Part 3
She enlarged the image until the leather grain broke into squares. The letters offered no further help.
For the moment, the information she could use was pinned inside the feed shed. Flint was eating reliably. The tape kept moving in the right direction. By the fifth week, he’d gained a little over a hundred and twenty pounds, and there was enough flesh returning to show the shape of his shoulder.
His left hind no longer made that short, reluctant step. As the feet came back into balance, his stride began to lengthen. Lydia watched him cross the yard and agreed that the apparent lameness at the sale had come largely from the way those neglected hooves forced him to move.
Claire began a few minutes of easy groundwork in the round pen. A walk in each direction, a stop, a quiet request to back. Nothing that left him tired.
The first time she lifted her hand for a turn, he changed direction before she finished the signal.
She lowered her arm and waited. Then she stepped toward his hip. Flint moved his hindquarters exactly one stride away and stood square.
On another lap, she softened her posture without speaking. His trot fell into a walk.
Claire checked where her feet were. She tried again, more carefully this time. He answered the small movement as clearly as if she’d swung a rope.
Owen Mercer delivered grass hay the following Tuesday. His flatbed had a cracked windshield and a latch he opened with a screwdriver. At sixty-eight, he walked stiffly enough that Claire had stopped offering help getting down; he disliked the offer more than he disliked the pain.
Most people in Belsa knew him as the man who could find decent hay when everyone else was selling stems. A few remembered his thirty-two years training horses across three states. Fewer still remembered the ranch gelding he’d hauled to a versatility event in Oklahoma in the mid-nineties and ridden past animals that cost dozens of times more.
Owen never supplied that story himself.
He was releasing the first load strap when his hand stopped.
“What?” Claire asked.
He nodded toward the paddock. Flint stood resting a hind leg, his attention apparently on nothing.
“Put him in your pen a minute.”
Claire fetched the halter. Owen took his time reaching the rail, allowing his bad hip to settle before he leaned against it.
She walked Flint off, asked for a little trot, and turned him once in each direction. Owen watched without offering a correction. When the gelding stopped, he stayed quiet another few seconds.
“Well,” he said. “You didn’t buy an unfinished horse.”
“You’re seeing it, too.”
“I’m seeing years.”
He pointed out how Flint brought his hind feet through on a change, without swinging a shoulder to get out of his own way. He noted the stops, the even line around the pen, the way the horse could attend to something without leaving his position to investigate it.
A barn cat slipped between the rails. Flint’s ears followed it. His feet remained still.
“That,” Owen said. “Plenty of good horses don’t know they’re allowed to watch without joining in.”
Claire rested her hand on the lead rope.
“What do you suppose he is?”
Owen rubbed at the seam of his glove. For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard.
“Before you put a price on him, find out where he started.”
“You think there’s trouble?”
“I think there’s a hole in his history. Different thing.” He looked again at Flint. “Somebody spent a lot of time and money on him. That doesn’t ordinarily vanish with the paperwork.”
He pushed away from the rail, winced when he straightened too quickly, and went back to the hay. Claire asked another question, but he only handed her the loose end of a strap.
Lydia approved light riding in the seventh week. Twenty minutes was the limit, walking and a little trotting only. Any stiffness afterward meant stopping and calling her.
Claire used her own saddle. When she brought the cinch up, Flint raised his back and held his breath.
She let the strap rest in her hand. The old saddle’s rubbed fleece and the marks beside his withers came to mind, but she didn’t touch him or talk him through it. She waited.
After half a minute, he exhaled. His back softened beneath the pad. Claire tightened the cinch a little, walked him, checked it again, and mounted.
They went down the ranch track and returned in eleven minutes. He was steady, a little reluctant through a left turn, willing to stop whenever she asked. She loosened the saddle and felt along his back before taking it off.
The next day they added a few short stretches of trot in the pen. On the third, she rode beside the pasture fence with the reins loose.
A calf sprang from grass on the other side of the wire.
Claire saw brown hide and a flash of tail. Flint had already gathered beneath her. He turned, moved toward the place the calf was headed, and stopped facing it, his hindquarters low and his front end free.
The calf checked on the far side of the fence.
Flint glanced back toward Claire’s boot.
She sat still, taking care not to pull on his mouth. She’d ridden close to two hundred horses. Some had been quick enough to make her laugh aloud. This one had completed a decision she hadn’t yet formed.
She let him stand, then asked him to walk on. He left the calf without argument.
Eight days later, Grant Pell stopped in the county road while Claire was working Flint in the pen. She heard the engine idling before she noticed the truck.
They were doing quiet turns across the center, no speed and no hard work. Each time she changed her position, Flint settled behind and came through without hesitation.
Grant watched two more turns. Then he pulled into the drive.
In nine years of living in the same valley, he and Claire had exchanged little beyond weather and directions. Now he approached the rail smiling.
“He’s coming along,” he said.
“He’s feeling better.”
Grant studied the gelding’s shoulder, then his head.
“I could take him off your feed bill. Twenty-five hundred. Cash today.”
Claire slid her hand down the rope and opened the gate to lead Flint out.
Grant moved aside. “I’ve got a trailer I can send over.”
“Don’t send it,” she said. “I’m keeping him…”
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