Wednesday, 8:15 p.m.
I went through the house first. I couldn't have gone anywhere else. I dropped the manila folder on the kitchen table on my way through.
He was on the couch where I'd left him, under the wool throw, with the oximeter glowing red on his finger and the number sitting at ninety-five. The transmitter on the floor by the end of the couch put out its small plastic hiss, and the receiver on my belt gave it back. His mouth had come open. The breath went in, caught at the top, and went out, and I stood over him exactly as long as it took to be sure of that. Then I took a halter and a lead off the hook in the mudroom and went out the back.
The barn aisle was full of low gold light and no horses. Every stall door but two stood swung back against the boards, the whole row of them like a book opened to every page. In the feed room the door was wide and the lid was off the oat bin. I filled the scoop bucket and went on running on habit.
Six horses. Duster, Sarge, Juno, Tucker, old Ike, and the gray Welsh pony, Mabel, who is the smartest animal on the property and had presumably gone first.
Hatchery Road is a county road with a posted limit of forty-five that nobody observes after supper. The pasture gate stood open on it, the pipe gate I have latched every night for eleven years, and the road beyond lay long and pale in the last of the sun. Ike was in the near ditch eating clover with his eyes shut. I got the halter on him and he came like a dog. Juno had gone up the shoulder toward the culvert at a trot. Tucker and Mabel were across the road at the wire of the Brask place, with Tiede's two donkeys on the other side of it, looking mortified. Sarge stood in the northbound lane with his head up, listening to something only he could hear.
Somebody comes down that road every four minutes at this hour. I shook the bucket at Sarge and walked out to him slowly, talking.
A pickup came up from the south with its hazards going, slowing a long way off, as you slow when you've seen a horse on a road and know what one does to a windshield. It pulled onto the shoulder by the Brask wire. Mr. Aubrey got down out of it with a coil of rope over one shoulder and two lead shanks in his fist.
"Your gate's open and there's a pony looking at me," he called across the road. "I thought, either that's Hanne's, or Emil's gone in for something smaller. Which ones do you want me on?"
"The paint and the pony. At the wire."
"I've got them. You mind that big fellow."
He went along the fence at an old man's walk, not hurrying, talking to Mabel before he was anywhere near her. I turned back to Sarge.
I had a fist in his forelock when my phone went against my hip.
It was the number, at twenty to nine. I'd copied it in at six that morning under no name, and it sat on the screen with no name over it, lit up in my hand like a small wrong window. Sarge threw his head. I wrapped the lead twice around my left fist, and answered, and clamped the phone to my ear with my shoulder.
"Hanne."
"Yes."
"You went to the neighbor."
The line behind it was empty. Across the road Mr. Aubrey had the paint by the halter and was working a loop over the pony's nose, and I could hear him in my other ear, low and patient: "No, you don't, madam. No, you don't. You come here to me." I looked up the shoulder, and down it, and at my own house with the yard light coming on over the gravel, and at the upstairs window across the road, which was lit, a yellow square with nobody I could see in it.
"I showed him some pictures," I said. "That's all. I didn't tell him a thing. I don't have your name, I said they were a patient's, I—"
"I said no one," the voice said, over the top of me. "It was a simple instruction. Next time it is him."
The line closed. There was a phone on my shoulder, and a horse blowing on my neck.
It had talked over me. In two days it had never once done that; every other time it had let me run all the way down before it spoke. I took it for what I supposed it was meant to be. It had heard enough from me.
I stood on the center line of a county road with a thousand pounds of sorrel gelding on a rope and looked at every window I could see. Somebody had stood in my barn aisle while I was across the road with a set of films, and opened every gate on the place so that a voice could tell me what it knew. The gates had been the warning, and the call was the receipt.
Mr. Aubrey came back across the road with the paint on one rope and the pony on the other, breathing hard, his face gray under the yard light.
"Bad news?"
"A client."
He followed my eyes to the lit window across the road and stood looking at it with me, the ropes slack in his hands.
"That neighbor of yours with the binoculars," he said. "He'll have seen who left your gate open, if anybody did. He sees most things from up there." He handed me Mabel's rope. "Whether he says is another matter."
My mouth tasted of pennies. I led Sarge off the road. It was the next thing.
