Daniel Harlan was waiting for Wayne Kessler to finish counting sacks so he could set down the one in his arms. Feed dust worked its way under his collar. Wayne stood beside the truck, tapping the eraser end of a pencil against an invoice.
“Need to be back before supper,” Wayne said. “I’m ending things with that new colt.”
Daniel shifted the sack higher. “The dark one? Your mare’s baby?”
“Three days old today. Lost her right after he came. Now he won’t stand, won’t eat worth a damn, and his eyes aren’t right.” Wayne made another mark on the invoice. “Can’t keep throwing money at him.”
Daniel set the feed on the tailgate. He was forty-eight, with a place outside Dunley, Wyoming, that had passed from his parents into his care. His mother had taught him about horses by making him wait. At twelve, he’d stood in a corral with his arm aching while she reminded him that an offered hand wasn’t an invitation if you kept pushing it into an animal’s face.
“Who’s examined him?” he asked.
“A fellow I use.”
“Your vet?”
Wayne stopped marking the paper.
“He’s raised plenty of horses.”
Daniel brushed the dust off his palms. He knew Wayne well enough to sell him leftover winter feed, not well enough to know what happened behind his barn doors.
“Show me.”
“You’ve got chores.”
“They’ll wait.”
The stall at Wayne’s place smelled of sour milk beneath the fresh straw. A feeding bottle hung crookedly from a cord, beyond the reach of the small black head on the floor. Daniel noticed it before he noticed the colt’s eyes.
One lid was swollen almost closed. The other exposed a dull film when Daniel crouched beside him. His body had the drawn, angular look of a newborn who had gone too long without enough to drink.
Outside, the gates swung cleanly and every fence post stood straight. Here, the colt could barely lift his chin.
“What went into him this morning?” Daniel asked.
Wayne leaned against the jamb. “Tried the bottle. Mostly comes back out. Sometimes he coughs.”
Daniel’s fingers curled against his knee. There was a wash bucket near the door. He wanted warm water and a clean cloth, wanted that bottle down, wanted the animal off the cold ground. Instead, he stayed where he was.
The colt tried once to raise his head. His neck shook, then gave up.
Daniel eased his left heel forward. The old boot made a small leather squeak.
An ear moved toward him.
He waited. The colt’s nose dragged an inch through the straw, paused, then searched farther. Daniel opened his hand but didn’t close the distance. Warm air stirred the loose hairs along his knuckles.
“He’ll nose at you,” Wayne said. “Don’t mistake that for getting better.”
Daniel took out his phone.
The veterinary clinic was well beyond his own ranch. At first the woman who answered said Dr. Miriam Bell couldn’t come to the phone. Daniel described the coughing, the eyes, the colt lying under a bottle he couldn’t use.
“Hold on,” she said.
When Miriam picked up, her questions came briskly. Had he nursed before the mare died? How long had he been down? Did anyone have a temperature? Were his legs straight?
“I’m looking at him for the first time,” Daniel admitted.
Wayne answered two questions when Daniel repeated them, then folded his arms.
Miriam told Daniel not to force milk into a colt who couldn’t swallow safely. Keep him warm. Get him to the clinic.
“I’ll have the bay ready,” she said.
Daniel put the phone away and looked at Wayne.
“What’s it take to make him mine?”
Wayne’s eyes went to the colt. “You understand what you’re buying?”
“I do.”
“You could pay a clinic bill and bury him tomorrow.”
“Tell me the price.”
Wayne asked for what he’d spent on formula and the man who’d come to see him. Nothing more, provided Daniel took him as he was and didn’t return with complaints.
At the kitchen table, Daniel read the few lines on the bill of sale, signed, and put it inside his coat. Wayne was still explaining the colt’s bad eye when Daniel went back out.
They found blankets and a broad piece of plywood. Getting the thin body onto it took both men, and getting it down the aisle took longer. Daniel kept the head from bumping while Wayne pulled. Twice they stopped to let the colt settle.
At the trailer, the little body jerked beneath Daniel’s hands.
Wayne let go of the board. “Daniel?”
Daniel slid his fingers along the jaw. The blankets had gone still. He bent closer, keeping one wrist beside the nostrils, and waited through several seconds he could not have counted afterward.
A faint breath warmed his skin.
“Keep pulling,” he said. “Easy.”
Once the colt was bedded down, Daniel called Judith. She listened without interrupting. He’d been married to her twenty-three years and could hear her already making arrangements in the silence.
“Test the trailer heat,” she said at last.
“It worked last time.”
“That wasn’t what I said.”
He checked it before leaving.
Their ranch lay along the route to the clinic. Lydia came out of the house with quilts stacked to her chin. At seventeen she was nearly as tall as her mother. Fourteen-year-old Seth had backed the other truck into position and was waiting with rolled towels to keep the colt from sliding.
They added bedding where he lay, switched the trailer to the truck with the better brakes, and left together.
From the back seat came whispers about names. Judith turned just enough to quiet them.
“Let’s get there first.”
Daniel took the rough stretches slowly. Once, a car went around him with an impatient burst of exhaust. He barely noticed.
Judith touched the sleeve of his coat.
“There’s nothing in that mirror you haven’t looked at twenty times.”
“I know.”
He checked it again at the next bend.
Miriam met them under the treatment-bay light with her sleeves already pushed up. There was silver in her hair, though she was a little younger than Daniel, and she had the efficient stance of a woman accustomed to moving creatures much larger than herself.
She gave him a place to stand and a job to do. He held the colt’s head while a technician placed a line. Then Miriam took over, and Daniel found himself with empty hands.
The colt was cold and badly dehydrated. Infection was likely; he had probably received too little of his mother’s first milk to protect him. His eyes needed treatment. Miriam listened a long time to his chest, then listened again.
They supported him in a sling to examine his legs. A hind pastern sank alarmingly. For a few seconds he tried to bear his own weight, then hung against the canvas.
Seth turned his face away from the lifting frame.
Miriam lowered the colt onto thick padding. As she talked through plasma, antibiotics, fluids, assisted feeding, and controlled warming, Daniel watched a bubble travel along the clear tubing.
“Those are things we can treat now,” she said. “The heart is a separate question. There’s a murmur. It may lessen as he improves. It may mean a defect serious enough to kill him young.”
“How young?”
“If it’s what I’m worried about, I’d be surprised to see him make his second birthday. We also haven’t got him through tonight.”
Lydia tucked her fingers into Judith’s hand.
Daniel moved aside as the technician returned. His boot sounded against the floor. Beneath the blanket, the colt turned one ear and began working his nose toward him.
Miriam watched that, too.
“You’d be feeding and watching him around the clock if he comes home,” she said.
“There are four of us.”
“And I need your word that we’ll stop when treatment becomes suffering.”
Daniel crouched. A small patch of white showed beneath the colt’s tangled forelock. He held his hand near the muzzle until the searching stopped.
“You’ll have it,” he said. “But don’t quit on something you can fix.”
Miriam peeled off one glove. She looked at Judith before looking back at him.
“Can you take him home knowing you may watch him die?”
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