Chosen by a Horse Read Online Free

some checking and found out he’d been fired from his teaching position on suspicion of child molestation.
    She sees emotional and physical problems, too. If she sees something serious like cancer, she doesn’t tell the client, but at the right moment she’ll suggest a visit to a doctor. When she sees sadness it’s usually a long-standing hurt from childhood—an abusive parent or a family withdrinking problems. Sometimes it’s just a past where love was in short supply. She sends those people home with salves or essential oils made from flowers and herbs she grows in an organic garden.
    Like any good witch, she could have been a doctor. She knows a lot about conventional medicine as well as alternative healing. Her shelves are full of medical books she orders over the Internet with titles I find intimidating and repugnant. However, Allie lugs them to bed for cozy reading and sometimes calls to report on breakthroughs in treatments for diseases I’ve never heard of. Talking about illness makes me uncomfortable, and I always try to steer the conversation back to safer ground. I laugh when I refer to Allie as my doctor, but the truth is, I’m not really joking and neither are the many others who seek her medical advice.
    But all her knowledge of medicine for humans is peanuts compared to what she knows about horses.
    While Allie finished her soup, I got up from the counter and opened the basement door around the corner from the kitchen and started pulling barn clothes off the hooks on the wall. Clothes bulged into the stairwell, going halfway down the stairs. There were pants and jackets for every season and every possible weather condition. I had just taken a shower and changed into dry clothes, and now I was going to get wet and dirty all over again. Sometimes this happened three times a day. I put on Gore-Tex everything and walked over to the door by the back deck and stepped into rubber boots.
    On the walk, I told Allie what the SPCA had told me about Lay Me Down. She had been born in April of 1980 and had begun training as a trotter for harness racing when she was officially a year old, although she had really been only nine months old. The bylaws of Thoroughbred and Standardbred racing state that all horses turn a year old on January first, regardless of when they were actually born. This meant Lay Me Down was on the track, winning races (making her owner money) at twenty months, even though by racing standards she was legally considered two. This had stressed her still-developing musculoskeletal system, and she was given steroids and other anti-inflammatories to mask injuries and stiffness. This was a practice common in all forms of horse racing. For Lay Me Down, it resulted in permanent, debilitating lameness, ending her racing career by age four. She walked with a pronounced limp in both front legs—a real hobble when she got up until she’d been walking for a few minutes, and she had arthritis in her hocks (elbows) in both rear legs. Looking at her now, it was hard to believe that at the peak of her racing, she was valued at a hundred thousand dollars.
    She would have maintained that value as a proven broodmare, a horse who consistently produced winning offspring, had she not been starved. During the twelve years she lived as a broodmare, she had been left in an open field with inadequate hay, feed, water, shelter, and veterinary care, yet still managed to produce twelve foals, including the one huddled beside her now. To hide the increasing emaciationof his twenty broodmares, the owner had confined them to a small barn for the past year. Then, for reasons still unknown, he had stopped feeding them altogether.
    “The court could issue an order to return them,” I told Allie.
    “Over my dead body,” she said. “We’ll steal her first.”
    Allie had been six when she stole her first horse and got her name in the police beat of the local newspaper. After attending the Dutchess County Fair in Rhinebeck, New