by Sean Little
When the water was hot, I soaked a rag in it and then used the rag to clean the wounds in the bay’s rump. She flinched and became a little distressed, but she did not shy away from me, kick, or bite. I took that as a good sign that she understood what I was doing to her needed to happen. Cleaning the wounds caused them to bleed afresh. Bright red blood seeped through the clotting and ran down her leg. The scars were ugly. In addition to the obvious, ragged tears, there were several smaller puncture wounds on her back and side. The creature that had attacked her had done a number on her. I wondered if it had been a single lion or tiger, or if a pair of them might have done the damage. Either way, she was clearly in bad shape.
Once I got the wounds cleaned, I used some hydrogen peroxide to clean them further, and then I slathered medicated salve into the cuts and punctures. I used large pads of gauze to cover the wounds and taped them in place with medical tape. There was not much else I could do after that, other than sit and wait for them to heal.
When my ministrations were complete, I saw the bay relax completely. Her eyes drooped. Her neck lowered. In seconds, she was asleep, able to fully rest in a safe place for the first time in who knows how long. I have never seen an animal in that stage of exhaustion.
I cleaned up the gear and left her to rest. Thing 1 and Thing 2, seeing that I had no treats for them, gave me the cold shoulder and returned to grazing in the paddock.
I washed my hands in what was left of the hot water and cast the rest of the pot into the garden. Any wastewater went to plants, always. I even urinated in the garden much of the time. I could not convince Ren to do that; she declined, citing the necessary apparatus to facilitate a directed stream. I couldn’t blame her.
I went into the house to find something to snack on for lunch. Fester the Faithful Housecat was lounging in the kitchen window, watching the barn. He seemed to know someone new had arrived. I scratched him between his ears, and he immediately leaned into the attention, giving a low, throaty purr.
“This place starts to look more and more like a farm, doesn’t it, buddy?” I rested in the kitchen, toweling off my sweaty face and head. I ate a pack of Zebra Cakes and drank a Coke. It wasn’t a great lunch, but one of the few true benefits of surviving a world-ending virus was that all the Zebra Cakes on Earth now belonged to me, and there was no one to tell me not to eat them. Then, I went back out to continue digging post holes, making sure to monitor for snakes a little better. I could not wait until Ren came home from wherever she was that day so I could show her the new addition to the farm. It was probably the best wedding present I could have given her.
Ren returned in the early afternoon. She was lugging a bag of supplies. I happened to be facing the right direction to see her approaching, so I abandoned the post hole digger to give her a hand. “I don’t know if I like you hauling heavy stuff—“
“—Stow it,” she cut me off. “I am not a delicate flower. Women all over the world worked harder labor jobs than this well into their ninth month of pregnancy.”
“Fair enough.”
She squinted at me. “You look happy.”
“Oh, I am,” I said. “I got married to the most beautiful woman in the world today.”
She started to smile, but turned it into a forced scowl. “Ease up, Romeo. Talk like that is why we had to get married.” She patted her stomach.
“I got you a present today.”
“Really? Was it Swiss Cake Rolls? Because I think I’m about to go into the house and eat every single box of those we have right now.”
“Better.” I couldn’t hide my smile.
“Lies. There is nothing better than Swiss Cake Rolls.”
“I think there is, but you can’t eat it.”
Ren rolled her eyes. “If I can’t eat it, it’s not that good of a present.”
I led her into the barn and pointed at the far stall in the corner. “There.”
Ren arched an eyebrow at me, but walked toward the stall cautiously. When she got close enough to see what was standing in it, she froze. Her jaw flopped open. She turned back to me with wide eyes and mouthed, You got a horse?
I nodded, practically bursting with pride. “Happy Wedding Day, wife.”
Ren put her hands on the side of her face in surprise. “This…this is amazing. Where? How?”
“She followed me home. Can I keep her?” I opened the stall door at stepped inside of it. The bay, somewhat more rested, moved toward me. I patted the side of her neck. “C’mon in and meet your new horse.”
Ren was standing at the door of the stall. “I can’t. I’ve never—”
“It’s easy.” I held out my hand for her. She took it and let me guide her into the stall. I moved her hand to the bay’s neck. Ren looked like she was going to cry. I explained seeing her in the field after the hunt, and then how she came to me earlier that day. Ren’s mouth hung agog at the story. She could not stop petting the horse. The bay did not seem to mind the attention.
“She is beautiful. What’s her name?”
“That’s up to you.”
Ren thought for a moment. “I always wanted a horse. I bet every little girl goes through that horse-crazy phase. In my dreams, I had a boy horse called Ranger. That doesn’t seem fitting for a girl horse, though.”
“Girls could be Rangers, if they want to be.”
“No…Ranger, in my mind, was an Appaloosa, and he and I would ride through Monument Valley in search of adventures. I don’t think I could call a bay female Ranger. I would feel like I was betraying his memory.” She thought for another long moment. “Hera. Hera was the goddess of marriage, childbirth, and family, and she came to us on this day out of all other possible days. Her name should be Hera.”
