Beware and Stogie

by Jessie Haas

  The cow goes fast. She disappears behind bushes and tall stands of grass. The calf skitters after. Beware trots hard to keep up, but she doesn’t have to do any herding. The cow leads her calf straight back the way she came, toward home.

  “Then why did you come in here?” Lily yells after them. She is hot, and her bug bites itch. She thought it would be fun to herd the cow. She thought it would be interesting. It isn’t interesting to scramble back through the swamp, getting spattered with mud from Beware’s hooves and still being bitten. “You stupid cow!” Lily yells.

  The little brown birds flutter up from the grass. Check! their father cries, and swoops down. He’s too late for the cow, too late for the calf, but Lily feels the breeze from his wings on her face. She ducks and makes Beware go faster. The ground beneath them squelches and sucks. Then with a grunt Beware heaves up the bank. She pauses, breathing hard. Across the field Lily sees the cow and calf galloping. Their tails kink in the air. They head straight for the fallen tree.

  But Gramp put the wire back! They can’t get in!

  The cow doesn’t pause. Lily hears a skreek! of wire, and then the cow is inside the pasture. The calf skims along beside her.

  Check! The blackbird dives.

  “Trot, Beware!”

  Gramp stapled two strands of barbed wire right into the fallen tree trunk. They are still up, and Lily doesn’t see how the cow could fit between them. But a tuft of red hair is caught in the top strand, and a tuft of white belly hair is caught in the bottom strand, and there is the cow in the middle of the pasture. She must have pushed the wires up and down, and if it hurt a little, she didn’t care.

  The cow looks back at Lily and Beware. Her head is high, and her eyes are narrow. Lily makes a face at her. She tries to turn Beware toward the barn.

  But Beware is gazing into the pasture. Lily looks where Beware’s ears point. There in the shade are the Girls, scratching each other’s backs. All around them are the other horses, dozing and grazing and swishing flies.

  “Oh,” Lily says. “That was easy!”

  At the barn she unsaddles Beware, and walks her cool, and puts her in a stall with water and a little grain.

  Then Lily walks up to the house. Sunlight flashes off the windshields of Gramp’s truck and Mom’s car. Good! They’re still here. Lily can tell them how she caught the cow.

  But Gran is alone. The kitchen is full of steam and the smell of cooked tomatoes. The pressure cooker rattles on the stove.

  “Where are Mom and Gramp?” Lily asks.

  Gran turns from the sink. “I have no idea.”

  “Well, did they have trouble with the horses?”

  “They didn’t catch the horses,” Gran says. She slips the boiled skin off” a big tomato. “I did.”

  “You did! How?” Gran never touches a horse if she can help it. She doesn’t like horses.

  “Easiest thing in the world,” Gran says. Her voice is sharp, but Lily sees her cheek dent as she holds in a smile. “Half an hour after you all left, I looked out the window, and there they were. I just opened the gate and let them in.”

  “Oh, poor Gramp!” Lily says. “Poor Mom! It’s too bad we can’t tell them.”

  “I did beep the truck horn,” Gran says, “but no one heard.”

  Lily remembers hearing the horn. It sounded as if it were out on the road.

  “It’s just as well they didn’t come,” Gran says after a minute. “That Stogie didn’t come back with the rest. He’s still out there.”

  Lily has a big glass of milk and a sandwich. She helps Gran with the tomatoes. Then she sits on the porch and watches until Mom and Gramp come out of the woods.

  She sees Gramp stop, take off his floppy green hat, and rub the top of his head. He says something to Mom, and his glasses flash as he laughs.

  Then he looks harder. He walks over to the fence. The Girls come to him, and he strokes their noses. But he looks past at the other horses. Mom looks, too, and they both shake their heads. They walk slowly up the hill.

  “Came back on their own, didn’t they?” Gramp says when he comes in. “Gracie, you win again!”

  “Lily got the cow,” Gran says.

  “All we got is tired,” says Mom, sitting down at the table. “You’d think it would be easy to track nine horses, wouldn’t you? But the tracks just disappeared under the pines.”

  “Like Stogie,” Lily says.

  Gramp stands frowning out the window. “Something must have happened to him.”

