Wild Horses

by Jenny Oldfield

  There was a green clearing at the end of the hidden gap with the stream flowing gently across. Grass grew, aspen trees clung to the rocky slopes, dripping moisture. A well-kept, living secret behind Dead Man’s Canyon.

  “Did you know about this place?” Lisa stood in the small meadow shaking her head. She turned on the spot, looking all around.

  Kirstie saw a pale brown hawk swoop from one of the trees, across the cloudy sky. “No way!” she breathed.

  A breeze swept through the grass. The aspen leaves quivered, the hawk landed.

  “Does anyone know about it?” Lisa’s voice didn’t lift above a whisper.

  “Charlie doesn’t. I don’t know if Hadley does. Maybe my grandpa did.” Kirstie stepped into the middle of the clearing. She noticed the bright blue columbines growing in the long grass. “He’d know all the grazing land for the cattle. I used to come on roundups in the spring and fall, but I never came here before.”

  “… Kirstie!” Lisa broke in. She grabbed her arm and pointed.

  There was a thicket of young aspens at the far side of the clearing. The trees were clustered thickly, good camouflage for any living creature.

  Kirstie saw a dark movement. At first she thought it was a shadow cast by the trees. She looked again. The shape was solid. It moved silently between the slender trunks. Then it emerged.

  The black stallion stood clear of the aspens. He raised his head, alert to their presence. He stayed calm, watching them, waiting.

  “Oh, hey!” Lisa breathed. It was her first view of the magnificent horse.

  “He’s alive!” Kirstie closed her eyes. When she opened them, the stallion had taken a couple of steps toward them. “And he’s walking much better!”

  They stared at his injured leg. There was no bandage around the knee. It was as Kirstie had guessed; her improvised strips of fabric had done the job of stemming the flow of blood, but soon afterwards, the horse must have torn them away with his teeth. In any case, the wound looked clean.

  “You know something… ?” In turn, Kirstie took a few steps toward the horse. “The cut is starting to heal.”

  “That’s fast,” Lisa admitted.

  “It’s almost like…like…” She was peering hard across the clearing, not wanting to go too close and scare the stallion.

  “… Like someone’s put grease around it!” Lisa whispered.

  “Antiseptic cream,” Kirstie agreed. Then she shook her head. “No way!”

  “Right. No way!” Lisa stared again and again at the injured knee. “But there is something on that cut!” she insisted.

  “How?…Who?”

  Lisa screwed up her mouth and thought hard. “Hadley?”

  Kirstie shook her head. “He’d have said.” By now she was sure; the stallion’s right knee had been smeared with a thick coating of white grease.

  “Glen Woodford?” Lisa guessed. “Maybe he came back without telling us.”

  “Nope.” Kirstie couldn’t believe this either. “In any case, that grease doesn’t look like something a vet would use.” Glen would have relied on jabs of antibiotic and tetanus, and left the wound open, with maybe a stitch or two to hold it together. “It looks more like a remedy an old rancher might have used.”

  Lisa shook her head and sighed. “OK,” she said. “We have someone who sneaks into Dead Man’s Canyon behind our backs, who gets close enough to this wild horse to lead him behind the waterfall into this clearing that no one else knows about …”

  Keeping her eyes fixed on the wary horse, Kirstie nodded.

  “… Who knows about old remedies and can get the stallion to trust him so he agrees to separate from the herd and stays here safe in the meadow …”

  “Yep.” This needed plenty of thought. Kirstie knitted her brows and kept on staring.

  “That takes one pretty smart guy!” Lisa looked round the green space. “One smart, invisible guy!”

  It was strange but true. The person who had helped the stallion must have been here either during those first hours after the landslide when Kirstie had gone with Charlie and Hadley to the ranch for help, or during the night, while Kirstie and Lisa had slept. He’d made no noise, but perhaps it was him who had spooked the bobcat early that morning. He’d treated the stallion, left him to graze in peace, and slipped away without leaving any clues.

  “But who?” Lisa voiced the question.

  Kirstie glanced away and up at the soaring hawk against the gray sky. She looked down again at the quiet, watchful stallion and felt the knot of worry she’d carried since they’d entered the gully begin to ease.

