Third-Time Lucky

by Jenny Oldfield

  Meltwater Trail would beckon: a game of Find the Flag with a new bunch of dude riders. Then on out of the stands of fresh green aspens, between tall lodgepole pines standing sentry along the high tracks leading to the bare ridges of pink granite to Bear Hunt Overlook, Elk Rock, and Dead Man’s Canyon. And beyond that the snow line. The glittering, icebound shores of Eden Lake. The two girls and their horses would enter a silent, shining paradise.

  But today was different. No phone calls. No leaving her cares behind. Today Kirstie’s only thought was to get over to the barn to see how Lucky was.

  Matt was already out there with Charlie, telling the young wrangler to feed the patient small amounts of molasses and concentrates throughout the day. “No oats,” he reminded him. “Dissolve the procaine tablets in his drinking water. And keep his bedding clean, OK?”

  “I’ll do it,” Kirstie volunteered, going into the stall. She could see that Lucky was no better, and that this time she couldn’t blame the artificial light for the dull look of his lovely golden coat. “Is it OK if I groom him?”

  “Sure.” Matt was moving off with Charlie. “But don’t handle him too much. He most likely wants some peace.”

  Like a person with flu, she guessed. A horse’s bones would ache; he’d be feeling stiff in his joints and tired to death. So she took a soft brush and worked him over from head to foot, talking to him soothingly as she covered him with a light blanket and reached under his belly to fasten the straps. He stood patiently, taking little interest in what she did.

  “OK, I’m done,” she assured him. “Now you get some rest. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  Leaving him in the cramped stall, head hanging, looking tired and sad, she went off to help Charlie saddle up the horses for the day’s trail rides. She bridled them up, checked cinches, divided riders into beginners, intermediates, and advanced, and saw them on their way.

  “How come you’re not riding today?” Hadley called as he headed the intermediates out across Five Mile Creek.

  Kirstie shrugged. “I need to take care of Lucky.”

  “You sure, honey?” Sandy checked, looking down from the saddle, the low sun behind her making her fair hair shine like a halo. Her ride was with the beginners, up Apache Hill and along Coyote Trail.

  “Yeah. I want to be here for him.”

  “OK. Charlie’s gonna be in the maintenance area this morning, servicing the truck and trying to get in touch with Glen Woodford to check if he’s on his way. Ask him for help if you need it.”

  Listless and heavyhearted, Kirstie saw off the group of excited, nervous riders. Even before they’d reached the top of Apache Hill, she was already wanting to run back and check on Lucky, having to tell herself firmly that the poor guy needed to sleep. So she wandered aimlessly into the tack room instead and began shooing cats and sweeping the floor just to keep herself occupied. The one black and two gray kittens kept on coming back and pouncing on the broom, tumbling out of the way, then scooting in and out of the door.

  “Hey, kitties!” a light, cheerful voice said.

  “Lisa!” Kirstie put down the broom and went outside. Her best friend was picking up the black kitten and tickling him under his chin. “How come?”

  “What do you mean, ‘How come?’ It’s our vacation, isn’t it? It’s me who should be asking ‘How come?’ How come you didn’t call me at some dreadful time this morning?”

  Kirstie blushed, then frowned. “Lucky’s sick.”

  “Yeah. Charlie just told me.” Lisa put down the kitten and gave her a long, hard look. “So? How come you didn’t call?”

  “I should’ve, I guess. Sorry.”

  Lisa stepped out into the corral, put her hands on her hips, and went on with her lecture. “Let me guess. You feel bad because you rescued the appie and the appie gave Moonshine and Lucky the flu …”

  “Lucky didn’t catch the bug!” Kirstie cut in quickly. “We can’t get hold of Glen and we don’t know what his problem is!”

  Lisa nodded. “OK. It’s not the flu, but somehow you still feel it’s your fault.” She put up her hand to ward off another interruption. “Yeah, you do. I know you, Kirstie. Guilt, guilt, guilt. It’s written all over your face. And look at you; you didn’t even comb your hair this morning!”

  “Lisa, give me a break.” This wasn’t what Kirstie needed. She turned away, planning to retreat into the tack room.