  “Maybe he just ran off,” Gran says. “A wild animal like that—”

  “That horse is no wilder than I am!” Gramp says. “I saw him ridden the day I bought him. He’s just smart, and the feller I bought him from was pretty smart, too! No, Gracie, horses like to be with other horses. He’d stay with the bunch if he could.”

  “Maybe he’s broken into somebody’s pasture,” Mom says.

  “Then why didn’t the rest of ’em?”

  “If he got separated from the others … if he got lost …” Lily can tell that Mom doesn’t believe that happened. Not really.

  Gramp scratches his cheek. He didn’t take time to shave this morning, and Lily can hear his bristles rasp. His eyes look far away, the way they do when he thinks about Stogie. Gramp has always wanted a good Morgan, since he was a little boy. He wanted to take Stogie to the show at Tunbridge and pull logs with him, drive him in races, and have Mom or Lily ride him. He has spent the past two years watching Stogie graze in the summer, tossing him hay in the winter, and trying to catch him. Now just seeing Stogie would be enough, just knowing where he is.

  “Well,” Gramp says finally, “guess I’d better call the sheriff.”

  He goes to the telephone. “Hi, Ken. Woody Griffin here. Got a black horse loose somewhere in this county.… Yup, he’s got a halter on, but the fact is, I can’t catch the son of a gun when he’s in my own pasture, so I don’t have much hope of catchin’ him now.” The sheriff says something. Lily sees Gramp hesitate. Then he says, “Yes, Ken, if he’s making trouble, you’ve got my permission to shoot him.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LILY AND MOM LOOK AT each other across the table. Gramp loves Stogie. He’s ashamed that he bought a horse nobody can catch. He knows that Stogie is useless. But he’s beautiful, too. Gramp likes having him out there, looking so wild.

  “They shouldn’t shoot him,” Lily says when Gramp comes back from the phone. “He’s afraid of people, really.”

  “I know, Lily,” Gramp says. “But if he gets in with somebody’s horses or into their garden, what are we going to do? He could hurt people just trying to get away.”

  Lily knows Gramp is right. She can see Stogie’s big black body crashing fences, shoving and shouldering people. She can see him kicking dogs and frightening children. Lily isn’t afraid of horses the way some people are. That’s because she knows how to tell them what to do. But no one can tell Stogie things because he won’t let people close. Maybe he doesn’t even remember the way people and horses talk to one another.

  “But couldn’t we look?”

  “Lily,” Gran says. She puts a sandwich in front of Gramp, and she opens him a bottle of homemade root beer.

  “I’ve looked,” Gramp says. “I’ll keep on lookin’. But he could be anywhere, Lily. For all I know he’s out on that hillside hurt, and we walked right by him.”

  Lily has never thought about Stogie being hurt. Stogie is fast and surefooted. His black legs are round and smooth, like iron bars.

  “Maybe he’s caught in wire,” Mom says. She gets up suddenly. “I have to go to work now, but I’ll try to get out early.”

  “I’ll go drive around a little,” Gramp says. “Maybe I’ll see him.”

  In a minute they both are gone. “He hardly tasted this root beer!” Gran says.

  Lily turns from the kitchen window. She and Gran look at each other. After a minute Gran sighs. She looks at the crumbs she is sweeping off the table.

  “I was brought up to
take care of the animals before I took care of myself,” she says. The corners of her mouth turn down.

  Lily waits.

  “Is that horse afraid of people?” Gran asks.

  “Yes,” Lily says. She doesn’t know how afraid Stogie is. She knows that a frightened horse is a dangerous horse. But she says, “The only thing he wants is not to be caught.”

  Gran pours the root beer into two small glasses. She gives one to Lily, and she takes a sip from the other. “There’s never been a more useless animal on this place,” she says after a moment. “But if he’s out there somewhere, suffering …”

  It feels to Lily as if they are two grown-ups talking. Something serious has happened, and each of them must decide what to do.

  Gran is waiting, and now Lily knows what to say. “I thought I’d ride up on the hill and look for him.”

  Gran nods. Her eyes are wide and steady, and they meet Lily’s eyes straight on. “I know you’ll be very, very careful,” she says.