  “A healer,” she said quietly. “An expert. Someone who really knows about horses.”

  7

  Matt threw another log on the ranch house fire, then quizzed Kirstie and Lisa. “How come you’re so sure the horse didn’t find his own way into the clearing?”

  Lisa stood with her back to the fire, her hands cupped around a mug of hot chocolate. She shook her head. “No way would the stallion make it by himself. Anyhow, who cleaned up the wound and put the grease on?”

  Kirstie’s brother thought hard. “So maybe Glen Woodford went back to the canyon?”

  “No, we already thought of that.”

  “OK, so how about Smiley up at Timberline?” Matt was looking for answers that made sense.

  Smiley Gilpin was a Forest Guard who lived at a station that stood at 10,000 feet. It was his job to look after the trails and plantations of ponderosa pines.

  Lisa turned to Kirstie to see what she thought.

  Staring into the flames of the fire in the huge grate, Kirstie shrugged. Right now the answers to the mystery didn’t much interest her. Instead, she was enjoying the warmth, the feeling of relief that the black stallion was going to be OK. “Give Smiley a call,” she suggested dreamily.

  So Matt went off to the phone, leaving Lisa and Kirstie to relax. They’d arrived back at Half Moon Ranch after their night on Miners’ Ridge just after ten thirty, to find that Sandy Scott had already left with a group of beginners to ride Bear Hunt Trail. Charlie had taken the more advanced riders deep into the mountains, to Eden Lake. So the girls had dismounted in the empty corral, leaving Hadley to unsaddle Lucky and Cadillac. Then they’d come into the ranch house, to a barrage of questions from Matt.

  “What do you think? Was it Smiley?” Lisa asked. She too was eager to solve the mystery of the unknown horse doctor.

  Kirstie smiled and shrugged.

  “I don’t get it.” Lisa put her empty mug down on the stone hearth and sat cross-legged on the brown-and-white patterned rug. “One minute you’d do anything for this horse: you sleep out, you have nightmares, you practically risk your neck. Now it’s like you don’t even care.”

  Kirstie gazed at the fire as the burning logs shifted and sent up fresh sparks. “I’m just glad, that’s all.”

  “But don’t you want to know who’s looking out for him?”

  “Kind of.” She pictured a man, or maybe even a woman, who knew how to approach a wild horse and win his trust. Someone who cared enough to lead him behind the waterfall into the hidden clearing, where he would be safe. In a few days’ time the stallion would be well enough to make his way back into the canyon and up onto Miners’ Ridge, when he would no doubt rejoin the rest of his herd.

  As Lisa gave an exasperated shrug, Matt came back. “Smiley says it ain’t him,” he reported. “The clearing behind the canyon is news to him.”

  “Great,” Kirstie murmured absentmindedly.

  Matt frowned. “What’s great about it?”

  “Don’t ask!” Lisa warned. “She’s on a different planet. But how about Hadley? Maybe he could tell us more.”

  “Let’s ask,” Matt agreed briskly. He strode across the room, grabbing his Stetson from the table.

  Lisa sprang to her feet and dragged Kirstie after her. “Hadley’s been here forever,” she reminded them. “We need to find out what he reckons.”

  The old ranch hand was storing L
ucky’s saddle in the tack-room next to the corral when Matt, Lisa, and Kirstie went to join him. They walked up the short ramp into the dark, cluttered room lined with iron hooks to hang bridles from and wooden racks for the saddles.

  “Sure, I know the place,” he replied slowly after Matt had described the hidden clearing. “Good grazing land.”

  His answer, laid-back and matter-of-fact as usual, drew Kirstie into the conversation at last. “You knew? How come you never told us about it?”

  “You never asked.” Hadley hung Lucky’s bridle alongside Cadillac’s on the row of hooks.

  “How can we ask about something when we don’t even know it exists?” Kirstie pointed out. She’d known Hadley all her life, since the days when her grandparents had run Half Moon Ranch as a cattle ranch. He’d always been the same; easygoing, unruffled, and sometimes infuriating.

