Breakaway (A Gail McCarthy Mystery)

by Laura Crum

  "How did you know?" I asked him.

  "It's subtle," he said charitably. "When you saw the mare she was probably so swollen that it was hard to tell. But once she'd been wrapped for twenty-four hours and the swelling was down, I could feel that the tendon was fine, and it was easy to palpate a big lump on the inside of her cannon bone." Jim shrugged. "It was an understandable mistake."

  "I see. I'll bet Linda Howard didn't say anything nice about me."

  Jim said nothing.

  "She likes you," I said. "She was pretty unhappy when she couldn't get you out yesterday."

  Jim still said nothing. I knew that he knew that some of our clients preferred him to an extreme degree. There was little either of us could do about it. But I hadn't done the office any favors by making a mistake with an already hostile client.

  I sighed. "Sorry," I said.

  "It was a tricky one." Jim didn't sound particularly upset. "I could have made the same mistake if I'd seen her first."

  "Thanks," I said. But I was pretty sure that, in fact, he would not have. Jim wasn't often wrong. I'd learned an incredible amount in the years I'd worked under him, and I was still learning. Even at the worst of times, when long hours, low pay, and Jim's sometimes derogatory attitude had really gotten on my nerves, his abilities as a veterinarian had always been such an inspiration that I'd only become more determined to stay the course. And now, now I was committed.

  This was my practice, this was my life. Jim and I had worked out a deal in which he would retire in ten years and I would, at that time, become the sole proprietor. It was what I had always wanted, and I had finally made it happen.

  So how come I didn't feel better about it? My reverie was interrupted by the receptionist, who came through the office door and said, "Gail, June Jensen has a newborn foal. She wants you to come out right away and imprint it. She says Gordon's out of town."

  "Oh," I said. I looked at Jim. Imprinting a foal was something clients normally did themselves, and it would take me at least an hour.

  Jim shrugged. "Go ahead and do it. I'll handle anything that comes up. Make sure she pays for it, though."

  "How much?"

  "A ranch call, an emergency call, and a full exam charge."

  "Okay." I started for the door.

  Jim's voice trailed after me. "Get back as soon as you can. I'm doing a surgery this morning, and I want you to help me."

  "Okay," I said again.

  June Jensen lived in the Soquel Valley, in my old neighborhood, in fact. Driving to her place on Olive Springs Road, I went right past the little cabin I'd lived in for five years. There were flowers in the window boxes; it looked like the new owner was taking care of the place. I smiled at it affectionately as I passed, but felt only the mildest of nostalgic twinges. My property in Corralitos had become home.

  June and Gordon Jensen had a pretty little spot that was bounded by Olive Springs Road on one side and Soquel Creek on the other. Their older farmhouse had been remodeled just enough to be clean and comfortable and not so much that it had lost its character. Behind it, a small barn and corral occupied the patch of meadow next to the creek.

  June came out of the house as I drove in. A woman of about my age, she was a little plump and distinctly unglamorous, prone to wearing jeans and baggy sweatshirts. She was also not a horse person; it was her husband, Gordon, who owned the bay mare that produced a foal every year.

  "She foaled two weeks early, Gail," June was already talking as I got out of the truck. "Gordon will be back tomorrow, but that's no help now. And you know how he feels about imprinting these babies."

  "Is the foal doing okay?" I asked.

  "I think so. I came out this morning to feed, and she was standing there, nursing. I almost dropped the grain bucket, I was so surprised. Tiz usually foals right on schedule."

  June was leading me toward the horse corral as she spoke; I could see mama and baby ahead. Everything looked reassuringly normal.

  I knew Tiz, the bay mare, well. Gordon Jensen had owned her for many years. A registered Quarter Horse with a fancy pedigree, Tiz was well made and kind-natured. Every year Gordon bred her to a different stallion, raised the baby up to weaning age, and sold it. He made a small profit on the colts, enough to pay for his horse-keeping expenses, which was important to him, I knew. Gordon and June didn't have a lot of money.