It was a fine and fitting name for a horse, I thought. I stood and watched my new wife, pregnant with my future child, hug the neck of our brand new horse, and I felt wholly fulfilled. For the first time since the Flu left me alone on the planet, I felt like I was finally where I was supposed to be in the world, doing what I was supposed to be doing. I felt like I actually belonged in the world again, instead of existing as an aberration that should have died months ago. It was a wonderful sensation.
Ren and I had a lovely celebratory dinner that night. We ate the remainder of the javelina and smoked what we did not eat to preserve it. Ren made a soda bread and a simple pie with canned blueberry filling. We cracked open a bottle of sparkling apple cider, since Ren would not be drinking any alcohol for a while. We sat in our chairs by the fire and dreamed about the future. Everything was falling into place as it should. That night, for the first time in quite a while, I slept well.
Part Two
Fall
CHAPTER SIX
Horses, Cats, and Storms
The summer passed in the blink of an eye. It was so busy, I barely had any time to write in my journal. There was always something to that needed to be done, and never enough hours of daylight in which to do it. I built fences around pastures, I dug deep holes for a stockade wall, I was able to live-trap a couple of wild hybrid piglets (they were something between a wild boar and a domestic white pig, and they started breeding quickly) and brought them back to the farm, I got better at hunting and kept our protein needs fulfilled, and I worked with Hera.
In her first few days at the farm, I let the horse rest in her stall. I had to clean her wounds daily and change the bandages a couple times a day. After a few days, the scabs formed and it looked like I had successfully staved off infection. After a week, I noticed Hera was starting to get antsy from standing in her stall. I started letting her out into the riding arena at night to hang out with Thing 1 and Thing 2, and she seemed to like that. Every morning when I went to check on them, she would walk over to me let me pet her neck. It was very clear to me that she had been someone’s pet before the Flu. Whatever domestication she had before everyone died was still lingering in her mind. Maybe she preferred the safety and consistency of domestic life to the freedom of roaming the plains? I cou
ld not speak for her, of course, but she seemed to enjoy being owned again.
After a week, I knew she needed to start exercising those wounded muscles. In the tack room of the stable, there were plenty of halters and lead ropes, so I would throw a halter on her head and take her for walks. At first, we started small, just around the perimeter of the farm. As her wounds started to look better, I extended those walks. I would take her down to the edge of the lake to inspect our water equipment. I would take her around the fields. I noticed that she was following me more like a dog than a horse. If I unclipped the lead rope from the halter, she was largely disinclined to wander away. She might stop to crop some grass here and there, but she would mosey after me before too long. It was like having a very large shadow. After a couple of weeks, I didn’t even bother with the halter. I just opened the stall door, and she would follow. Ren thought I was crazy, at first. “She’ll run away!” But, I felt like I knew Hera. I knew she would not run. And she never did.
It was that level of trust I had in her that convinced me to learn to ride. The closest I’d ever come to riding a horse in my lifetime was the time my family went to the circus and my dad let me ride one of the camels. I was by no means a natural horseman, but I knew that I wanted to be. It would be invaluable to have the ability to throw a saddle on a horse and be able to ride to hunting sites or take her out to scout the area. I could take Hera places I couldn’t ride my bike. It only made sense. Horses would be the new/old four-by-fours of the post-societal wasteland. We were basically reverting to a pre-Industrial Revolution level of agrarian living, and riding a horse or having a horse pull a cart was going to be necessary once again.
I prepared for the first ride by reading about it, of course. That is how I’ve had to do everything since everyone died. Books were my salvation and my instruction guides. I rode my bike to the library in nearby Atascocita and brought home every equestrian book they had on the shelves, as well a box full of magazines like Western Horseman, Horse & Rider, Equus, and Practical Horseman. At night, in the light of the fire in the yard, I read everything I could about riding, training, and horsemanship. I would explain what I read to Ren, even though she said she did not feel like she would be riding until after the baby was born. I also taught myself basic horse hoof care. I found rasps and clippers at a DVM office and brought them back to give her neglected feet a necessary trim. I did not trust myself to put nails through her feet, though. She would just be barefoot and carefree.
When I read enough to feel a little bit confident in what I was doing, I shooed Thing 1 and Thing 2 out of the riding arena and into the pasture. Then, I put Hera in cross-ties in the barn aisle. I brought out a bridle and saddle from the tack room. There was a lovely black leather Western saddle with a suede seat pad. With some polish and a little Murphy’s Oil Soap, I repaired two years of neglect. I threw a saddle pad on her back, and swung the saddle up afterward. Hera craned her head around to look at what I was doing. I think she knew what was happening, or at least it was not unfamiliar to her. I fastened the cinch under her belly, adjusted the stirrups to the height I thought I would need, and straightened the saddle on her back. I eased her face into the halter, and she accepted the bit without fuss. After she was decked out, I led her into the riding arena. It was now or never.
Ren came to watch me. “I want to make sure you don’t crack your skull open if you get thrown.”
Her confidence in me was inspiring.
I positioned myself on Hera’s left side. Holding the reins and the saddle horn in my left hand, and holding the cantle of the saddle in my right, I lifted my left foot into the stirrup. Hera bore my fumbling with a saint’s patience. After a couple of tentative bounces, I went for it. I stood in the left stirrup and went to throw my leg over the saddle.
