Caleb Mercer had a fifty-pound sack against his chest when Roy Voss announced he was putting the colt down before supper. Roy was checking the feed invoice, drawing short pencil strokes beside each item. He did not look up to see what the words had done.
“The black one?” Caleb asked. “Out of that mare you bought?”
“Born Tuesday. She bled out inside an hour.” Roy turned the invoice over against his palm. “I’ve bought milk replacer. Had somebody come out. He won’t get up, and there’s something wrong with his eyes. I’m finished with it.”
At forty-eight, Caleb had spent his life noticing which animals stayed behind when a gate opened. The ranch outside Alder Creek, Montana, had belonged to his parents before it belonged to him. His mother used to make him hold his hand still until a frightened horse decided whether to approach it, a lesson that had cost him considerable patience at twelve.
He lowered the sack onto the tailgate. Chaff stuck to the sweat along his wrists, cold now that he had stopped working.
“Was the person you called a veterinarian?”
“He knows horses.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Roy folded the invoice into quarters. Until this moment, selling Roy the last of his winter feed had been an ordinary transaction between men who knew each other’s trucks. Now Roy was looking at him as though he had found an extra charge on the bill.
“You ought to see the thing before you start.”
Caleb reached for his keys. “I’ve got twenty minutes.”
Thirty-five minutes later, he followed Roy into a barn on the small horse property east of town. The fence wire was taut, the gates hung square, and inside the foaling stall a bottle dangled from baling twine with a hard white crust around its nipple.
The colt lay below it. His black coat stood up along his spine, making the ribs beneath seem sharper. One eye was sealed nearly shut; the other showed a cloudy surface when Caleb’s shadow crossed the bedding.
Roy stopped in the doorway. “He’s been like that since she died.”
Caleb crouched far enough away to leave room between them. The little head came up, trembling with the effort, then dropped before it had cleared more than three inches. Straw clung to the damp corner of the colt’s mouth.
“How much has he taken today?”
“Some. Then he coughs, or lets it run out.”
Caleb wanted to clean the eye. He wanted to pick the animal up, get the bottle down, do something his hands understood. Instead he rested his arm on his knee. The colt watched him with the small amount of sight he had.
When Caleb moved his left foot, the leather gave its familiar creak.
An ear turned. The colt’s nostrils widened, and his muzzle traveled slowly through the straw toward Caleb’s hand. It stopped short. Caleb could see the fine hair moving around the nostrils.
“He’s looking for you,” Roy said. “He does that. It doesn’t mean he’ll live.”
“I’d like Helen Ward to look at him.”
“You paying?”
Caleb was already taking out his phone. Helen’s clinic was forty-two miles from his ranch, farther from here, and her receptionist initially said the doctor was with a patient. Caleb described what lay in front of him. After a brief wait, Helen came on the line herself.
She asked about the birth, the mare’s first milk, the colt’s temperature, his legs. Caleb answered what he could and admitted what he didn’t know. Roy supplied two details from the doorway, then went quiet.
“Warmth first,” Helen said. “And stop trying to bottle-feed if he can’t swallow properly. Can you bring him in?”
Caleb looked at the trailer beyond the barn. “We’ll manage.”
When he ended the call, Roy rubbed the folded invoice against his thumb. “You could spend a thousand dollars and still be hauling a dead horse home.”
“I know. What do you want for him?”
Roy glanced at the stall and back at Caleb. His expression had changed.
“The formula. The call I paid for. That’s all. But you understand there’s no guarantee, and I don’t want you coming back here.”
They put it in writing at the kitchen table. Caleb signed the bill of sale while Roy stood beside the sink, naming the colt’s problems again. Caleb tucked the paper inside his coat before Roy could find another one.
Moving him was worse than buying him. They slid blankets beneath the thin body and worked a low sheet of plywood across the aisle. Roy pulled; Caleb supported the head and kept the blankets from bunching under the neck. They stopped whenever the colt struggled.
Near the trailer ramp, a shudder ran through him. Caleb held his jaw and waited for another breath. Roy stopped pulling.
“Caleb.”
“I’ve got him.”
For a moment there was no movement beneath the blanket. Then Caleb felt a small damp breath against the inside of his wrist, and he lowered his face until the colt could hear him without effort.
“All right. Let’s get you somewhere warm.”
He called Nora from the truck. She asked where he was, listened to the answer, and said nothing about the feed he was supposed to have been selling. After twenty-three years of marriage, she knew how these calls went.
“Is the trailer heater still working?” she asked.
“It was.”
“Check it before you pull out.”
At home, seventeen-year-old Abby came down the steps carrying quilts. Owen, fourteen, had the other truck ready and climbed into the trailer to help wedge rolled towels around the colt. They added bedding without unloading him. Then Caleb changed trucks, and all four of them headed for the clinic.
The children spoke quietly behind him. Caleb caught the beginning of a discussion about names and heard Nora put it off. At each rough place in the road he slowed until another driver passed them.
“You’ll wear out your neck,” Nora said.
He realized he had been looking in the mirror again.
“I can’t see him from here.”
“I know.”
Neither of them said anything for the next mile.
Helen met them at the treatment bay. Gray already showed through her hair although she was not yet fifty, and she moved with the quick economy of somebody whose patients outweighed her. She guided the colt’s neck while a technician found a vein. Caleb stood where she put him and tried to keep his hands out of the way.
The findings accumulated: dehydration, a temperature too low, infection likely helped along by too little colostrum before the mare died. His eyes were inflamed. There was a murmur in his heart, and when they supported him in a sling, a hind pastern folded almost to the floor.
Caleb counted eleven seconds of weight on those legs. On the twelfth, the canvas took the three-day-old colt’s weight again.
Helen settled the colt onto padding and outlined treatment. Plasma, fluids, antibiotics, help with feeding, careful warmth. Caleb watched the line running into the little neck as she explained that surviving the infection would leave other questions unanswered.
“The eyes may improve. I can’t promise how much. And if that murmur comes from a serious defect, he may never reach adulthood.”
Abby drew closer to Nora. Owen had stopped looking at the equipment.
“A year?” Caleb asked.
“A year or two would surprise me. He could die tonight, Caleb. Before any of us gets that far.”
The colt moved when Caleb shifted his boot. One ear found the creak, and the muzzle followed it a little way across the pad. Helen let Caleb bend beside him before she continued.
“You’d need somebody with him day and night.”
“We can work out shifts.”
“And you have to stop if we’re only prolonging pain.”
Caleb put his hand close to the colt’s nose. “I won’t ask you to keep doing that. But while there’s something you can treat, I’d like you to treat it.”
Helen looked toward Nora and the children, then back at him.
“Suppose he gets as far as your barn and dies there. Can you manage that, Caleb?”
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