  "How do you want to do this?" I asked June.

  ''I'll hold Tiz," she said promptly, "and you imprint the baby. I do this with Gordon every year. I'm used to hanging onto the mare."

  "I take it she's okay with this." I looked questioningly at June. Some mares were extremely protective of their babies and could be downright violent.

  "She gets a little upset," June said, "but not bad. She's never tried to bite or kick us or anything."

  "Good," I said. "Do you want to catch her?"

  "Could you do it?" June glanced at me diffidently. "I'm not all that used to putting the halter on; I'll probably fumble it. I can help you corner her."

  "Sure." I took the halter she handed me. I was fairly used to catching clients' horses. It wasn't my preferred method, but I often ran across this situation. Since I knew Tiz, it wasn't an issue, but I'd nearly been flattened last week by a brown gelding that belonged to a teenage girl who couldn't catch him.

  Shaking my head at the memory, I slipped between the boards of the horse corral, halter in hand. June followed me. Setting my emergency bag down on the ground just inside the fence, I started toward the mare.

  Her head came up as soon as she saw me, and she placed her body protectively between me and her baby. The foal, a sorrel filly, moved restlessly on her long legs, not sure whether to be curious or alarmed.

  "It's okay, Tiz," I said reassuringly. "You know I'm not going to hurt your baby."

  Tiz was having none of it. Even though she produced a foal a year, and this process was undoubtedly familiar to her, the brand-new creature by her side brought out all her maternal instincts. At some level she understood that I was not really a threat, but her genes told her to keep her vulnerable foal safe from any possible predators.

  I walked toward the pair, June following me, and Tiz trotted away, tail held high, nickering at her baby to follow. The baby whickered back and trotted, then loped, after her mother. Even though I had seen it many times before, I smiled in delight at the sight of the several-hours-old filly manipulating her long legs into the rhythm of a canter, looking remarkably coordinated and confident.

  Horses were amazing this way, I thought, as June and I began walking Tiz into a corner where she could be more easily caught. Like other large prey animals, deer for instance, their newborn young were ready to keep up with the herd in an hour or so.

  This filly was pretty damn lively. She galloped alongside her mother, moving with little apparent effort over the ground.

  "Nice strong foal," I said to June.

  She smiled. "I hope Gordon will like her."

  At this point we had Tiz in a corner. The mare stopped, once again placing her body between us and the baby.

  "Come on, Tiz, you know we've got you," I said calmly, and walked quietly towards her.

  Tiz's head came up, but I could see a certain acceptance in her eyes. I walked to her shoulder and patted it, then slipped the lead rope around her neck.

  The mare nickered anxiously to her baby; I used the lead rope to control Mama as I put the halter over her nose and behind her ears. Once the halter was buckled in place, I relaxed. Tiz was safely caught. Now for the baby.

  Handing the mare's lead rope to June, I walked around Tiz's body and approached the filly. Head up, eyes big, the little horse watched me. Stepping slowly toward her, I held my hand out. A diminutive muzzle stretched in my direction, delicate and whiskered. The baby sniffed my hand curiously. Then she scooted away.

  Tiz neighed again and stomped her front feet. June bumped her with the lead rope and said, "Whoa." I began following the filly. It took me about five minutes to catch h
er, but once I had my arms around her body, she struggled for only a few seconds and then held still.

  Imprinting a foal is an interesting process that has recently become popular with some of the more enlightened horse breeders. The idea is to handle the colt a great deal in its first few hours of life and accustom it to a wide variety of things-having its body confined, its feet picked up and worked on, a halter put on its head and used to lead it, other routine handling. The theory behind all this is that a horse will take an imprint of these actions, and in later life, will be much more relaxed and confident in the breaking and training process, and thus much easier to handle.

