Million-Dollar Horse (10 page)

The woods were quiet and peaceful. The only sounds were the usual forest noises. A squirrel rustled in the underbrush. A bird chirped overhead. The creek water burbled past them.

Suddenly there was another sound. It was loud and it
was terrifying. It was the howl of an animal in terrible distress. Belle and Starlight started at the noise, tugging on their reins. The lines were loosely tied to a bush near where the girls sat. Honey-Pie, unaccustomed to the woods, the trail, the creek, and, most especially, the noise, jumped backward. Her ears flattened. Her eyes opened wide so that Lisa could see the whites all around them. The mare stepped back again, tugging at the reins, which slipped right out of the branches where it had been secured.

Before Lisa could even stand up, Honey-Pie, sensing her sudden freedom, fled. She headed straight into the woods, behind a rock, down a hill, and was gone. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, even her hoofbeats were just an echo in Lisa’s memory.

S
OMETIMES
T
HE
S
ADDLE
C
LUB
could spend hours planning how to solve a problem, devising schemes and backups. Sometimes they acted on instinct. When Honey-Pie fled, there was no planning—it was all instinct.

In a matter of seconds, Carole and Stevie ran to their horses. They knew which direction Honey-Pie had started out in, but they had no idea where she might have turned once she’d rounded the rock and gone down the hill.

“I’ll take the left,” Carole said. “Stevie, you go that way.” She pointed downhill to the right. “And Lisa, you go on foot and follow any signs you can see of Honey-Pie’s trail—you know, broken branches, leaves churned up, stuff like that.”

“We’d better keep calling to one another,” said Lisa. “Otherwise, next thing you know we’ll all be lost.”

“Bye,” said Stevie, not wanting to lose another second.

The path where Honey-Pie had started out wasn’t a path at all. It seemed to Lisa that the horse had simply disappeared into the underbrush, and once she began walking into it herself, it was hard to understand how the mare had fit through there at all. The bushes were thick and dense. Honey-Pie must have been powered by a fierce terror to have made it through them so quickly.

Lisa heard the disappearing hoofbeats of her friends’ horses and realized that she was now very much alone. She wasn’t frightened—not for herself, at least. She wasn’t even particularly worried about the trouble she’d be in if something happened to Honey-Pie. What really worried her was the possibility that Honey-Pie could get hurt.

She knew she had to focus if she was going to help the mare. Fretting about what might happen wasn’t going to do any good. She had to concentrate on the job at hand.

She grabbed a branch of a bush in front of her and tugged it aside, making a path for herself in the direction where she knew Honey-Pie had gone.

There wasn’t a path here. It was pure woods and very overgrown. Lisa and her friends rarely left the wide horse trails in the woods, so this was unfamiliar territory. She knew they were in the foothills of Virginia’s mountainous area, but the horse paths were so carefully planned that the riders were rarely aware of any more than a gentle slope. There was nothing gentle about the slope where she found herself now.

Lisa grabbed another branch and held on to it while she let herself down the hillside. Then she was at the big boulder where Honey-Pie had disappeared. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that it had all happened very fast. Honey-Pie had been standing calmly between Belle and Starlight, and then there was that awful sound—what was it?—and then Honey-Pie was racing away. Then she was gone. So very fast.

Lisa could hear Stevie circling to her right and was vaguely aware of Carole, farther away to her left. In her mind, though, she could still hear the awful sound that had frightened Honey-Pie. It had frightened all of them, really, but when it had stopped, nobody had paused to think about what it had been.

Lisa followed her instincts down the hill, thinking that a horse that started running down a hill would keep running down a hill.

“Honey-Pie!” she called out, wondering if the horse would respond to her name. She remembered then the silly image of Ben Stookey standing at the bottom of the ramp on the van, calling Honey-Pie as if she were a dog. Nobody had known at the time just how sweet this horse was. The thought of everything they’d learned about Honey-Pie since then overwhelmed Lisa as she carefully set down one foot, then the next, descending the steep hill. She couldn’t stop the tear that rolled down her cheek.

“Honey-Pie!” she cried out, even more loudly this time. There was still no answer.

S
TEVIE LEANED BACK
in Belle’s saddle to accommodate the steep downward angle of the path. She stopped every few feet and listened. She knew her eyes were important in this search, but her ears might turn out to be even more important.

“Come on, Belle, do you hear anything?” Stevie listened intently, but she also watched her horse’s ears. Belle’s hearing was much keener than her own, she knew. Belle was likely to hear the fleeing horse long before Stevie did.

Belle’s ears flicked around. When Lisa called Honey-Pie’s name, Belle’s ears turned toward the sound. Stevie sat up eagerly. Did Lisa’s calling mean she had found the
horse? She waited for a second, barely breathing. There was no other sound. Lisa was just calling for Honey-Pie. Stevie smiled, recalling how Mr. Stookey had tried to call the horse that way, too. It hadn’t worked then, but it had been funny. Now it was nice to have a little something to smile about.

Stevie clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and Belle continued downhill, along the path.

It seemed to Stevie that a frightened horse wasn’t going to pay much attention to its direction; it was just going to run. And, once running, chances were it would keep heading in pretty much the same direction, dodging trees, rocks, and other natural obstacles, until it could run no farther. Stevie had no idea what obstacles Honey-Pie might have encountered, but she did know the general direction the horse had started out in, and it made sense to her to keep going that way.

