The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  “It’s okay fella. It’s okay now.”

  He was within twenty feet of the horse now and was trying to figure out how he was going to do this. If he could get hold of the bridle, he might have a chance of giving the shot in the neck. In case something went wrong, he had loaded more sedative into the syringe than he would need. If he could get it into a vein in the neck, he would have to inject less than if he shot into a muscle. In either case, he would have to take care not to give too much. A horse in as bad a state as this couldn’t be allowed to fall unconscious. He would have to try and inject just enough to calm him so they could lead him out of the river and get him somewhere safer.

  Now that he was this close, Logan could see the chest wound. It was as bad as anything he’d ever seen and he knew they didn’t have long. From the way the blood was pumping, he figured that the horse had already lost maybe up to a gallon of it.

  “It’s okay young fella. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  Pilgrim snorted and wheeled away from him, taking a few steps toward Koopman, stumbling and sending up a flash of water that rainbowed in the sun.

  “Shake your branch!” Logan yelled.

  Koopman did and Pilgrim stopped. Logan used the flurry to lunge nearer, stepping into a hole as he did and wetting himself up to the crotch. Sweet Jesus, it was cold. The horse’s white-rimmed eyes saw him come and he started off again toward Koopman.

  “And again!”

  The shake of the branch stopped him and Logan dived forward and made a grab. He got the reins, taking a turn in them and felt the horse brace and twist against him. He tried to step into the shoulder, keeping as clear as he could from the hind feet that were coming around to get him and he reached up quickly and managed to get the needle into the horse’s neck. At the touch of the needle, Pilgrim exploded. He reared up, screaming in alarm and Logan had a fraction of a moment to push the plunger. But as he did so, the horse knocked him sideways, driving into him so that Logan lost all balance and control. Without meaning to, he injected the entire contents of the syringe into Pilgrim’s neck.

  The horse knew now who was the more dangerous of these men and he leapt away toward Koopman. Logan still had the reins twisted over his left hand, and so he was whipped off his feet and pulled headfirst into the water. He felt the icy water streaming through his clothes as he was dragged along like a tangled waterskier. All he could see was surf. The reins bit into the flesh of his hand and his shoulder hit a rock and he cried out in pain. Then the reins came free and he was able to lift his head and take a lungful of air. He could see Koopman now, diving out of the way and the horse splashing past him and scrambling up the bank. The syringe was still hanging from his neck. Logan stood up and Watched the horse disappearing up through the trees.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “You alright?” Koopman asked.

  Logan just nodded and started to wring the water from his parka. Something caught his eye up on the bridge and he looked up to see the hunter, leaning on the parapet. He’d been watching and was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Why don’t you get the fuck out of here,” said Logan.

  She saw Robert as soon as she came through the swing doors. At the end of the corridor there was a waiting area with pale gray sofas and a low table with flowers on it and he was standing there looking out of a tall window, the sun streaming in about him. He turned at the sound of her footsteps and had to screw his eyes up to see into the relative dark of the corridor. Annie was touched by how vulnerable he looked in this moment before he saw her, with half his face lit by the sun and his skin so pale it was all but translucent. Then he found her and came walking toward her, with a grim little smile. They put their arms around each other and stayed like that for a while, saying nothing.

  “Where is she?” Annie asked at last.

  He took hold of her arms and held her away from him a little so he could look at her.

  “They’ve taken her downstairs. They’re operating on her now.” He saw her frown and went on quickly before she could say anything. “They said she’s going to be okay. She’s still unconscious but they’ve done all these checks and scans and it doesn’t look like there’s any brain damage.”

  He stopped and swallowed and Annie waited, watching his face. She knew from the way he was trying so hard to keep his voice steady that of course there was something else.

  “Go on.”

  But he couldn’t. He started to cry. Just hung his head and stood there with his shoulders shaking. He was still holding Annie’s arms and she gently disengaged herself and held him the same way.

  “Go on. Tell me.”