  “But where did guilt ever get you?” Lisa insisted. She leaped ahead of Kirstie, barring her way. “You gotta get it into your skull that horses get sick without it being your fault. Think about it a different way.”

  “Like what?” Kirstie couldn’t take much more of this. She could feel the stupid tears welling up again.

  “Like, what can we do now? What’s gonna be the best thing to help Lucky get better?”

  “You mean, cowboy-up?” Kirstie’s voice was low and scornful. “Spare me, Lisa. I already had that from Mom.”

  “Yeah, cowboy-up!” Lisa’s green eyes sparked. She refused to back off. “Think. Make plans. If Matt’s stymied and can’t work out what’s wrong with Lucky, and you’re really afraid it’s something serious, then get a move on!”

  “And do what?” Gosh, if she could think of something useful to do, instead of feeling totally helpless every time she so much as looked at Lucky, didn’t Lisa think she would do it?

  “Get a second opinion!” her friend insisted. “Don’t hang around. Call Glen Woodford again!”

  * * *

  “Lucky’s running a high fever, that’s for sure.”

  Kirstie and Lisa stayed in the background with Tommy Woodford as Glen talked Lucky’s case through with Matt. The vet had finally been contacted shortly after Sandy Scott had returned from her morning ride.

  “And there’s a respiratory problem that we need to check out.”

  “How’re we gonna do that?” Sandy asked. She’d assured Glen that the cost of getting the palomino back to full health wasn’t an issue. “Whatever it takes,” she’d insisted. “Never mind the expense.”

  “First, we make a culture of the nasal discharge and look for bacterial infection. We’ll be looking for a herpes virus, say. That would fit in with a slight swelling I can feel beneath the horse’s jaw.”

  As she listened to the technical stuff, Kirstie felt a little better. Glen sure knew what he was talking about. Not that Matt didn’t, but the vet from San Luis had years of experience in treating sick horses.

  “If it’s herpes, all you need to do is rest Lucky until the infection clears up. Period.”

  Lisa nudged Kirstie’s arm and smiled.

  “If we find equine influenza, that’s more serious,” Glen went on.

  “It’s not that!” Kirstie quickly reminded them about the up-to-date health program. “You vaccinated Lucky yourself, remember!”

  “OK, so the other options include a streptococcus virus, so we have to watch out for abscesses under the jaw. Or else it could be emphysema: lung damage caused by an allergy to spores in mold that you get around fodder and bedding.”

  By this time, Kirstie found that the long words had begun to have the reverse effect. Instead of being reassured by Glen’s knowledge, she felt scared by the number of serious illnesses a horse could get. And now he was moving on to an examination of the inside of Lucky’s airways which involved pushing a tube through his nostril, down the windpipe into his lungs.

  “The tube contains fiber optic strands,” Glen explained. “They’re connected to this light source so we get to see the damage to the lungs, if any.”

  As the vet approached Lucky with the tube, Kirstie backed away from the stall in dismay. She didn’t want to stay to see this, so she walked out of the barn, leaving the cluster of experts—her mom, Matt, and Glen—to carry out the examination. Lisa chose to watch, her face tense, her jaw clenched tight. But Tommy followed Kirstie out into the daylight.

  “Jeez!” Closing her eyes, she leaned against the wall of the barn and took a deep breath
. The wooden boards felt warm through her thin cotton shirt.

  Tommy walked ahead a few paces, then kicked his toe against a tethering post. His mouth was screwed up tight and he gave a slight shake of his head. “Kirstie …”

  “What?” She opened her eyes to squint into the sun at the hunched figure in a black T-shirt and jeans.

  “I got something to tell you.” More uneasy than ever, he scuffed his boot in the dust.

  “I’m not gonna like it, am I?” Pushing herself free of the wall, she edged toward him. Tommy was so quiet it was unusual for him to begin a conversation. He was just someone who was always there in the background, helping his dad with the paperwork that all vets carried with them.

  “It’s about Lucky’s flu shot.” He paused, sighed, then forced himself to carry on. “The file for April shows that we gave all the Half Moon Ranch horses their booster for tetanus, influenza, and rhino …”

  “Yeah?” They’d looked at the files when Moonshine fell ill. All the boxes had check marks filled in. “So?”

