Winter's Tide (11 page)

“See, there,” said Jeremy, touching my shoulder. “That's Shackleford Banks, the island where the horses live. That's where we'll go next.”

Shackleford Banks was off to the west, just past a short span of water, a pie-shaped tip attached to a long strip of land. Along the edge of the water, looking like toys, stood a group of tiny brown horses.

“Look!” I said to Jeremy.

“Yeah, so cool, right?”

“Y'all? Help!” We heard a small voice on the other side of the lighthouse. We followed the catwalk around and Stephanie was standing just outside the doorway on the catwalk, frozen, hanging onto the railing for dear life. “I can't move.”

“What's the matter?” I said.

She could barely move her head to glance at me, and the look on her face showed sheer terror. “I can't look down. I can't move.” Her face was white.

“Are you afraid of heights?” Jeremy asked.

“Apparently,” she whispered.

“Okay,” I said. I went over and took her hand. “Want me to take you back inside?”

She nodded, her eyes wide. Her fingers in mine were sweaty and shaking. I turned her around and led
her over the ledge back through the door inside. She grabbed the railing with a gasp and almost collapsed.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

She nodded wordlessly.

Jeremy and I skipped back to ground level, but I thought it was going to take Stephanie a half an hour to climb down, gripping the railing all the way. We thanked the park ranger and headed back to the dock.

“Shouldn't we go back now?” Stephanie said as she stepped carefully from the dock to the boat. But Jeremy and I ignored her.

“I can't wait to see the horses!” I yelled, as I jumped back into the boat. In a few minutes we were headed along the coast of Shackleford Banks.

“Shackleford Banks is nine miles long, and we've got to get to the other end, so we'll be riding along beside it for awhile,” Jeremy yelled.

After awhile we finally reached the landing area. From the landing area point, the right side of the island looked like a sandy beach with breakers, the center of the island was grassy and treed, and the left side looked more like a bay, with its tide pools and vegetation. Standing right at the edge of the water on the bay side were about seven horses, bay and black, with long manes and tails and heavy winter coats, just like the ones I'd seen on the Outer Banks!

I stood up. “There they are!” I shouted.

“Sit down!” Jeremy shouted back, slowing the boat. “Don't stand up in the boat!”

Obediently, I sat back down but kept my eyes on the horses. As we approached, the horses raised their heads and pricked their ears at us, then began to run away, their tails sailing in the cold wind.

W
e were going to get in so much trouble. Why didn't I learn? Every time I did something with Diana she got me in trouble.

I was still feeling shaky from being up in the lighthouse. Diana had been nice to help me while I was up there, but now this boat bumping over the crests of the waves was scaring me to death, not to mention the fact that Jeremy was heading right for the beach, and I didn't see a dock anywhere.

“Where's the dock?” I shouted.

“No dock!” he shouted back. “I'm going to drive right up on the sand!”

Right up on the sand? Was he nuts?

I checked the digital clock on my phone. We were supposed to meet Daddy and Lynn back at the parking lot in less than an hour now. What if we didn't make it back in time?

Meanwhile Diana had her phone out and was taking pictures of the horses as they galloped away from us toward the bay side of the island.

“Go to the front so we don't have as much weight in the back,” Jeremy yelled. I started to walk forward and just as I did, we dropped into a trough between two waves, and I fell to the floor of the boat.

“You okay?” Jeremy reached down and grabbed my arm to help me up.

I was so embarrassed! I scrambled up and headed to the front, sitting on the bench across from Diana. Jeremy cut the throttle to slow the boat as it nosed into shallower water, until at last we scraped bottom on the sand below us.

“We're here!” Jeremy cried, cutting the engine. “Somebody needs to jump off and push the boat a little higher up on the sand.”

“You mean get wet?” I said. I had my new boots on!

Diana started laughing. “We'll do it. You stay in the boat until you can jump clear of the water.” She stuck her phone in her sweatshirt pocket and jumped into the water, which was calf-deep. “Woooo! This will be the third time in two days I've had to wash my shoes.”

“You mean that Lynn has had to wash your shoes,” I pointed out.

Jeremy jumped into the water on the other side of the boat and together they pushed the boat, with me in it, partway up onto the sand.

At least now that the boat had stopped moving I wasn't so freezing cold.