  Lily rides Beware up Gramp’s wood road. The air is cool under the trees. High above, the leaves shift, and bright blue sky shows through. This is one of Lily’s favorite places to ride, but today she lets only a little part of herself enjoy the air and blue sky. The rest of her listens for Stogie, and watches the ground, and stays prepared. That is what Gran depends on her to do.

  Beware trots strongly. The snap of the lead rope around Lily’s waist clicks in time to Beware’s steps. Nobody can catch Stogie, so nobody can lead him, but Lily brought a rope anyway. She brought the whip, too.

  Partway up the hill Lily gets off to look for horse tracks. She bends close to the ground. Beware looks, too. She noses the dirt, and then she nudges Lily’s hand. Maybe Lily has found something. Maybe it’s good to eat.

  “No, silly! I’m looking for tracks.”

  There are no tracks. There are no sounds, except a blue jay calling. It’s so quiet nothing as big as a horse could be nearby.

  But the cow was there, Lily remembers. It was just as quiet out in the swamp, and the cow was right there.

  Lily rides on. She listens, but she can hear only the soft thud of Beware’s hooves. If Stogie were near, Beware could smell him. She could hear him, better than Lily could. But Beware doesn’t seem to sense anything. Her ears point gently up the road.

  Where Gramp has cut wood there is more sky and more sunlight. Ferns grow in the bright shade between the stumps, and Beware keeps reaching down to snatch a bite. “Hey!” Lily says. “We aren’t on a picnic!”

  She rides around the edge of the cleared spot. No tracks. No tracks. No tracks—wait! Here the ferns are bruised and broken. Clods of dirt are kicked up, and there are tracks, a big braid of them.

  Lily dismounts. She holds the reins loosely and lets Beware eat ferns while she studies the ground. She finds Stogie’s track, notched and ragged, on top of all the others. When they came through here, Stogie was still chasing them.

  Lily sits back on her heels. She tries to put herself inside Stogie’s mind and understand what he wants.

  Stogie thinks he is a wild horse. He acts like the boss of a herd. Once he got his herd out of the pasture, where would he want to take them?

  Away. Across the mountain.

  Lily looks toward the uphill side of the clearing and up, and up, to where the edge of the mountain meets the sky. That’s where Stogie would go.

  Lily can see him in her mind’s eye, weaving back and forth behind the others. The Girls want to go home. They keep looking back. But Stogie bites them. He throws himself at them like a black spear, and he drives them uphill. The Girls are big and slow. They can’t outrun Stogie. How did they get away to lead the others home?

  Something happened to Stogie. That’s the only way it could have happened. Lily can see it different ways in her mind. Stogie steps in a hole and breaks his leg. He gets caught in wire. A bear comes out of the woods, and Stogie turns to protect his herd—

  The reins pull in Lily’s hand. She looks up. “Hey!” Beware has stepped on one of the reins. Before Lily can move, Beware feels the pull. She tosses her head. The rein snaps.

  “Oh, no!” Lily jumps up and catches Beware by the bridle. The rein is broken close to the bit ring. Beware rolls her eyes and snorts her breath out. It frightened her to feel herself suddenly caught like that.

  “Stupid!” Lily tells herself. She should have watched Beware, not the horse herd in her head.

  She tries to tie the broken rein around the bit ring. It makes a big knot that rubs the side of Beware’s cheek. When Lily pulls the rein even a little bit, the knot comes untied.

  Now what? Lily doesn’t dare ride with only one rein. Even Beware isn’t good enough for that. She’ll have to walk back down the hill and see if she can find an old set of reins in the barn.

  Or a lead rope. A lead rope would make a quick rein.…

  And there’s a lead rope right here, tied around Lily’s waist.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE LEAD ROPE FEELS THICK in Lily’s hand. She keeps lengthening it and shortening it, trying to make it feel right, as she rides along the edge of the clearing.

  The tracks have disappeared over the bare ledge and the thick brown pine needles. Once Lily does see a narrow trail of bruised ferns, leading downhill. She finds a horse track there. It was made by a round, neat hoof that wore a horseshoe.