* A minivan slowed at the pasture gate at ten to nine, put its flashers on, and stopped half in the ditch.
A woman got out with her hand already up, so I'd know she wasn't the kind who drives past a loose horse. Fifty, a fleece vest, a school lanyard. A boy of about sixteen stood beside her looking at Juno, whom I had finally walked down, and who was looking back at him.
"Is it yours?" the woman said. "Is there somebody I should call?"
"No. Thank you. Someone left a gate."
"Colleen," she said, "and this is Nate, we're from Marten Falls, we were coming back from the lake. Nate, take the old one." She didn't wait to hear. She had Juno's lead out of my hand before I'd found the words.
We put them in the round pen, because the paddocks were too open in the failing light. The round pen gate was chained. It's a log chain with a snap, for hauling, and I never use it on a gate; somebody had wrapped it twice round the post and snapped it back on itself so the snap jammed. Nate held Ike while I stood in the gravel with my fingers bleeding into the links and swore in front of a child.
"Let me," Mr. Aubrey said, and put his hand over mine. "I've got nothing else to do with my hands."
He worked the snap with both thumbs, patient, as if it were a parcel he meant to keep the string off, and it gave, and five horses went in like a delivery.
Five. I went over them again, nose by nose.
"You're missing one," Nate said.
"The bay. Duster. He's gone north."
"I'll go with you."
"You'll go home." It came out too hard. His mother stopped, and I put my hand up, apologizing to a woman I'd never see again. "Thank you. Both of you. It's getting dark and I'd rather not have anyone else on that road. He's a boarder, he's tame. Five minutes."
Colleen looked at the sky, which was going from gold to the color of dishwater. She went to the minivan and came back with a big rubber flashlight and put it in my hand.
"It's my husband's. Bring it back some time."
"I'll mind the pen," Mr. Aubrey said. He had let his tailgate down and sat on it with the rope in his lap, his coat buttoned to the neck. "I'm no good on a grade in the dark anymore. I'd only be one more thing in the road."
* I took the truck, because a loose horse at dusk wants a vehicle with its hazards on between it and whatever comes over the crest. I crept north at ten miles an hour with the window down and my husband's breath coming small and even out of the receiver. Past the culvert, a black notch in the fence line. Past the last open field. The road tilts up there and the woods close over it, maples and jack pine, and dusk lies down under them an hour before it does anywhere else. The air went cold and smelled of stump.
Duster stood at the top of the grade in the last of the light, a dark bay in a dark place, looking down at me with his ears up and a mouthful of ditch grass he hadn't finished. He is fourteen, and Bethany Kuehl's, and has never in his life gone anywhere without being told.
I stopped and got out and left the flashers going. He watched me come.
"There you are. Hey, big man."
He put his nose in the bucket. I got the halter up over his ears. A diesel dragged itself up the other side of the grade in a low gear, patient, coming for the top.
"Come on," I said. "Walk with me."
The logging truck came over the crest at forty-five miles an hour with its lights full on.
The grille came over the crest, and behind it the stacked ends of a load, pale as cut bone, and a horn, one long note. I let go of the rope. I was in the ditch on my back in wet ferns with the flashlight beating against my ribs, and the whole world was air brakes.
It didn't stop. It had forty feet to stop in and eighty thousand pounds behind it. The bumper took him at the hip with a sound like a wet sack dropped from a loft, and then the truck was past me with the trailer swinging out and wobbling back, and dust hanging in my flashers, and it stopped three hundred yards down the hill with its lights on, breathing.
Duster lay on the center line.
He was alive. His hind end was wrong in a way that meant the pelvis, and he was trying to get his front end under him and couldn't, and the noise coming out of him was one I've heard before from other horses and have never got used to.
The driver came running up the road with a light, a heavy man in a hi-vis vest, saying I didn't see, they were right in the road, I didn't see them* until the light fell on Duster and he stopped.
"It's not your fault," I said. "Get me your triangles."
He went. Some people are grateful to be told.
I knelt at Duster's head and put my hand flat on his neck under the mane, where the big vein runs, hot and jumping. "I know, old man. I've got you." Then I dialed Bethany Kuehl, and when she answered I said her name in my clinic voice, the one that has never lied to a client about the worst thing, and told her.