I stood on the bow and both of them held their hands up so I could jump down. Well, here goes! I jumped, and they caught me as my boots sank in the wet sand. I followed at a walk as Jeremy and Diana raced across the beach toward the center of the island.

“What's here?” I yelled. It didn't look like much. Just sand and trees and sea grass. “Is there a bathroom or a place to get hot chocolate or anything?”

Jeremy started laughing. “Sorry, Stephanie. There's nothing on this island but horses. No shops.”

I thought wistfully of the shops on Front Street that we could have spent the afternoon looking through. And we were supposed to have lunch. My stomach
growled. All I wanted was to get back without getting into trouble.

“C'mon!” Diana shouted, skipping backward. “I want to get close to those horses!”

The horses had headed for the center of the island, which was higher ground with groves of twisty trees. We climbed over a dune and saw them grazing in a small meadow. Their winter coats were long and shaggy, and their tails almost dragged the ground. I finally caught up.

Diana slowed to a nonthreatening walk as she approached them. Close to us were two horses with reddish coats and light tails and manes, almost like palominos.

“How many horses are on this island?” Diana asked Jeremy.

“I don't know. Maybe a hundred?”

“And did these horses come from Spanish ships five hundred years ago, like the ones farther north in the Outer Banks?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Jeremy said. “They've learned to dig holes with their hooves to drink the water here on the island. And they eat the sea grass.”

“What happens to these horses if there's a hurricane?” I asked. “Do people come and round them up and take them to safety?”

“No, they just stay here,” Jeremy said. “They find the high ground and huddle under the trees. I guess it's been that way for hundreds of years, and they've survived.”

“Wow. They're so amazing,” Diana said. “I found out when we saw the horses in the Outer Banks that you're not supposed to try to feed them or get too close. The stallions want to protect their mares and foals.” She turned and grinned at us. “But wouldn't it be fantastic to ride one of these horses on the beach?”

“No!” I said.

“C'mon, let's explore!”

“We probably need to head back,” I said, twisting my hair around one finger nervously. “We don't want to get in trouble. We don't want to be late.”

“Oh, Stephanie, you're always worrying!” Diana said. “We just got here.”

She headed in the direction of the horses, which were ambling along, slowly grazing their way across the meadow, their tails swishing rhythmically.

Diana and Jeremy weren't listening to me. They followed the horses and I, not knowing what else to do, tagged along behind. The afternoon wind picked up, stinging my eyes. I looked at the time on my phone again. How long would it take to drive the boat back?

And Grammy was there in her hospital bed, waiting
for us to come and visit her. If her healing was going well, she'd have surgery day after tomorrow.

I couldn't believe I had let myself get in another situation like this with Diana.

Meanwhile, I watched Diana and Jeremy together. He walked beside her, talking and waving his hands. Was she blind? Couldn't she see that he liked her?

I ran to catch up and caught the tail end of their conversation.

“So there was this young stallion, and I named him Firecracker,” Diana was saying. “And I watched him get into a fight with the stallion that was the leader of his herd. Firecracker got thrown out of the herd.”

“Oh, that must have been amazing,” Jeremy said.

“Their fight was terrible to watch. Firecracker was standing off by himself, and every time he tried to walk closer, the black stallion charged him. And they'd rear up on their hind legs, and they were trying to pummel each other with their front hooves and bite each other's necks. And horses have to have the herd to survive. But by the end of our week there, Firecracker had found a friend. He'd found his own herd. It really gave me hope.”

“Same way with the whales,” Jeremy said. The wind blew his longish red bangs into his eyes, and he impatiently swiped them away. “They have to have their
pod too. You know, pilot whales often follow one older female. Sometimes, if there's something wrong with the leader, she might strand herself, and then all the whales in the pod will follow her. So that's why whole groups of pilot whales sometimes strand themselves. And then, you know, it's such a tragedy, because they all die, but only one was sick.”

Could two people be a better match? Listen to them talking about the lives of animals.

“I heard that sometimes sonar can cause whales to strand themselves,” Diana said. “Is that true?” While she asked him this, she tiptoed to within a few feet of one of the horses that was grazing and kneeled to take a close-up picture of the horse's face and neck.

