Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  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.

  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.

  [ 3 ]

  AS SOON AS I got Lay Me Down home and settled, I ca
lled 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.