slack in the rope to let the steer go. Lisa was accustomed to catching two feet. I noticed that her little bay horse worked well for her.

As I watched Lisa and Glen lope down to the stripping chute at the far end of the arena to put the steer away, a strange motion caught my eye. Someone on the sidelines was waving a sign.

For a moment I was confused-unlike fans of baseball and football, spectators at a roping do not wave placards. Or at least they never had, in my experience. The person holding the sign turned slightly, and I could read the message: "I protest cruelty to animals." My God. An animal rights protester.

Two of them, in fact. I could see two sign wavers, a man and a woman, though I couldn't read the second sign. The woman wore a long skirt and the man wore shorts, and they would have stood out in the jeans-clad crowd even without the signs. I noticed everybody was giving them a wide berth.

Another thought struck me. Had these people seen the sorrel horse break his leg? If so, Glen might be in real trouble.

The animal rights movement has been gaining strength and momentum for the last few years. Its devotees protest such things as rodeo events, raising animals for slaughter, and, in some cases, keeping animals in any sort of confinement. It's hard to generalize about the movement, as its members range from those who are offended at cruelty to animals (count me in) to fanatics who don't believe that animals should be kept as pets and appear to think that all creatures should live completely free.

That this is impractical and ridiculous doesn't seem to have occurred to these folks, and many animal rights activists appeared to me to have very little feeling for or understanding of the animals they were ostensibly trying to save. To kill helpless cattle rather than seeing them live in "slavery" (i.e., a fenced pasture) strikes me as craziness, as does turning domestic animals loose to starve on the already overgrazed open range. Not to mention burning down laboratories, including the animals in residence there, because said laboratories do medical tests on animals.

On the other hand, I'm not one to condone putting animals through unnecessary suffering, and I more or less agreed with some of the intelligent animal rights people I knew. The real question is, What is unreasonable and unnecessary? What is cruelty and what isn't? In my opinion, the answer is a little more complicated than many people like to suppose.

I wondered if the man and woman standing by the arena fence with their signs were on the lunatic fringe or if they were sensible, if perhaps misguided. I wondered if they knew anything at all about horses and cattle. If I had to bet, I'd lay odds they didn't.

The next team rode into the box, and I realized with a pang that it was Lonny and Tim Bennett. I couldn't seem to look at Lonny without feeling that pang-a twinge of longing and fear mixed with the sharp bite of anger. Damn him, after all. Why in the world was he doing this to me?

Oblivious to my tangled emotions, Lonny rode Pistol into the heeler's box, ready to make a run. Tim Bennett was heading on a big roan mare, no doubt one of Smoke's offspring. I saw Tim staring down at Al Borba as Al loaded the steer. Tim and Al didn't get along real well. But then, nobody got along with Al Borba. Except Glen.

Tim nodded for the steer, and Al opened the gate; horses and steer came flashing out in the familiar pattern of team roping. From where I sat it looked almost like a ritual, a tribal dance, men and animals interacting in symbolic ways.

Tim turned the steer and Lonny roped two feet cleanly, Pistol performing his part admirably, like the tried and true performer he was. But when Lonny kicked the horse forward to turn the steer loose, Pistol was dead lame.

THREE

Not Pistol. It couldn't be. I felt almost dizzy with fear. Pistol took another step and I saw that he was able to bear some weight on the injured leg. It wasn't broken. Thank God.

Relief rushed through me like water; my hand shook as I lifted the reins and clucked to send Gunner forward down the hill. Pistol was off in the right front. I thought I could guess what was wrong.

By the time I reached the arena, Lonny'd gotten off Pistol and was feeling the leg carefully. A group of people had gathered around him, including the animal rights protesters. Everybody looked worried and unhappy. Two accidents in one day was unusual and unnerving.

I tied Gunner to the fence and approached the group. Lonny looked up at me and smiled in relief. "Come have a look, Gail."

I bent down and picked up Pistol's right front, palpating the leg carefully and gently from the knee down to the ankle. Nothing obviously wrong that I could feel. Putting the foot down, I told Lonny, "Lead him forward a few steps."

