Halfway across the field, Cobby suddenly raised his head, his small pointed ears tightly forward. He stopped. Steve pushed him on, but he stopped again, head up, all his senses alert.
‘He’s heard something,’ said Steve, ‘or got a scent.’
‘Probably a field of oats,’ Dora said.
‘Let’s see where he’ll go.’
Steve dropped the reins and sent him forward. Cobby broke into a jog. They went through a gap in the hedge and over a stubble field. At the far end, a plank bridge took them over a deep dry ditch. The mule hesitated, distrusting the bridge. Dora slapped him with the flat of her hand, and he was just scrambling across when Cobby stopped again and backed, almost knocking Willy into the ditch.
He switched off to the side, and as they followed the edge of the ditch, they saw the dark shape of the mare.
Callie held the horses, while Steve and Dora jumped down to Specs. The foal had been born. It had been born still wrapped in the thin sac of membrane which had protected it for so long, floating inside its mother. Jammed in the ditch, weak and exhausted, the mare could not turn and rip the sac with her teeth, and the foal was suffocating, drowning in the fluid.
‘Just in time.’
Steve freed the small wet head. They could not tell if it was alive or dead. Dora had once seen a man fished out of the river and saved by mouth-to-mouth breathing. She took the foal’s head and breathed steadily into its nose, until its lungs moved and the foal began to breathe life of its own.
When they showed her her wet black colt, poor old Specs was too weak to lick it. She bumped it with her grey whiskery nose, and then dropped back her head.
Her eyes were glazed and dull. She looked as if she would die.
Steve rode across the field, and followed the road to the nearest house, where he astonished a sleeping family with a demand for blankets for a dying mare and her newborn foal.
When it was light, the Colonel came with a breakdown lorry and a canvas sling. Somehow they got Specs out of the ditch and on to her feet. The Colonel and Steve and the two men from the garage pulled and pushed and half carried her up the ramp into the horse box. Callie sat on the floor in front with her arms round the struggling, long-legged foal.
As soon as he was in the stable with his mother, he pushed his face against the exhausted mare and tried to suck, but there was no milk for him.
The vet came three times that day, and gave Specs injections, but she had been infected from the difficult birth, and in the evening, he said, ‘She hasn’t got much chance. You’d better try and find a foster mother.’
‘We’re going to raise him by hand.’ Callie pulled the colt away from his mother and pushed the bottle of milk into his soft mouth.
Slugger’s wife had found a feeding bottle that had been used for one of her grandchildren, and they fed the colt with milk from the old man’s goat. It had to be fed little and often, the way a mare feeds her foal, wandering away from it before it can take too much.
‘Never rear it,’ Slugger droned. ‘You know what they say: Lose a mare, lose a foal.’
‘What about cows? They take the calf away at once and feed it by hand, don’t they?’
The Colonel borrowed a special calf feeding pail from Mr Beckett, who had calmed down when they explained that last night was not their fault, but the colt much preferred Slugger’s grandchild’s bottle.
He was always hungry. It seemed to be always time to feed him. At almost any hour of the day or night, you could find the Colonel or Anna or Steve or Dora or Callie or Toby tipping the bottle of goat’s milk down to the soft, demanding nose, the long legs braced, tail quivering, blue eyes bulging with greed. They took it in turn to set their alarm clocks and go down in the night to the stable where Specs lay in the straw, licking anxiously at her foal, her white-rimmed eyes full of the trouble she could not understand. The fever had gone into her feet, and she would not stand.
But the colt would not give up. He was full of life and bounce, and he gave his mother no peace.
‘Shouldn’t we take him away from her?’ Dora was trying to get Specs to eat, holding the food in her hand. The mare would nibble a bit, then turn her head away. ‘She isn’t getting any better.’
‘But she’s alive.’ The Colonel would never give up his stubborn hope of life for his animals. ‘She’s alive because she’s got a colt. Take him away, and you take away her will to hang on.’
The colt was called Folly, as Callie had planned. Cobbler’s Folly, Steve called him, since it was Cobbler’s Dream who had found him.
Callie hated being away from him at school.
‘Had your foal yet?’ Lewis asked quite affably.
‘Yes. A colt.’
He raised his thick eyebrows, which met in the middle of his nose, so that his whole brow furrowed when he moved them.
‘Mother and child doing well?’
He lowered the brows. With those dull eyes and that hanging mouth, you could not tell how much he was hiding. It must have been him and the Toad who chased our poor Specs. But there was no way to prove it.
‘The colt is lovely,’ Callie said. ‘But the poor old mother nearly died.’
‘Oh well,’ said the Louse. ‘We all come to it.’
Callie did not tell him that because the lovely colt had kept bothering Specs to get up and feed him, the milk had begun to come at last, and the fever left her. She did not tell him about the miracle. He would not understand things like that.
Some time after that, Lewis stopped coming to school.
Steve had to go back to the hospital for a final X-ray. While he was there, one of the nurses, the one who had written, ‘Love always Susie’ on his plaster cast, gave him some interesting news.
Two patients had come in with food poisoning, which was traced to a tin of contaminated meat found on the rubbish heap at the Pinecrest Hotel, where they were staying.
The hotel had been closed down and the owners had gone away.
The old man came back in the spring. When they told him about Specs, he nodded and sucked his loose false teeth and did not say anything.
Specs and her colt belonged to him, of course. Callie went sadly out to the field. Folly left the other horses and came to her at once. He still liked people best, because they had first cared for him.
He put his inquiring nose into her hand. She let him lick the salt of her skin, and then flung her arms round his neck and wept into his growing mane. The colt put his head down to graze, to get rid of her, and moved away.
When Steve came to the gate, Callie was sitting in the grass, tearing daisies to pieces.
‘Stop sulking,’ he said. ‘He’s gone.’
Callie looked up and saw Steve through a mist of sun and tears.
‘The old man has moved into his daughter’s flat. We’re keeping Specs and Folly.’
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