Chosen by a Horse Read Online Free Page B

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    “What a sweet horse,” Allie said, adjusting the stethoscope in her ears, then sliding the little disc under Lay Me Down’s ribby middle.
    I was beginning to sense the same thing. Everything about Lay Me Down had been easy and obliging, starting with her willingness to get into the trailer at the SPCA, the only horse to “volunteer.”
    “Her heart’s strong,” Allie said a few minutes later and moved the stethoscope higher to listen to the lungs. “Oh boy,” she said right away.
    I immediately tensed, even though I already knew the mare was sick, I already knew she had pneumonia. “She’s on antibiotics,” I said, hoping to avoid hearing that her lungs might collapse or fill with fluid, that this horse could die at any moment.
    “Could be worse,” Allie said. She pulled the stethoscope off her neck and folded it back into the bag.
    I was so relieved I was willing to listen to any details she wanted to offer. But Allie ignored me as she pulled a thermometer out of her bag and lifted Lay Me Down’s tail to insert it. None of my three would have allowed this without being held or tied. Lay Me Down wasn’t restrained in any way and chose that moment to close her eyes for a little nap.
    Standing by Lay Me Down’s rump, Allie got a good look at the foal for the first time. “What a cutie,” she said. “She needs a new halter.”
    I was afraid she’d notice. It meant chasing the foal around a wet pasture, and if we could catch her, wrestling off the old halter and then wrestling her into a new one. Allie and I would surely get roughed up in the process. Two hundredand fifty pounds of kicking, biting horse is a lot to contend with. “I don’t think she’s been handled at all,” I said.
    “We’ll need a third person then.”
    I tried to think of all the people who wouldn’t mind risking their necks. The list wasn’t too long, even among my horsey friends. It might be better to ask someone who didn’t know anything about horses, a big strong man who wouldn’t think twice about helping with a baby horse. That’s what I’d call her, a baby. It sounded so innocent.
    Allie pulled out the thermometer, told me Lay Me Down’s temperature was slightly elevated, and then talked to me about feed, supplements, and vitamins. We discussed moving her into a stall in the barn, someplace I could completely enclose in order to run a vaporizer to help clear her lungs. It wasn’t a bad idea except we both knew it was out of the question. I didn’t want to expose my other horses to a sick horse, and even if I had been willing, Lay Me Down was too weak to introduce to an established herd. Even if Lay Me Down had been in perfect health it would have taken a few weeks of controlled introductions before my mare would have allowed another mare in the same pasture. I had seen how ferocious Georgia could be. And then there was the foal.
    Thirteen years earlier, a few days before Georgia birthed her own foal, I had moved the geldings (who had been with us for almost a year by then) to the pasture where Lay Me Down was now. After Sweet Revenge was born, I gave mother and foal eight weeks together before reunitingthem with the boys. Even then, I divided the communal pasture in half with a single strand of electrified fence wire—boys on one side, mother and foal on the other. Weeks passed. There was much nose sniffing and getting acquainted across the fence, a barrier that was mostly psychological. Yet it allowed Georgia to feel she controlled how close the boys could get to her foal. When it looked like the herd was as reintegrated as possible with the electrified wire still between them, I took the wire down.
    It was as though I had allowed men with machine guns into the pasture. The minute that single strand of fencing disappeared, Georgia flew at Hotshot, driving him into a corner, where, it was clear, she intended to kill him. Poor Hotshot was as unprepared for this explosion as I was. He seemed incapable of