Lonny clucked to Pistol and the horse limped after him. He was plenty sore, but he could use his right front leg. Given Pistol's history, I was pretty sure I knew what had happened.

"It's his ringbone, I think," I told Lonny. "He must have taken a bad step and tweaked that ankle. We'll have to x-ray him and see if he's got a bone chip in there. Either way, he's done for today. Lead him over to the barn and run some cold water on it. I'll get the vet kit, and we'll give him a shot of bute."

Lonny started to lead Pistol off, and I looked at the group around me, meaning to say something reassuring. Glen and Tim were right at my shoulder; behind them stood the two animal rights protesters, and behind them was Lisa, down on her hands and knees, scrabbling in the dirt of the arena. She was right about where Pistol had pulled up lame.

"Did he step on a rock?" I asked her.

Lisa looked up abruptly from her task. To my amazement, her face seemed distorted with fear, eyes wide and staring, mouth clenched, skin colorless. She didn't answer me, just got quickly to her feet, aware that all of us were watching her.

"They're aren't any rocks in this arena." Tim's lazy drawl.

It was true. Glen had imported truckloads of sand to build the arena; it was beautifully groomed and rock-free.

"I was looking to see if he stumbled in a hole or something." Lisa mumbled this almost to herself, looking at the ground.

"Lisa, I drug this arena not two hours ago. There can't be any holes." Glen's voice. He sounded worried. But, again, I was sure he was right. A sand arena, properly watered and drug as this one had been, was not going to produce an unexpected hole.

"Is he going to be all right?" Lisa again.

"It depends what you mean by all right," I told her. "He has ringbone in that foot, and he's been lame on it off and on for a few years. Not bad lame, like he is now, just a little lame. But the calcification of the joint caused by the ringbone has been getting worse and worse, and I think he may have taken a bad step and possibly caused some of the calcified material to break loose. A bone chip," I added. "I'd guess that's why he went so suddenly and dramatically lame."

"What do you think caused him to take a bad step?" Lisa was off on some track of her own.

"I don't know. Just putting his foot down wrong maybe. Like a person can twist their ankle for no apparent reason."

I could feel the ropers around me nodding; they were all familiar with the way horses could take bad steps and come up lame for no good reason. It was the stuff of everyday life.

"Let's rope!" Al bellowed at us from the chutes.

Lonny and Pistol were over by the barn. I turned to follow them and the group around me started to disperse when we were all frozen in place by the voice of the female protester.

"Surely you're not going to go on with this abuse after you've already crippled two horses?" The question was addressed to Glen, and the woman's voice was loud and belligerent.

Everyone looked at Glen. Face and voice calm, he replied, "It's unfortunate those two horses were hurt, but this is not abuse."

"You should stop this roping right now." The woman had a high-pitched voice; something about her shrill, strident tone was familiar.

I stared, trying to place her. In a second, I had it. My God. Susan Slater. Disbelieving, I looked at Lisa. "It's Susan," I said.

Lisa nodded "uh-huh" and the woman turned toward us at the sound of her name. "Well, Lisa and Gail. If this isn't a class reunion."

Susan Slater had been in Lisa's and my high school class. I might have recognized her earlier if I'd been paying attention; she looked very much as she had when we were all seventeen. Fair Irish skin, a dusting of freckles that matched her long, curly mane of strawberry blond hair, a slim figure shown off now, as then, in a snug tank top and swirling ankle-length skirt. Susan had always been physically attractive enough. It was her ultra-combative personality that was the problem.

In high school she had been the one vociferously pushing any cause going, handing out pamphlets to legalize marijuana, demonstrating against police brutality and the fascist state at the slightest provocation. Susan wasn't quiet about her beliefs. She was in your face if you so much as greeted her, pressing her cause in that shrill voice.

She had her devotees, mostly male. The quiet, bespectacled, shorts-and-sandals-wearing man with her looked like a good example of the type. He seemed quite content to let her do all the talking.