  The wrangler shrugged. “Ain’t had no call to go there since the spring of ’94,” he told them. “That was the last roundup me and your grandpa rode out on. We heard a bunch of cattle had found their way in there. And your grandpa knew every blade of grass round here. We had no problem tracking them down and rounding them up for the summer.”

  “So other old ranchers would know the clearing?” Matt suggested after a short pause.

  Hadley nodded. “Jim Mullins over at Lazy B, Wes Logan up at Ponderosa Pines—”

  “Maybe one of them helped the stallion,” Lisa cut in.

  “Don’t count on it,” Hadley warned, going to the door at the sound of horses returning along the trail by Five Mile Creek. “Busy cattlemen don’t take time out to rescue a wild horse. More likely to be a backwoods man, I reckon.”

  “A drifter?” Matt considered the new idea.

  Kirstie had followed Hadley to the door. She took in her mother’s group of riders returning slowly along the trail, gazed out at the Meltwater Range rising steeply from the narrow valley, then up at the sky. She saw that the clouds that had clung to the peaks for the past two days were clearing at last. There were small patches of blue, and more to come.

  “One of those guys who live in trailers up there in the mountains?” Lisa prompted Hadley for more information. “Kind of drop outs?”

  Kirstie knew the type of loner they were talking about. The backwoods men chose a lonely life of hunting and fishing. They scraped an existence from the land, lived simply, moved on.

  “Like who?” Matt asked. “Give us some names.”

  Hadley tipped his hat back on his head. “A name ain’t much use without an address,” he reminded them. “And these guys don’t stay in one place too long.”

  “But I know who you mean,” Lisa said eagerly. “Some of them come into San Luis for supplies once in a while. They call in at Mom’s diner.” Her mother, Bonnie Goodman, ran the most popular eating place in town. “Yeah, I got it; there’s Bob Tyson. He’s an ex-rodeo rider. Then there’s Art Fischer and Baxter Black; hippie types. They all live kind of rough in the forest.”

  Kirstie listened and let her imagination run on. She pictured the rescuer of the black stallion as a man who had turned his back on a life that centered on cars, jobs, and evenings in front of the television. He knew the woods and the mountains, had learned the old ways; maybe even the habits and healing methods of the Native American Indians. One thing was for sure; the mystery man cared about horses.

  “They live rough and think rough,” Hadley warned. He strode out into the corral to greet the returning riders, heading first for Ronnie Vernon on Silver Flash. He helped Vernon to dismount as he went on talking to Lisa. “Don’t go getting ideas about looking them up.”

  “Ideas about looking who up?” Sandy Scott inquired as she dismounted from her own horse. She tethered the skewbald to the nearest post.

  When she heard the news about the mysterious horse doctor and the latest theory on who he might be, she quickly agreed with Hadley. “Too risky,” she told Lisa and Kirstie. “We don’t know the first thing about those guys.”

  “Except that one of them cares enough about the black stallion to climb down into Dead Man’s Canyon and take care of him!” Kirstie objected. “Except that he’s done more for that horse than a lot of people I can think of!”

  “How do we know that?” Sandy took off her white hat, then linked arms with her daughter. She led her out of the corral, followed by Matt and Lisa. They walked together past the tack-room toward the ranch house. “Aren’t you loping ahead a little bit here?”

  “But, Mom …” Kirstie launched into her reasons for tracking down the healer. “He’d be real interesting. I reckon he knows a lot about wild horses. We could learn things from him …”

  Sandy raised her eyebrows and stared. “Too risky,” she repeated. “Hadley’s right.”

  “But …”

  “Listen.” Her mother stopped on the stretch of grass outside the house, one foot on the wooden deck that led to the front door. She spoke seriously to get her point across. “You paint a pretty picture of your horse doctor, but you gotta know that’s not the way it’s likely to be.”

  “How come?” Matt asked. He saw that his mom meant what she said.

  “Well, just suppose you’ve hit on the right answer and Bob Tyson, say, is the guy who’s taking care of the stallion. Now I don’t know Tyson in person, and I’ve never met him, but I hear he’s got a bad name in town for not paying his bills.” Sandy turned to Lisa for confirmation.

  “I guess,” Lisa agreed awkwardly.