  He took a long breath and tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling before he could look at her again. He made one false start then managed to say it.

  “They’re taking her leg off.”

  Annie would later come to feel both wonder and shame at her reaction that afternoon. She had never thought herself particularly stalwart in moments of crisis, except at work where she positively relished them. Nor did she normally find it difficult to show her emotions. Perhaps it was simply that Robert made the decision for her by breaking down. He cried, so she didn’t. Someone had to hold on or they would all be swept away.

  But Annie had no doubt that it could easily have gone the other way. As it was, the news of what they were doing to her daughter in that building at that very moment entered her like a shaft of ice. Apart from a quickly suppressed urge to scream, all that came into her head was a string of questions, so objective and practical that they seemed callous.

  “How much of it?”

  He frowned, lost. “What?”

  “Her leg. How much of it are they taking off?”

  “From above the—” He broke off, having to summon control. The detail seemed so shocking. “Above the knee.”

  “Which leg?”

  “The right.”

  “How far above the knee?”

  “Jesus Christ Annie! What the hell does it matter?”

  He pulled away from her, freeing himself, wiping his wet face with the back of a hand.

  “Well, it matters quite a lot I think.” She was astonishing even herself. He was right, of course it didn’t matter. It was academic, ghoulish even, to pursue it but she wasn’t going to stop now. “Is it just above the knee or is she losing the top of her leg as well?”

  “Just above the knee. I haven’t got the exact measurements but why don’t you just go on down and I’m sure they’ll let you have a look.”

  He turned away to the window and Annie stood watching as he took out a handkerchief and did a proper job on the mucus and tears, angry at himself now for having wept. There were footsteps in the corridor behind her.

  “Mrs. Maclean?”

  Annie turned. A young nurse, all in white, darted a look at Robert and decided Annie was the one to talk to.

  “There’s a call for you.”

  The nurse led the way, walking in small rapid steps, her white shoes making no sound on the shining tiled floor of the corridor so that she seemed to Annie to be gliding. She showed Annie to a phone near the reception desk and put the call through from the office.

  It was Joan Dyer from the stables. She apologized for calling and asked nervously after Grace. Annie said she was still in a coma. She didn’t mention the leg. Mrs. Dyer didn’t linger. The reason she had called was Pilgrim. They’d found him and Harry Logan had been on the phone asking what they should do.

  “What do you mean?” Annie asked.

  “The horse is in a very bad way. There are broken bones, deep flesh wounds and he’s lost a lot of blood. Even if they do all they can to save him and he survives, he’s never going to be the same.”

  “Where’s Liz? Can’t we get her down there?”

  Liz Hammond was the vet who looked after Pilgrim and was also a family friend. It was she who had gone down to Kentucky for them last summer to check Pilgrim out before they bought him. She’d been equally smitten.

&nb
sp; “She’s away on some conference,” Mrs. Dyer said. “She’s not back till next weekend.”

  “Logan wants to put him down?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry Annie. Pilgrim’s under sedation now and Harry says he may not even come around. He’d like your authority to put him down.”

  “You mean shoot him?” She heard herself doing it again, hammering away at irrelevant detail as she had just now with Robert. What the hell did it matter how they were going to kill the horse?

  “By injection I imagine.”

  “And what if I say no?”

  There was a pause at the other end.

  “Well, I suppose they’d have to try and get him somewhere they could operate on him. Cornell maybe.” She paused again. “Apart from anything else Annie, it would end up costing you a lot more than he’s insured for.”

  It was the mention of money that clinched it for Annie, for the thought had yet to coalesce that there might be some connection between the life of this horse and the life of her daughter.

  “I don’t care what the hell it costs,” she snapped and she could feel the older woman flinch. “You tell Logan if he kills that horse, I’ll sue him.”

  She hung up.

  “Come on. You’re okay, come on.”