She said "Oh, no" to someone in the room with her, not to me. Then, "Is he in pain?"
"Yes."
"Can you fix it?"
"No. His pelvis is broken in more than one place. I can end it now. I need you to say yes, Bethany."
A long breath, and a television somewhere behind it. "Yes. Please. Don't let him be by himself."
"He's not by himself."
I laid the phone on the asphalt with the speaker up and went to the truck. The steel box was where it always is. I threw the padlock with the key already in my hand and the lid up, and gave no thought to shutting either. Xylazine first, to quiet him. Then the pink, two big syringes of it into the jugular, with the flashlight held in my teeth by its rubber head. He lowered his head onto my knee. His eye stayed on my face until the eye was only an eye.
The road smelled of hot brake and pine. Behind me the driver stood with the triangles in his hands and his back turned, like a man at a grave who isn't family.
"Do I call it in?" he said when I got up. "The sheriff, I mean. Company says I call every animal strike."
"Then call it."
"Call it from the cab. Then go. Please. It's a horse. Nobody's hurt."
He looked at me, and at Duster, and at his own truck with its hazards going. He said sorry to the middle of the road and went down it with the phone already at his ear, and after a minute I heard the diesel start the long climb through its gears.
My log was on the dash where I keep it, a green vet-supply book with a pen clipped to the cover. I looked at it through the windshield glass. I told myself I'd do it at the house, where there was a light and a table.
I put a chain on his hind pasterns and dragged him onto the shoulder with the truck, six feet at a time, and left the flashers going over him. My phone was still on the road with Bethany's breathing in it. I picked it up.
"He's gone," I said. "It was quick."
* His pickup was still by the round pen when I came back down the hill, the dome light on and him on the tailgate. He got down when he saw my face.
"The bay?"
"A logging truck. On the grade. I put him down."
He was quiet a moment. Then: "Bethany's. The one who wouldn't load without a peppermint." He looked at the flashlight in my hand and not at me. "I rang your partner, Hanne. I hope you don't mind. You oughtn't to be on your own for this."
"I don't mind."
"Then I'll get out of your road before he runs me over." He looked toward the barn. "She's in?"
"She's in. Her door was shut."
"Good girl," he said, to the barn, and got into the pickup in stages and went north up Hatchery Road with his hazards still going, as if he'd forgotten them.
The barn, when I came back into it, was lit by one bulb on a cord, and it was wrong in more ways than I could hold at once.
Six stall doors open. Two shut and latched. The feed room had stood open, the round pen was wrapped in its chain like a parcel. I walked the aisle with the bucket still in my hand. Nobody in the aisle. Nobody in the feed room. Pilot and Rook were the two I hadn't had to catch, and I didn't ask why. The mare blew at me over her boards and went back to her hay. My old gelding stood with his forehead against the wall and did not have an opinion.
I went into the house.
He hadn't moved. The clip said ninety-four, ninety-five. His hand hung off the edge of the cushion, and the throw had left a crease across his cheek. He didn't know where I'd been. I put my hand flat on his chest and it lifted under it.
Headlights swung across the front window at ten, and I went out into the yard with my hands still smelling of the pink.
The clinic's white Ram stopped crooked beside my truck, and Osric climbed down out of it in scrubs with a jacket over them and his hair on end. He'd done seventy on the county road and it showed. He looked at the flashlight in my hand.
"Bethany called the answering service," he said. "The trucker called it in, and dispatch put a horse strike on the board and nobody's coming, because the county has one car after dark and it's down at the mill. Lindahl phoned me. And your Mr. Aubrey rang me at home to say you'd gone up the grade by yourself in the dark after a loose horse, and would I come. Half the county's heard, and I haven't even seen your face."
"He was here. He had two of them roped before I'd reached the third."
"Then he's more use than I am." He was already past me, walking to my truck. "Your box is open. Again. I have a speech about this. I've given it twice. This time I'm putting it in writing—"
He stopped.
The yard light hummed on its pole. He stood at the open lid with his big shoulders very still, and when he turned around he had something small in his fingers, a glass vial, held up between us so I could see through it. It was clear all the way through, and empty.
"Hanne," he said. "What did you sign out on Monday?"