  Imprinting worked, as far as I was concerned. It didn't change the basic personality of the horse; some imprinted colts were more lively and fractious than others. What it did was dramatically decrease a horse's instinctive fright at having its body confined in any way. As a prey animal in the wild, a horse's major defense is its ability to get away and run-fast. Thus horses react very unfavorably to anything that diminishes their chance of doing this-being controlled by a lead line, having their feet held up. Imprinting seems to give horses some security in these areas; just as they bond to their mothers in that first hour, so they also absorb the message that this confinement is okay.

  For the next hour I went through the imprinting procedures that I knew; June told me a few more that Gordon regularly used. I held the filly and picked her up so that all four legs were off the ground; I lifted each foot in turn and tapped on the bottom of it; I put my fingers in her ears, nose, and mouth; I draped a soft rag over her back and fanned her gently with it; and I put a halter on her and led her a few steps. I also put a little iodine on her navel to prevent infection and noted that the placenta, which I found nearby, looked complete.

  The baby responded well to my efforts; once she tried to kick me, but she gave in fairly easily and I felt she had taken the imprint. Stroking the dainty arched neck, curved like a seahorse, with its fine ridge of curly baby mane, I said to June, "I think this is enough. We don't want to exhaust her. Have Gordon catch her and do this stuff again a couple more times when he gets home. I think she'll be fine."

  "Thanks, Gail." June slipped the halter off the mare and turned her loose. Tiz moved away a few steps and then stopped; immediately the filly began to suck.

  "How much do I owe you?" June asked me as we walked out to my truck.

  Calculating rapidly in my head, I charged her for a ranch call and an exam, purposely neglecting the emergency charge Jim had told me to add on. This call would be expensive enough for the Jensens without that, and I hadn't really spent that much time here.

  I could hear Jim's voice in my head. "Don't be such a soft touch, Gail. We're in this to make a living, you know."

  Rebutting it with a mental, "The practice is doing real well, Jim, and it's not good business to overcharge people," I accepted the check June wrote out for me and said my good-byes.

  I wasn't in the truck two minutes before the car phone rang. The receptionist sounded a little frantic. "I've got two calls for you, Gail, and both of them are saying they're emergencies. One is a horse that's been sick for a week and Jim's been treating it, but he isn't sure what's wrong with it. Today the horse is a lot worse and two other horses in the barn are sick.

  "The other call is a woman who says her horse has pigeon fever, she thinks. She wants the vet out right away. And Jim's off dealing with a colic."

  ''I'll see the client with the horse that got worse," I said. "Pigeon fever's not really an emergency. Call the woman and tell her that, and that I'll be out later today."

  So it went. The sick horse turned out to have a case of what we called bastard strangles. The only reason I was able to diagnose this was that the two other horses that had just come down with the disease were exhibiting the more normal form of strangles, characterized by a snotty nose, a mildly elevated temperature, and abscesses under the jaw. Occasionally strangles went underground, so to speak, and the abscesses were internal. Such cases were hard to diagnose, the horses tending to show few symptoms other than fever and general malaise.

  I diagnosed and treated this group; the man who owned them wasn't happy at all. "Dammit, if I'd known this was strangles I would have isolated the first horse so the others didn't get it. Jim told me he thought it was some sort of internal infection and not contagious. So I left the horse in the barn with the others. Now the whole herd's going to get strangles."

  There wasn't much I could say. The man was probably right about the whole herd getting the disease. Since he raised Morgan horses and had somewhere between twenty and thirty head on his place, this was a fairly major problem.

  "I'm sorry," I told him. "Bastard strangles can be hard to catch. We can vaccinate the ones that aren't sick yet; they might not catch it."

  "How much will that cost?"

  "Twenty-four dollars a horse."

  "Shit," the man said forcefully. He was mad, I knew, not at me, or even at Jim, but just at the whole situation. Strangles is a real nuisance of a disease. He eventually agreed to vaccinate the rest of his herd; I gave them the nasal injections and took my leave.

  Driving away from yet another unhappy client, I called the office to see what was most pressing. The receptionist sounded even more stressed. "Gail, Jim wants you back here right away. He's ready to do that operation."