  Koopman was walking backward down the slope, waving the truck on with both arms. It reversed slowly down after him into the trees and the chains hanging from the hoist on its rear end swung and clinked as it came. It was the truck that the mill people had standing by to unload their new turbines and Koopman had commandeered it, and them, for this new purpose. Following close behind it was a big Ford pickup hitched to an open-top trailer. Koopman looked over his shoulder to where Logan and a small crowd of helpers were kneeling around the horse.

  Pilgrim was lying on his side in a giant bloodstain that was spreading out through the snow under the knees of those trying to save him. This was as far as he’d got when the flood of sedative hit. His forelegs buckled and he went down on his knees. For a few moments he’d tried to fight it but by the time Logan arrived he was out for the count.

  Logan had got Koopman to call Joan Dyer on his mobile and was glad the hunter wasn’t around to hear him asking her to get the owner’s permission to put the animal down. Then he’d sent Koopman running for help, knelt by the horse and got to work trying to stem the bleeding. He reached deep into the steaming chest wound, his hand groping through layers of torn softtissue till he was up to his elbow in gore. He felt around for the source of the bleeding and found it, a punctured artery, thank God a small one. He could feel it pumping hot blood into his hand and he remembered the little clamps he had put in his pocket and scrabbled with his other hand to find one. He clipped it on and immediately felt the pumping stop. But there was still blood flowing from a hundred ruptured veins so he struggled out of his sodden parka, emptied its pockets and squeezed as much water and blood as he could from it. Then he rolled it up and stuffed it as gently as he could into the wound. He cursed out loud. What he really needed now was fluids. The bag of Plasmalyte he had brought was in his bag down by the river. He got to his feet and half ran, half fell back down there to get it.

  By the time he returned, the rescue squad paramedics were there and were covering Pilgrim with blankets. One of them was holding out a phone to him.

  “Mrs. Dyer for you,” he said.

  “I can’t talk to her now for Christsakes,” Logan said. He knelt down and hitched the five-liter bag of Plasmalyte to Pilgrim’s neck, then gave him a shot of steroids to fight the shock. The horse’s breathing was shallow and irregular and his limbs were rapidly losing temperature and Logan yelled for more blankets to wrap around the animal’s legs after they had bandaged them to lessen the blood flow.

  One of the rescue-squad people had some green drapes from an ambulance and Logan carefully extracted his blood-soaked parka from the chest wound and packed the drapes in instead. He leaned back on his heels, out of breath, and started loading a syringe with penicillin. His shirt was dark red and sodden and blood dripped from his elbows as he held the syringe up to flick the bubbles out.

  “This is fucking crazy,” he said.

  He injected the penicillin into Pilgrim’s neck. The horse was as good as dead. The chest wound alone was enough to justify putting him down but that wasn’t the half of it. His nasal bone was hideously crunched in, there were clearly some broken ribs, an ugly gash over the left cannon bone and God knows how many other smaller cuts and bruises. He could also tell from the way the horse had run up the slope that there was lameness high up in the right foreleg. He should just put the poor beast out of its agony. But now he’d got this far, he was damned if he was going to give that triggerhappy little fucker of a hunter the satisfaction of knowing he was right. If the horse died of his own accord, so be it.

  Koopman had the mill truck and the trailer down beside them now and Logan saw they had managed to find a canvas sling from somewhere. The rescue-squad guy still had Mrs. Dyer standing by on the phone and Logan took it from him.

  “Okay, I’m yours,” he said and as he listened, he indicated to them where to put the sling. When he heard the poor woman’s tactful rendering of Annie’s message, he just smiled and shook his head.

  “Terrific,” he said. “Nice to be appreciated.”

  He handed the phone back and helped drag the two canvas sling straps under Pilgrim’s barrel, through what was now a sea of red slush. Everyone was standing and Logan thought they all looked funny with their matching red knees. Someone handed him a dry jacket and for the first time since he was in the river he realized how cold he was.

