“You’re coming? You just got back to Brandon.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to see me?” she said, a teasing note in her voice.
I laughed but didn’t rise to her bait. “You’ll be here for the run?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” This time, there was no mistaking the growl.
“I’ll get to meet the other man in your life.”
She made a huffing sound. “He’s no longer a real man, remember.”
I did remember her comment on Garrett being castrated. “Is that for real?”
“I’ll let you figure that out on your own.” Something in her tone indicated lips peeled back from teeth, but I privately doubted Garrett lacked any of his parts. Not that I took anything for granted with this she-wulf. “In that case, I’m likely not far behind him.”
She snorted. “See you soon, soldier.”
I brushed the chow mein off me, got out of the truck, and ran through the rain to the clinic.
Mandy met me at the door. “It’s fracking coming down like shrimps out there. Whiterock Dairy has a horse that needs your help. They need someone out right away.”
A horse? Whiterock only had one—Barb’s old show horse, Buster. The animal was in its twenties, which made the emergency worrisome. My mind still buzzed with the information Sam had given me as I collected Keen from the kennel, and we were soon in my truck, me driving and her cleaning up the chow mein.
She was going to need a long run tonight.
18
I walked into a situation that seemed to be in its final hour.
Barb’s husband Todd had met me at the barn and directed me to the scene. “We put Buster in the woodlot to clean out underbrush,” he explained as we walked toward the back of the farm. “Barb wanted to turn the area into a place we can sit in the evenings.”
As dairy farmers, I doubted they had much time to sit, in the evenings or otherwise. Barb and Todd Thorston had bought the operation a few years ago and had thrown themselves into it with gusto. They were still in the process of improving the farm with new paddocks and pastures. Our clinic conducted artificial inseminations, pregnancy checks, and helped with calving or health problems that might arise.
Personally, I thought it would have been wiser to buy a few goats to eat the undergrowth, or maybe use a couple of cows. But while the cows were the bread and butter of the farm, Buster’s only value was that he was much loved by Barb, and Todd no doubt viewed the horse as a bit of a freeloader.
Buster usually lived on a large, lush pasture with the cows, not a bad life for a retired show horse, although I didn’t know if horses and cows spoke the same language. We approached his temporary new home—a woodlot where most of the trees were huge old maples, with a profusion of bush at their base. Todd had placed a single strand of electric wire on portable posts around the bush to keep the horse confined to his task.
Todd’s expectations that the horse prove himself useful and behave like a goat had landed Buster in a mudhole of trouble. The old guy’s front end was tied to the bucket of their tractor, but his back half was buried in a pit of awful, sucking mud.
I instantly realized what had happened. These established farms often had multiple home sites, with ancient cellars that disappeared beneath layers of dirt and vegetation. New to this land, neither Todd nor Barb had known about the abandoned site buried in the bush, the walls long since vanished. The floor covered a concrete cellar that never drained, filling over time with thick mud. Poor Buster had stepped on the rotten floor and broken through. The recent storm only added to the problem, turning everything into a slippery mess.
Buster’s ears and head drooped with exhaustion. They’d managed to pull his front end free, but his sunken hindquarters were surrounded by the broken floorboards. I hoped he hadn’t been impaled. Everywhere were signs of the struggle to extricate him: there were planks to give his rescuers solid footing, two tow ropes were fastened to his barrel behind his front legs, and another rope trailed into the mud near his hind end.
Barb kneeled at the horse’s head, her body bent around him in a posture of protection and grief I had witnessed all too often. She glanced up as I approached. Her face was streaked with mud and tears, and my heart hurt for her. “We’ve been trying to get him out for hours.” She gulped. “We can’t do it. I think he’s suffered enough.”
So they’d called me to put him out of his misery. No longer tasked with not causing damage, the tractor could just haul the body out.
I crouched beside the old horse’s head and petted him, then took his pulse. The large dark eye rolled toward me. My hand stilled on the mud-streaked neck, and our gazes met. Exhausted he may be, but I detected a subtle gleam—the desire to live, to try.
I stood back to study the situation. The big trees meant they couldn’t position the tractor to achieve adequate leverage. The powerful machine could only manage a straight pull, which kept shoving Buster’s hind legs up against the cellar wall where it blocked progress. Every yank threatened to further injure the horse.
I walked around to his back end. His hindquarters needed to be lifted while the tractor pulled. A second tractor could have done it, but there was no way to get another through the stand of dense trunks. I looked up. The trees were old, with big, heavy branches overhead. Manitoba maple wood tended to be soft and inclined to break. But one tree, right over the horse, was an ancient oak.
“Do you mind if we try again?”
Barb’s face lit with hope, but Todd frowned.
“He’s suffered enough,” he said.