  Back to the office, where I helped Jim take a bone chip out of a polo pony's ankle. Then out to a colic-by far our most frequent emergency call. Then another lame horse, followed by one with a cut on its forehead that needed to be stitched. It wasn't until the end of the afternoon that I made it up to the little mountain town of Boulder Creek to see the horse with pigeon fever.

  Sure enough, this Peruvian Paso mare had the characteristic swelling on her chest. And her owner was mad as hell. "I called early this morning and said I wanted somebody out here right away," she snapped.

  "Did the receptionist call you back and explain that this isn't really an emergency?" I asked.

  "In your opinion." The woman wasn't mollified.

  "We often don't even treat this," I said. "Once the abscess bursts, you can clean it out every day with some hydrogen peroxide. But this one isn't ready to open yet," I added, feeling the swelling gently. "As long as this mare is eating and drinking well, there's nothing to do but wait."

  "That's neither here nor there. When I call your office and say I need a vet right away, I do not expect to wait eight hours. What if this horse had been dying of colic?"

  "Then I would have come as soon as I could. I made the judgment that your horse could wait, based on what you said was wrong with it. And I was busy all day treating horses with more immediate problems."

  "I'm not impressed. I think your behavior is totally unprofessional, and I will write Jim a letter saying so."

  "Fine." I climbed back in my truck. "Do what you need to do."

  This did not improve the situation. The woman was still working on an irate tirade when I shut the pickup door. I'd just plain had enough.

  Wearily, I drove back toward Santa Cruz. This kind of thing happened. It was inevitable; it was part of the job. No need to let it get me down.

  But it did get me down. Everything got me down, or so it seemed. The least little bit of stress and/or adversity sent me reeling. Tears leaked out of my eyes as I drove the truck back toward Santa Cruz. It just isn't working, I thought. I am just not doing okay.

  I made it back to the office feeling tired and defeated and sad, very sad. Sitting down at my desk, I stared at the phone. I didn't want to go on feeling this way; I wasn't sure I could go on feeling this way.

  Reluctantly. I dug the scrap of paper out of my pocket. Dr. Alan Todd. Kris had said he was good. I hoped she was right.

  TEN

  I was lucky. Dr. Alan Todd had a cancellation. He would see me tomorrow evening at five. Wonderful. And yet, despite my reservations, I did feel better. At least I was doing something about this damn depression.

&nb
sp; Right now I was on my way to Nicole Devereaux's, and I was feeling pretty good about that. I'd grabbed a quick dinner at Cafe Cruz, and I was about to arrive right on time.

  I was looking forward to seeing Nicole, I realized, looking forward to spending some time studying her work. The paintings had left an imprint on my mind, one I hadn't forgotten.

  Pulling into Nicole's driveway, I parked next to the rambling rose hedge and looked around. No front door was evident. The one time I'd been here I'd gone in the back door. Tentatively, I started in that direction.

  Nicole came out the garden gate. She smiled when she saw me. "I see you were remembering the way in."

  "Yes," I said. "Is that the only door?"

  "Yes, there was a door on this side," she gestured toward the road, "but I had it covered over when I turned the house into my studio. The rose hides it now."

  "Oh." I followed her toward the kitchen garden. "It's your house then?"

  "No, it belongs to a friend. She allowed me to do the, how do you say it, remodel."

  We followed the path toward the Dutch door, and I glanced automatically at the roses. A graceful cream-colored beauty weaving its way between sky-blue spikes of delphiniums made me ask, "Is that Devoniensis?"

  "Yes." Nicole smiled quietly. I made a mental note to someday acquire that rose for my own garden.

  Then we were in the house, and I was once again entering the room of the paintings. With a jolt of recognition and delight, I stared around, my eyes resting on one intense wash of color and then another. The paintings were all that I remembered; brilliant, evocative, and mysterious, they beckoned, inviting me closer.