Now, I had never, ever put a saddle on a horse before that day. Apparently, a cinch needs to be tighter than I had it. As I put weight in the stirrup and tried to straddle the horse, the saddle slid all the way to Hera’s belly and sent me spilling into the dust of the arena. The sudden change in the saddle’s position made Hera panic. She leapt away from me kicking out and trying to run. Luckily, she had horse sense. After a few seconds of running, she stopped and looked at me on the ground. The look on her face clearly said, Not like that, genius. From her seat on the fence, Ren howled with laughter.
Blushing from embarrassment, I reset the saddle on Hera’s back and tightened the cinch properly. I tugged on the saddle a few times to make sure it was settled properly. When I was certain that it would not slide again, I tried again. This time, I was up and over, my right foot easily finding the other stirrup. I sat on her back and held my breath. Hera did not move. She gave a huff as if to say, What now? I tapped her sides with my heels and she lurched forward into a walk. And just like that, I was riding a horse.
Every day after that, I worked with Hera under saddle, both for her rehab and my own need to practice. It took me weeks to get to a spot in my training and development on horseback where I felt confident in what I was doing. Like I said, usually people did something, or they didn’t do something. People who rode horses usually started young, and they usually had parents who taught them to ride, or they took lessons. For me to do this on my own, it was ridiculous. It was one thing to walk, and another thing entirely to trot, jog, and canter on horseback.
Hera did not have any problems accepting my commands, and whomever had trained her before I found her had done a splendid job. She responded to cues easily, and often seemed to know what I wanted her to do before I could tell her to do it. However, there was a large gap in my own trust in the horse where I had to learn that as long as I stayed centered over the animal, she would take care of me. When I coaxed her into a run, I had to trust that as long as I kept my balance, no matter how much it felt like I might fall off, she would make sure I didn’t.
I counted myself extremely lucky that I was able to find a smart horse that needed help, and that had training before I came along. I did not have to go through the whole process of breaking her. That would have been a whole different mess.
One midsummer afternoon, everything came together. I was out on a ride with Hera, miles from the house, and I realized that I was no longer actively thinking about riding; I was simply riding. I was not scared. I had no need to grip the horn of the saddle. I just sat, coordinated my balance over her center of gravity, and let her take care of the rest. I had gone from analyzing everything I was doing, planning, and being conscious about it to simply feeling it. To be a good rider, there needed to be a fusion between man and beast, a simple connection between two creatures with both intent on the same goal. At that moment, with Hera doing an easy canter through the Texas fields, I became a horseman. There came with that realization a rushing sense of freedom, and a sense of purpose. I could not stop smiling.
The summer was not all horseback rides and happiness, though. A lot of our troubles came about because of the garden. First, I found out that gardening a large garden like ours was a daily occupation. It took time every day to walk through the plants and make sure they were all watered well. It took time to fend off the weeds which seemed to sprout overnight. It took time to fence off tender young plants from rabbits, mice, and bugs that would like to eat their succulent leaves and murder them before they had a chance to sprout fruits or vegetables. I spent a lot of time working in the gardens with Ren, erecting fences around them, and trying to refine our water system to keep up with the demand that plants needed during a hot, dry Texas summer.
I was using a three-bucket filtration method. I had a long hose running into the lake with a small electric water pump hooked into a quartet of solar panels for power to pump water to the buckets. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to do the trick, for now. The three-bucket system was simple enough. It was made of three five-gallon buckets, each stacked on top of each other with a small hole in the bottom of the top two for water to filter down and through them, and a hole on the side at the bottom of the third for cl
ean water to drain through a hose and a series of filtration screens into a holding reservoir. The top bucket held fine gravel, the second sand, and the third was activated charcoal. I had gotten literal tons of all that stuff hauled out to the farm before the RV died, maybe a decade’s worth if not more. It was all stacked on pallets in garage of the house next door. To make the three-bucket system work well, it had to be filtering water constantly, hence the pump and the solar panels. As the farm grew, and our water demands grew, I had to keep adding buckets. Our single stack of three grew to a trio of stacks, and then to nine stacks. My simple three-bucket system had grown to a twenty-seven-bucket system. It was worth it, though. I piped hoses into the house and added hand pumps to the end of them so we could get water to places we needed it, like the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink. I was even working on figuring out a way to make a decent shower system so we could stop relying on a solar-powered camp shower for our bathing needs. Simply maintaining our water supply felt like it could have been a full-time job. We tried to practice conservation, as best we could. When you really had to labor for water, it became more precious. I missed the days I could take a hot shower for granted.
My long-term plans for our water system included figuring out a way to get the well pump in the basement of the house to start running again, and to start pumping up the well water from the aquifers deep below the house. We would have perfectly clean, clear water running through the pipes of the house again. It would almost be like returning to a pre-Flu existence. I salivated at the thought of that, yearned for it. However, for that to work, I was going to need a lot of electrical power. And all that electrical power was going to take a lot of work.
