The Horse Whisperer

'I saw her face looking up at me, down by Gully's feet, just before the horn sounded. She looked so little, so scared. I could have saved her. I could have saved us all.'

He didn't speak, for he knew the futility of words to change such things and that even the passing of years might leave her certainty undimmed. For a long time they stood that way, with the night folding around them and he cupped his hand on the back of her head and smelled the fresh young smell of her hair. And when her crying was done and he felt her body slacken, he asked her gently if she wanted to go on. She nodded and sniffed and took a breath.

'Once the horn sounded, that was it. And Pilgrim, he kind of turned to face the truck. It was crazy, but it was like he wasn't going to allow it. He wasn't going to let this great monster come and hurt us all, he was going to fight. Fight a forty-ton truck for heaven's sake! Isn't that something? But he was going to, I could feel it. And when it was right in front of us he reared up at it. And I fell and hit my head. That's all I remember.'

The rest Tom knew, at least in outline. A

When Tom said, in all truth, that he'd never heard of a vet being able to save a horse so sorely injured, Logan laughed and said he dearly wished he hadn't. He said things had gone all wrong later at the Dyer place and the Lord only knew what those two boys had done to the poor creature. He said he even blamed himself for going along with some of it, like trapping the animal's head in the door to give him those shots.

Grace was getting cold. It was late and her mother would be wondering where she was. They walked slowly back to the barn and passed through its dark, echoing emptiness and out the other end to the car. The beam of the Chevy's headlights tilted and dipped as they bumped along the track toward the creek house. For a while the dogs ran ahead, throwing pointed shadows before them and when they turned their heads to look back at the car, their eyes flashed ghostly and green.

Grace asked him if what he now knew would help him make Pilgrim better and he said he'd have to do some thinking but that he hoped so. When they pulled up he was glad to see she no longer looked like she'd been crying and when she got out she smiled at him and he could tell she wanted to thank him but was too shy to say it. He looked beyond her to the house, hoping he might see A

'I'll see you tomorrow.'

'Okay,' she said and swung the door shut.

By the time he got in the others had already eaten. Frank was helping Joe with some math problem at the big table in the living room and telling the twins for the last time to turn down the sound on some comedy show they were watching or he'd come and switch it off. Without a word, Diane took the supper she'd saved him and put it in the microwave while Tom went through to the downstairs bathroom to clean up.

'Did she like her new phones then?' Through the open door he could see her settling herself back at the kitchen table with her needlework.

'Yeah, she was real grateful.'

He dried his hands and came back in. The microwave was pinging and he took his supper out and went to the table. It was chicken potpie, with green beans and a vast baked potato. Diane always thought it was his favorite meal and he never had the heart to disabuse her. He wasn't at all hungry but didn't want to upset her so he sat down and ate.

'What I can't work out is what she's going to do with the third one,' Diane said, not looking up.

'How do you mean?'

'Well, she's only got two ears.'

'Oh, she's got a fax machine and other things that use lines of their own and with people calling her all the time, that's what she needs. She offered to pay for the lines being put in.'

'And you said no, I'll bet.'

He didn't deny it and saw Diane smile to herself. He knew better than to argue when she was in this kind of mood. She'd made it plain from the start that she wasn't crazy about A

'Frank says you took her out on Rimrock this morning,' Diane said.

'That's right. First time since she was a kid. She rides good.'

'That little girl. What a thing to happen.'

'Yeah.'

'She seems so lonely. Be better off in school, I reckon.'

'Oh, I don't know. She's okay.'

After he'd eaten and gone out to check the horses, he told Diane and Frank he had some reading to do and bade them and the boys good-night.

Tom's room took up the whole north-west corner of the house and from its side window you could look right up the valley. The room was large and seemed more so because there was so little in it. The bed was the one his parents had slept in, high and narrow with a scrolled maple headboard. There was a logcabin quilt on it that his grandmother had made. It had once been red and white but the red had faded a pale pink and in places the fabric had worn so thin that the lining showed through. There was a small pine table with one simple chair, a chest of drawers and an old hidecovered armchair that stood under a lamp by the black iron woodstove.

On the floor were some Mexican rugs Tom had picked up some years back in Santa Fe, but they were too small to make the place seem cozy and had more the opposite effect, stranded like lost islands on a darkstained sea of floorboard. Set into the back wall were two doors, one to the closet where he kept his clothes and the other leading to a small bathroom.

On the top of the chest of drawers stood a few modestly framed photographs of his family. There was one of Rachel holding Hal as a baby, its colors now grown saturate and dark. There was a more recent one of Hal beside it, his smile unca

Tom sat at the table going through a stack of old Quarter Horse Journals, looking for a piece he remembered reading a couple of years back. It was by a Californian horse trainer he'd once met and was about a young mare who'd been in a bad wreck. They'd been shipping her over from Kentucky along with six other horses and somewhere in Arizona the guy towing the trailer had fallen asleep, driven off the road and the whole rig had flipped clean over. The trailer ended up lying on the side where the door was so the rescue folk had to get chainsaws and cut their way in. When they did they found the horses had been tied into their boxes and were hanging in the air by their necks from what was now the roof, all but the mare dead.

This trainer, Tom knew, had a pet theory that you could use a horse's natural response to pain to help it. It was complicated and Tom wasn't sure he fully grasped it. It seemed to be based on the notion that though a horse's first instinct was to flee, when it actually felt pain, it would turn and face it.

The man backed this up with stories of how horses in the wild would run from a pack of wolves but when they felt teeth touch their flanks they would'turn in' and confront the pain. He said it was like a baby teething; he doesn't avoid the pain, but bites on it. And he claimed this theory had helped him sort out the traumatized mare who'd survived the wreck.