The Horse Whisperer

Tom found the right issue and read the piece again, hoping it might shed some light on what to do with Pilgrim. It was kind of short on detail but it seemed all the guy had really done was take the mare back to basics as if he were starting her afresh, helping her find herself, making the right thing easy and wrong thing difficult. It was fine, but there was nothing new there for Tom. He was doing that already. As for the turning-into-pain thing, he still couldn't make a lot of sense of it. But what was he doing? Looking for a new trick? There were no tricks, he should know that by now. It was just you and the horse and understanding what was going on in both your heads. He pushed the magazine away, sat back and sighed.

Listening to Grace this evening and earlier to Logan, he'd searched every corner of what they said for something to latch on to, some key, some lever he could use. But there was none. And now at last he understood what he'd been seeing all this time in Pilgrim's eyes. It was a total breakdown. The animal's confidence, in himself and all around him, had been shattered. Those he had loved and trusted had betrayed him. Grace, Gulliver, everyone. They'd led him up that slope, pretended it was safe and then screamed at him and hurt him when it turned out not to be.

Maybe Pilgrim even blamed himself for what happened. For why should humans think they had a monopoly on guilt? So often Tom had seen horses protect their riders, children especially, from the dangers that inexperience led them into. Pilgrim had let Grace down. And when he'd tried to protect her from the truck, all he'd gotten in return was pain and punishment. Then all those strangers, who'd tricked him and caught him and hurt him and jabbed their needles in his neck and locked him up in the dark and the filth and the stench.

Later, as he lay sleepless with the light out and the house long fallen quiet, Tom felt something float heavily within him and settle on his heart. He now had the picture he'd wanted or as much of it as he was likely to get and it was a picture as dark and devoid of hope as he'd ever known.

There was no delusion, nothing foolish or fanciful about the way Pilgrim had assessed the horrors that had befallen him. It was simply logical and it was this that made helping him so hard. And Tom wanted so very much to help him. He wanted it for the horse itself and for the girl. But he knew too - and knew at the same time that it was wrong - that above all he wanted it for the woman he'd ridden with that morning and whose eyes and mouth he could see as clearly as if she were lying there beside him.

Chapter Twenty-one

The night Matthew Graves died, A

A

Many years later, when A

After the first hundred-dollar session the poor woman was clearly disappointed that A

The therapist nearly fell off her chair with excitement. A

She asked A

But if her father's death, as A

Within a month of his funeral, her mother had packed up the house in Kingston and disposed of things around which her children had felt their lives revolved. She sold the small boat in which their father had taught them to sail and had taken them to deserted islands to dive among the coral for lobsters and run naked on the palmed white sand. And their dog, a black Labrador cross called Bella, she gave to a neighbor they hardly knew. They saw the dog watching from the gate as the taxi took them to the airport.

They flew to England, a strange, wet, cold place where nobody smiled and their mother left them in Devon with her parents while she went up to London to sort out, she said, her husband's affairs. She lost no time in sorting one out for herself too, for within six months she was to marry again.

A

She favored George, not because she disliked him less but in order to divide them and thus make A