“I think the whales use echolocation to call to each other and, like, give each other directions. Some people say the sonar can mess them up. I heard about cases where entire pods of thirty whales have stranded themselves in shallow bays after the Navy did sonar testing.”

“No kidding!” Diana said. She pointed at the horses that were grazing. “Look, see? The pinto is the stallion. All the other horses here are mares. And even though he's in the back of the herd, he's telling the mares which way to go. He directs them with his head.”

Jeremy and I watched as the stallion did as Diana
described, lowering his head and slowly herding the mares along. Though the horses did not seem afraid of us, the stallion was slowly moving them away. Diana and Jeremy followed at a distance, still talking about animals. We came to the end of the pasture and started climbing a small dune. Just past the dune the horses began to melt into a grove of gnarled and twisted trees with shiny green leaves. The wind whistled through the gray, crooked branches.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Jeremy said. “Right out there is where they found the
Queen Anne's Revenge
.” He pointed toward the ocean side of the island. “Right off the tip of this island.”

“Blackbeard's ship, right?” Diana said.

“Yeah.” Then Jeremy asked, “So since you love animals so much, are you planning to be a veterinarian or something?” Jeremy asked.

Diana blushed. “Stephanie and I helped a veterinarian do surgery once on a wolf-dog. That was really cool, wasn't it, Steph?”

I had been terrified. “Sure,” I said.

“The vet said the animals of the world could use more people like me,” Diana said. “I've never forgotten that.”

“You should do it,” Jeremy said. “But keep an eye on your grades. I've heard it's hard to get into vet school.”

Diana opened her mouth to say something, glanced at me, and then didn't say anything. I knew exactly what she was thinking about. Being suspended. And she didn't want Jeremy to know. Well, I wasn't going to tell him if she wasn't.

I looked at the time on my phone again. “Hey, Diana, we have to go!”

“No, we don't. If they have to wait a few minutes, it's not the end of the world.”

“Jeremy, how long does it take to get back to Beaufort from here?” I asked.

“About fifteen minutes.”

“See, we better go. It will take time to tie up the boat and walk back to the parking lot. We're supposed to meet them in thirty minutes.”

“Just a few more minutes!” Diana kept walking after the horses. I could feel myself starting to become upset. At the same time, I hardly knew Jeremy, and I didn't want to get in a fight with Diana in front of him.

“They'll get worried about us.”

Now Diana wasn't even talking to me. She was just walking, ignoring me. My heart beat harder, and I felt out of breath. I could feel the blood pounding behind my eyes as I got madder and madder. Diana was always doing whatever she wanted and not paying attention to other people.

I was tired of her pushing me around.

“Diana!” I yelled, so loud that it hurt my throat, so loud that the horses started to run, crashing through the undergrowth around the trees. The pounding of their hooves gradually died away. A few branches swayed gently from their passing.

Diana threw her hands in the air in disgust. “I can't believe you did that! You scared them!”

“We have to go!” I yelled. “Why are you like this? Grammy is waiting in the hospital for us to come visit her. She's been waiting there all day!”

“I don't care!” Diana flung back over her shoulder.

Anger flashed through me. She never cares! She never cares about anyone! I ran after her, shouting. “Once I told Colleen that you cared more about animals than you did about people, and it's true!” I drew a deep breath into my lungs, feeling the burn of the cold air. And it came out. “That's why people call you ‘annn-i-mal,' Diana!”

Diana stopped and turned and stared at me. “What?”

There was a sudden silence, during which the constant roar of the surf on the other side of the island seemed to swell to a crescendo inside my head. I realized that I had just told Diana the secret that I had been keeping all of this time. That I was the one who had started people calling her “animal.” That it was
my fault that she had endured this name-calling for over a year.

Her mouth hung open, but she seemed unable to speak. She just stared at me in shock. I stared back at her, my heart beating in my throat.

Jeremy looked from one of us to the other, then jammed his hands into his pockets and focused on the ground, scuffing the sand beneath his feet. “I guess we better go,” he said finally.

In silence, we trudged back toward the meadow. Diana stayed as far away from me as she could. She and Jeremy didn't talk anymore. The wind blew and the waves pounded on the beach-side of the island with an endlessness that made me want to put my hands over my ears.

Why had I told her? Why hadn't I told her before? Would she ever understand that I hadn't done it on purpose?