  “The list ain’t right,” Tommy told her. He left off scuffing his boot and looked up at her with hooded eyes.

  “How come?”

  “It ain’t true that all the horses had their shots. I was the one checking them off, so I should know!”

  “Meaning what exactly?” At times like this, when new possibilities exploded inside her head, she asked the dumbest questions.

  “Meaning, we needed to get out of here fast, onto the next job. My pa gives the shots; I line up the horses and check them off the list. He deals with so many, he don’t remember the names of each and every horse. That’s my job.”

  Kirstie clenched her fists and practically stopped breathing. What was Tommy building up to?

  “So what I did when we ran short of time was look at a few horses way down the list: Cadillac, Moose, Crazy Horse, and Lucky. I see it’s only ninety days since we gave them the last booster, and I reckon there’s not much risk if we just leave them off the list that day, so long as I keep it in my head to put them at the top of the list next time.”

  “But you put a check mark in the box to make it look as if we were up to date?” Another dumb question, but Kirstie found it hard to believe what Tommy was telling her.

  He nodded, unable to look her in the eye any longer.

  “So Lucky didn’t have the shot, which means right now he isn’t immune to tetanus …”

  “Or rhinopneumonitis …”

  “Or influenza!” she gasped. “Oh, my gosh, Tommy, why didn’t you tell us this before?”

  6

  It was like fitting a new piece in a difficult jigsaw, the fact that Lucky and several other horses at Half Moon Ranch had been left wide open to infection.

  “Horse flu is what killed Moonshine!” Kirstie walked with Lisa up and down the ranch house porch. “It turns into pneumonia and kills them. At the very least, they have permanent damage to their lungs!”

  “Wait!” Lisa’s advice was brief. She’d watched and listened hard as Tommy had come back into the barn after his talk with Kirstie to confess what he’d done.

  “How can I? Like, waiting is the last thing we should do. Didn’t we lose enough time already?” Kirstie meant the hours lost because of Tommy’s guilty silence.

  “Look, Glen did all the tests and took them off to the lab, didn’t he? Now we just have to hang on until he gets the results.”

  “It’s flu,” Kirstie said in a flat, fatalistic voice, her face marked by a grim frown. “I feel that’s what it is. Lucky was the one who got closest of all to Whisper. The pony was coughing those bugs all over him.”

  “Say you’re right.” Lisa caught her arm to stop her pacing up and down. “It’s still good nursing and a whole lot of patience that’s gonna pull Lucky through.”

  Kirstie broke free and stepped down into the yard. Over in the corral, guests were gathering for the afternoon rides. The routine of the ranch carried on regardless. “It’s weird!” She turned back to Lisa. “We got all these tests and drugs with fancy, scientific names; we got labs and hospitals for horses and all the modern stuff, but we still can’t do a single thing to help Lucky!”

  Matt had tried and Glen Woodford was doing his best, but still no one was certain what was wrong. And the thing everyone told her was “Wait and see.”

  “There must be something else!” she insisted.

  “Yeah, modern stuff …” Lisa echoed. Knitting her brows and catching her bottom lip between her teeth, she stepped down absentmindedly from the porch, staring at Hadley who was in the corral helping riders to mount their horses.

  “Here we are, the turn of the millennium, living in a country with the most up-to-date Western medicines you could wish for, and they say ‘Rest.’ That’s it! ‘Rest’ and ‘Wait and see’!” Kirstie’s impatience took her across the yard toward the corral, to lean on the fence.

  Lisa joined her. “Uhmm … Kirstie …”

  “Yeah?” Once the rides were out of the way, her plan was to help Charlie dissolve Lucky’s next dose of penicillin in his drinking water.

  “… Say we stopped thinking modern here. Say we started thinking something more traditional.” Lisa spoke slowly and quietly, without her usual bubbling self-confidence. She was still staring thoughtfully at the senior wrangler.