She stopped again and looked around. This time there were no sounds. Belle’s ears stood straight up. Nothing.

They went on.

“O
UCH
!” L
ISA SAID
involuntarily. She’d scraped her hand on a rock as she grabbed for a branch. “Why couldn’t you have run away in a field?” she said, now a
little annoyed at the daunting task of searching the woods for a horse that seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth.

And there was no sign of the horse. Nothing. There were no noises, no rustling, no whinnies. Perhaps Honey-Pie
had
disappeared, been picked up by aliens in a ship.
No, no.
Lisa shook her head. She was beginning to think like Stevie.

The ground leveled then, making Lisa’s progress easier, but progress to where? She had no idea whether she was anywhere near the horse.

She stopped and looked around to see if she could tell where she was. She hadn’t gone far and shouldn’t have trouble finding her way back to the clearing by the creek. What she didn’t know was whether she would have any success in looking for Honey-Pie.

Overhead, a squirrel dashed along a branch, making an eager clucking sound. Was he trying to tell her something? Probably not. Squirrels were not noted for their intelligence.

Lisa took a few steps, then paused to catch her breath. There was something horsey, familiar. What was it? She took in another lungful of fresh Virginia air. There was definitely something horsey about it. It had the distinct odor of manure.

She looked at the ground. There, not far from her,
were two balls of manure. Lisa didn’t think it would have been possible for her to be happy at the sight of manure, but she definitely was. Where there was manure, there was a horse, and these were decidedly fresh droppings. She
was
on the right trail. Now all she had to do was find the next bit of manure!

She sniffed again; she scanned the ground. The two balls lay a few inches apart. The next one had to be straight ahead. She began to follow an imaginary line and crossed her fingers.

C
AROLE LEANED FORWARD
, ducking under a branch that hung low over the horse trail. She had decided it made sense to follow the widest trail that kept to the contour of the hill, suspecting that if Honey-Pie had happened upon this trail her protective instincts would have kept her on it. The trail looped around, coming back to Pine Hollow. It would be the best news in the world if she found the horse somewhere along this comfortable, safe path. Carole knew wishful thinking when she was dealing with it, but there was some logic involved as well.

She paused every few steps, listening and looking, as she knew her friends were doing. The trail divided ahead. Carole had forgotten that fork. One part of the path continued uphill and the other went down, paralleling
the creek all the way to the field. They didn’t take this lower trail very often because it skirted one of the rare ravines in these woods. It was rocky and could be dangerous. Max often warned young riders away from it.

What convinced Carole to follow it was not that she was certain she’d find Honey-Pie there, but that she knew it was the part of the woods where Honey-Pie would be most likely to get in trouble—the only place where she might really need their help to get out.

A sudden realization swept over her and she felt a surge of cold perspiration.
The gorge. The gorge. Anything but that!

T
HERE IT WAS
, another ball of manure. Lisa knew she was going in the right direction, and part of her was very happy about that. Another part wasn’t happy at all. She was getting closer and closer to the bed of Willow Creek, and just across the creek, on the side of the hill that seemed so gentle right where she stood, was an area that wasn’t gentle at all. What if …?

She stifled the thought and pressed forward.

“Honey-Pie!” she cried out. “Honey-Pie!” Still no answer.

The land rose to the left and Lisa followed it, knowing exactly where it would lead her. Her breath came in small gulps and her heart began pounding.

She wasn’t at all surprised to see Carole following the path that came from above her on the hillside. She knew that Carole knew, too.

“Where’s Stevie?” Carole asked.

“Not far,” Lisa said. “I heard her—”

“You guys?” Stevie said, the worry apparent in her voice. “You know what I think?”

“Yeah, we know,” Lisa said. “We’ve all figured it out.”

They all stopped. There were still no sounds, no horse in distress, no whinnying, nickering, chomping, stamping.

Belle’s ears perked forward.

“Let’s go see,” said Stevie.

It wasn’t far to the edge. They almost didn’t want to get there, but they knew they had to.

Where the land had broken away to form the ravine, they saw the first definite signs of the bad news they feared but somehow expected. A scramble of hoofprints told the story of a desperate but failed effort to stay on top of the hillside.

“Honey-Pie!” Lisa called before looking over the edge. She didn’t want to look, and neither did her friends.

There was a snort and a whinny in response. They’d found her.

Lisa neared the edge of the steep hillside, and, holding on to a secure tree branch, she looked over.

“She’s there!” Lisa said. “She’s standing and she’s okay, but she’s not alone!”

“Danny!” Carole said breathlessly.

“Wow! A thousand bucks!” said Stevie.

I
T SEEMED LIKE
good news, and of course it was, but the girls knew their work wasn’t done. Stevie and Carole dismounted, secured their horses—firmly—to tree branches, and joined Lisa at the edge of the ravine.

Knowing the horses were there was not the same thing as knowing they were okay, and it was far from the same thing as rescuing them.

“A helicopter!” Stevie said. “I mean, between the two of them, those horses are richer than almost anybody in Willow Creek. Honey-Pie could hire a helicopter to get the two of them out of there!”