  Koopman and the driver hitched the ends of the sling to the hoist chains and then stood back with the others as Pilgrim was slowly lifted into the air and swung like a carcass onto the trailer. Logan climbed up there with two paramedics and they manhandled the horse’s limbs so that eventually he lay as before on his side. Koopman passed the vet’s things up to him while others spread blankets over the horse.

  Logan gave another shot of steroids and took out a new bag of Plasmalyte. He suddenly felt very tired. He figured the chances of the horse being alive by the time they got to his clinic were odds on against.

  “We’ll call ahead,” Koopman said. “So they’ll know when to expect you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “All set now?”

  “I guess so.”

  Koopman slapped the rear end of the pickup that was hitched to the trailer and yelled for the driver to move out. It started slowly up the slope.

  “Good luck,” Koopman called after them but Logan didn’t seem to hear. The young deputy looked vaguely disappointed. It was all over and everyone was going home. There was a zipping sound behind him and he turned to look. The hunter was putting his rifle back in its bag.

  “Thanks for your help,” Koopman said. The hunter nodded, swung the bag over his shoulder and walked away.

  Robert woke with a jolt and for a moment thought he was in his office. The screen of his computer had gone berserk, quivering green lines racing each other across ranges of jagged peaks. Oh no, he thought, a virus. Rampaging through his files on the Dunford Securities case. Then he saw the bed with its covers neatly tented over what remained of his daughter’s leg and he remembered where he was.

  He looked at his watch. It was nearly five A.M. The room was dark except for where the angle-lamp behind the bed cast a cocoon of soft light over Grace’s head and her naked shoulders. Her eyes were closed and her face serene as if she didn’t mind at all the snaking coils of plastic tube that had invaded her body. There was a tube into her mouth from the respirator and another up her nose and down into her stomach through which she could be fed. More tubes looped down from the bottles and bags that hung above the bed and they met in a tangled fury at her neck, as if fighting to be first into the valve slotted into her jugular. The valve was masked by flesh-colored tape, as were the electrodes on her temples and chest and the hole they had cut above one of her young b
reasts to insert a fiber-optic tube into her heart.

  Without a riding hat, the doctors said, the girl might well be dead. When her head hit the road, the hat had cracked but not the skull. A second scan however had found some diffused bleeding in the brain so they had drilled a tiny hole in her skull and inserted something that was now monitoring the pressure inside. The respirator, they said, would help stop the swelling in the brain. Its rhythmic whoosh, like the waves of a mechanical sea breaking on shingle, was what had lulled Robert into sleep. He had been holding her hand and it lay palm up where he had unwittingly discarded it. He took it again in both of his and felt the falsely reassuring warmth of her.

  He leaned forward and gently pressed down a piece of tape that had come unstuck from one of the catheters in her arm. He looked up at the battery of machines each of whose precise purpose Robert had insisted on having them explain. Now, without having to move, he carried out a systematic check, scanned each screen, valve and fluid level to make sure nothing had happened while he slept. He knew it was all computerized and that alarms would sound at the central monitoring desk around the corner if anything went wrong, but he had to see for himself. Satisfied now, still holding Grace’s hand, he settled back in his seat. Annie was sleeping in a little room they had provided down the corridor. She had wanted him to wake her at midnight so that she could take over the vigil but as he himself had dozed Robert thought he would let her go on sleeping.

  He stared at Grace’s face and thought that amid all this brutish technology she looked like a child half her age. She had always been so healthy. Apart from having a knee stitched once when she fell off a bicycle, she hadn’t been in a hospital since she was born. Though there had been drama enough then to last a good few years.

  It was an emergency caesarean section. After twelve hours of labor they had given Annie an epidural and because nothing seemed likely to happen for a while, Robert had wandered off to the cafeteria to get himself a cup of coffee and a sandwich. When he came back up to her room half an hour later all hell had broken loose. It was like the deck of a warship, people in green running all over the place, wheeling equipment around, yelling orders. While he was away, someone told him, the internal monitoring had shown the baby was in distress. Like some hero from a forties war movie, the obstetrician had swept in and declared to his troops that he was “going in.”