  Puzzled, Kirstie followed her line of vision. “No use asking Hadley,” she objected before Lisa could even suggest it. “He already said that the type of infection Lucky’s got is bad news. ‘The ruin of many a good saddle horse,’ to use his words.” The old man had looked in on Lucky over lunch and more or less written him off.

  “I wasn’t thinking of asking Hadley’s advice.” Lisa sniffed and climbed the fence. She headed for the lean, slightly stooped figure of the longest serving member of the Half Moon Ranch crew. “It’s his brains I’m interested in. Pure information, honest!”

  Kirstie clicked out of her gloomy mood and followed, weaving between horses and riders, avoiding Charlie’s long rake as it cleared the yard.

  “Hey, Hadley!” Lisa looked up at him as he settled in the saddle on Silver Flash, his hat pulled well down, a blue neckerchief protecting the back of his neck from the sun. “You remember a guy called Red Mitchell who worked here way back?”

  “Uh-huh.” Hadley backed his sorrel horse away from the post, one eye on the group of advanced riders.

  “That means, ‘Uh-huh; yep’?” Lisa reached for Silver Flash’s rein.

  A nod, a shrug, so what?

  “He had a horse called Bandit?”

  “Black-and-white paint,” came the swift reply. Hadley was always more interested in talking about horses than about people. “That gelding had great presence: part Morgan, part quarter horse. Never lost his cool, most hardworking cutter you ever seen.”

  “That’s the one!” Lisa stole a quick glance at Kirstie to see if she was clued in. “OK, so Red Mitchell took Bandit to some horse doctor when he fell sick one year.” She recounted the story her grandpa had told her.

  “Yep.” Hadley clammed up again, making it clear he didn’t have time to chat.

  “This horse doctor; where did he hang out?” Refusing to let go of Silver Flash’s rein, Lisa followed Hadley across the corral.

  “In the mountains, way out West, I forget.”

  “In Colorado? Wyoming? Montana?”

  “Montana.” Hadley saw that he wouldn’t get rid of Lisa until he’d given her some answers. “Long way from here. Place called Rainbow Mountain.”

  “And when was this?” Lisa realized her time was running out. Hadley’s group had surrounded him, eager to leave. “Twenty years back? Thirty? What was the guy’s name, do you remember?”

  “Twenty, twenty-five years. I didn’t pay too much attention. All I know is, Red Mitchell got some damn fool idea into his head that his sick horse needed special medicine from a guy holed up in the mountains. Had some Native American blood, as I recall. Sioux maybe, or Comanche.”

  Lisa no
dded eagerly, storing the information for future reference. “His name!” she pleaded.

  Hadley raked through his memory one last time. “Maybe it was Stone. Zak Stone. Yeah, I guess that was it.”

  “Hang on just a minute!” Sandy Scott had trouble taking in Kirstie’s eager plan. She’d returned from her afternoon ride to find her daughter transformed. Instead of a listless, anxious wreck, she’d been greeted by this energetic blonde whirlwind. “Tell me one more time!”

  “Zak Stone!” Kirstie repeated the name. “Lisa and me asked Hadley about him. Then we called all the old-timers on the ranches around here!”

  “You’ve been running up my phone bill, huh?” Her mom refused to be drawn in. Instead, she poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “Grandpa couldn’t recall much more than Hadley,” Lisa reported. “But Jim Mullins at Lazy B said everyone knew about Zak Stone in those days. He had a name as the best horse doctor in the West.”

  “So how come I never heard of him?” Sandy sat down wearily at the table.

  “Because he’s a hermit!” Kirstie jumped back in. “You know; he don’t.”

  “‘Doesn’t’!” Sandy corrected.

  “He doesn’t like having folks around. Lives in the backwoods on Rainbow Mountain in south east Montana. If people want to see him, they gotta find their own way. You could drive for days across country, I guess, and turn up at his place without knowing for sure that you’d find him home.”

  “Very convenient!” Sandy looked up at Matt, who had just come in, with a sigh that said “Help!”

  “Find who home?” Kirstie’s brother asked. He too looked dead beat.

  “Zak Stone!” Kirstie began the explanations all over again. “Part Sioux…old, Native American remedies…herbs and stuff…works like magic… holed up in the mountains of Montana!”