  “He lives real rough, he owes hundreds of dollars at the grocery store and the gas station and the diner. And one more thing I know about Bob Tyson …”

  “What?” Kirstie suspected that she wasn’t going to like this one little bit. Her stomach turned over and began to tie up in another knot.

  “He does know plenty about horses, like you said. He used to work the rodeos in San Luis and Silvertown.” Sandy paused to fling her hat onto the porch swing, sat down, then delivered the bad news. “So what he does now when he wants to scrape together a few dollars is go up the mountain and trail a herd of wild horses. He picks out the best horse in the bunch, watches and waits until he can cut that one out. Then he’ll lasso it and bring it down. Great. Now he has something to sell at the horse sale.”

  “What are you saying?” Kirstie gasped. She had a strong picture in her head of her own black stallion being brought down by a snaking lasso, of him being dragged into the dust, tied down, bullied until the fight went out of him. His gleaming black coat would be covered in dirt, there would be fear in his eyes.

  “Bob Tyson catches wild horses to sell onto the rodeo circuit,” Sandy repeated. She looked long and hard at Kirstie, then Lisa, then Matt. “So I’m telling all three of you right here; you don’t tangle with the Bob Tysons of this world.”

  “No, ma’am,” Lisa agreed and hung her head.

  Matt gave a quick nod.

  “Kirstie?” Sandy prompted.

  She hung her head and gave in at last. “OK,” she breathed, turning on her heel and striding away from the house.

  8

  So much for Kirstie’s belief in her mysterious horse healer. She spent the rest of Sunday doing chores on the ranch, helping Matt and Charlie to bring in logs for the fires and stacking them outside the guest cabins, then raking the dirt surface of the arena behind the corral. That evening Charlie and Matt were to give an exhibition of horsemanship there, and everything had to be made neat and tidy.

  But Kirstie felt too let down to work well. It was like riding Lucky up to Hummingbird Rock, feeling great, seeing that the world was a beautiful place, then suddenly, unexpectedly, falling off. She was down on the ground, covered in dirt, looking like an idiot. And she only had herself to blame.

  She raked the arena with sullen strokes, head down, eyes fixed on the furrowed pattern she made with the rake. Trust her to believe that the black stallion’s helper was someone you could trust. All that stuff about knowing nature and caring about horses turned out to be Kirstie’s own im
agination running away with her, making up romantic stories that turned out not to be true.

  “Sorry,” Lisa had said quietly after Sandy had dropped the bombshell. “I know how much this means to you.”

  Kirstie had done her best to smile back at her friend. “Sure. But I guess we can still hope.”

  “How come?” Lisa was waiting for her grandfather, Lennie Goodman, to drive over from Lone Elm, pick up her bicycle, and drive her down to her home in San Luis. “You heard what Hadley and your mom said. No way can we take any more risks to save the stallion.”

  Inwardly Kirstie had groaned. But she didn’t show how disappointed she felt, and had waved Lisa off in her grandpa’s red pickup truck without giving anything away.

  It was only when she was alone in the late afternoon sun, working in the arena, making it ready for the evening show that she admitted even to herself how bad it was.

  For a start, she really loved and admired that horse. Her first view of him in the canyon, proud and suspicious, neck arched, nostrils flared as he protected his herd, had done it. Then there was his courage. She remembered how he’d struggled through his bewilderment and pain to get to his feet after the landslide. And the stallion had trusted her. Hers was the first human hand ever to touch him as she buckled the halter onto help him. And he’d believed in her as she strapped the bandage around his leg to stop the bleeding.

  Fiercely Kirstie raked the ground. The horse had permitted her touch, had allowed her to help him. And now a second human being, a man whose name might be Bob Tyson, or Art Fischer, or Baxter Black, had deceived him. The mystery man had found him trapped in Dead Man’s Canyon, had offered false help in order to make money out of him. The drifter had betrayed the horse’s precious trust for the sake of a few dollars in a San Luis sale barn.

  Unless…unless…Kirstie stopped work and held the rake frozen in mid-air. “How dumb am I?”

  “You say something?” Charlie poked his head around the tack-room door. It was his afternoon to clean the tack while the others took rides along the trails. With his shirt sleeves rolled up, the low sun made him look extra-tanned.