  The sun turns some leaves gold and others deeper green. The breeze shifts them, and bright light slides along the ground. Up the hill Beware climbs, and then she picks her way down the other side. Together she and Lily decide which way to go. Sometimes Lily sees a mark on the ground that might be a track. Sometimes Beware moves forward with her ears pricked, finding an opening among the trees that looks like a path.

  But it never is a track, and there never is a path. Lily goes a long way, down and down again, until she can hear the cars on the big road.

  Near the road the ground gets rough. The trees grow small and close together. Lily turns Beware around, and they pick their way back to the top of the hill.

  Lily stops there to let Beware catch her breath. The hill spreads down behind her and in front of her. It drops into deep folds. Brooks and small dirt roads are hidden there. Other hills rise up beyond. They are covered with trees, and they are all quiet.

  “Maybe we’ll go home,” Lily says. “Maybe Stogie’s found his way back.” She knows it won’t be true. But the hills are too big to find a horse in.

  “We’ll go home a different way,” she tells Beware. “If we can find it.” There’s a trail that leads down the shoulder of the hill. Mom cleared it years ago, and Lily cleared it again this spring. But the trail is steep and narrow, so Lily doesn’t take it often. It begins somewhere here, where Gramp has been cutting trees.

  Lily angles across the cleared slope. There was a hemlock, and the trail started behind it. That hemlock is gone now. There are new stumps, and new brush piles, and new growths of ferns.…

  Beware bobs her nose, asking Lily for more rein. Her ears point gently forward, and she steps eagerly. Beware seems to know exactly where she’s going. She crosses the bare, confusing slope, and suddenly there is the trail, slicing down between the thick-growing saplings.

  The trail is a green tunnel. The light is dim, like the light at the bottom of the sea. Lily can see the gray stubs of branches that Mom cut long ago and fresher brown stubs of branches that she’d cut herself.

  There are other branches she should have cut. They arch across the path, and Lily has to keep ducking. Once she doesn’t duck far enough, and a branch smacks hard on her helmet. Once Beware swerves and bangs Lily’s knee into a tree trunk.

  “Ow! Beware, slow down!” Lily leans back in the saddle. She thinks about keeping her legs against Beware’s sides. She thinks about keeping her rump down in the saddle. Riding right, the way she would ride in a show ring, helps her stop Beware from going too fast.

  It feels good to ride this way. Lily is thinking about that when suddenly Beware stops.


  “What?”

  Beware stares down the narrow path. She blows her breath out hard.

  The path ahead is dark and dim. Lily stares into the darkness, trying to see what Beware sees.

  The darkness moves.

  Whoosh! goes Beware’s breath, and she’s going backward, fast. Lily can hardly tell what’s happening. “Whoa!” she says, but Beware keeps backing until she bumps into a tree.

  Then she stands still. Her neck is high and hard like a rock. Her ears strain forward, and the breath in her nostrils goes p-r-r! P-r-r-r!

  “Easy,” Lily whispers. She has never seen Beware this frightened before. Is it a moose down there? A bear? There’s nowhere to run except straight uphill, and Lily knows that a bear can run faster than a horse uphill. But the trees grow close together here. Beware couldn’t push between them.

  There’s a sound. To Lily it seems like a growl. But Beware snorts and bobs her head, as if she is suddenly less afraid.

  The sound comes again. Beware flicks one ear back at Lily, almost as if she wonders what Lily thinks. Then she takes a step forward.

  Lily grabs the saddle. Beware wouldn’t go toward a bear, would she?

  Beware takes two steps. She stops, she snorts, she listens, and she steps again. Lily just hangs on to the front of the saddle. If Beware decides to turn and run, Lily wants to stay on top of her.

  The darkness groans and moves again. Now Lily can see a long black tail, hanging in ropes.

  Stogie.

  He is facing downhill, and he’s on his feet. His head is high. Why doesn’t he turn? He isn’t even looking at Lily and Beware. What is wrong with him? Doesn’t he know they’re here?

  Lily shifts the whip into her free hand, so she can use it if she needs to. She shortens the real rein and the lead rope rein, so she’ll be able to control Beware.

  “Hey!” she yells.

  Stogie’s tail swishes limply. High against the leaves, Lily sees the white of his eye. But he doesn’t move.