"This roping should be stopped," she announced again.

Glen was losing patience. "Lady, what happened to those horses were accidents. Now clear out of here."

I could have told him that was a mistake. Giving Susan an order was like waving a red flag at a bull. She was likely to dig her heels in now.

For a second, father and daughter locked eyes, and my mind jumped back to the plea Lisa had made to me earlier: "The horse you just put down, that wasn't an accident." Could Lisa possibly mean that what had happened to Pistol wasn't an accident either? It seemed unbelievable.

In any case, this wasn't my job. "I need to take care of Pistol," I told Glen and Lisa. "I'll be over at the barn."

I could hear voices raised as I walked away; the clearest one was Tim's: "Jesus, Lisa, will you quit being an idiot?"

Then I was out of earshot and headed for the barn. I'd left the vet kit back there, I remembered, when I put the sorrel horse down. Hardly very responsible of me, but I'd been too stressed out to care. Hopefully no one had swiped it.

Ropers are, by and large, an honest lot. The vet kit was right where I left it. Lonny had Pistol tied to the hitching rail behind the barn and was running cold water on his leg. I filled a syringe with four cc's of phenylbutazone and injected it into the horse's jugular vein.

Pistol stood quietly for this, like the trooper he was. Pistol was fifteen, and between age and the arthritic condition horsemen call ringbone, he was near the end of his working life. The trouble was, Pistol didn't want to retire.

A big, blaze-faced gelding with a flaxen mane and tail, Pistol was not only flashy to look at; he was one of the best heel horses in the state of California. He'd been a rope horse all his life, and it was what he knew. Like Rudyard Kipling's famous Maltese Cat, Pistol played for the glory of the game.

On the occasions when his ringbone had been acting up and Lonny'd left him at home, Pistol had stood stubbornly by the gate of his corral, his head stuck between the bars, a pleading look in his eyes. He wasn't lonely; he had Plumber, my other horse, at home with him to keep him company. Pistol wanted to go roping.

But this might be the end for him. Lonny would never put the horse down unless it was absolutely necessary, but Pistol might have to be retired to the pasture, like it or not.

"What's going on over there?" Lonny was watching the little group of people still gathered in the arena.

"They're trying to decide whether to stop the roping," I said. "It's a long story," I added hastily, not feeling up to explaining the whole thing. I wasn't in the mood to have any sort of long conversation with Lonny, at the moment. "Either way," I said, "I'm staying here and having dinner with Lisa. She said she'd take me home."

Lonny made no answer to that. He stared at the cold water he was playing on Pistol's leg as if looking at the offending limb hard enough could make it well. I knew he was desperately trying to avoid a repeat of this morning's argument.

Lonny hated conflict. He had a sunny temper and an optimistic nature-pleasant traits in a man, I had thought initially. I still thought so, but I had come to realize that the downside was that Lonny wouldn't deal with problems. He tried to ignore them out of existence.

As anybody who has ever been involved with such a person knows, this method of avoiding conflict only leads to more trouble in the end. I'm not much of a fighter myself, being inclined to a self-sufficient, autonomous approach to life, but I will take a stand when it seems necessary. As it was becoming now. I was not about to simply let Sara move back in with Lonny without having at least a little discussion about it.

However, this was neither the time nor the place. Lonny was off the hook for the moment. "Go have dinner with Sara," I told him. "Let me know how it goes." It cost me a lot to get those words out in an uninflected tone.

"All right." Lonny's voice was as carefully uninflected as my own. He rubbed Pistol's forehead gently. "What're we going to do about him?"

"Keep him on bute this weekend. Bring him on down to the clinic Monday, and I'll x-ray him and we'll talk about it then. See, he feels better now." I patted the horse's rump.

"Yeah, he does." Lonny agreed.

Putting the bute into Pistol's jugular vein got the painkiller into his system in a matter of seconds. The horse's eye was calm and relaxed, his expression indefinably but plainly different from the stoic look he'd worn a few minutes ago.