The Horse Whisperer (3 page)

With a jolt, Wayne spotted the exit for Chatham coming up and he got to work, pumping the brakes and taking the truck down through its nine gears, making the big four-twenty-five horsepower Cummins engine roar in complaint. As he forked away from the interstate he flipped the four-wheel-drive switch, locking in the cab’s front axle. From here, he calculated, it was maybe just five or six miles to the mill.

   High in the woods that morning there was a stillness, as if life itself had been suspended. Neither bird nor animal spoke and the only sound was the sporadic soft thud of snow from overladen boughs. Up into this waiting vacuum, through maple and birch, rose the distant laughter of the girls.

They were making their way slowly up the winding trail that led to the ridge, letting the horses choose the pace. Judith was in front and she was twisted around, propped with one hand on the cantle of Gulliver’s saddle, looking back at Pilgrim and laughing.

“You should put him in a circus,” she said. “The guy’s a natural clown.”

Grace was laughing too much to reply. Pilgrim was
walking with his head down, pushing his nose through the snow like a shovel. Then he would toss a load of it into the air with a sneeze and break into a little trot, pretending to be frightened of it as it scattered.

“Hey, come on now you, that’s enough,” said Grace, reining him in, getting control. Pilgrim settled back into a walk and Judith, still grinning, shook her head and turned to face the trail again. Gulliver walked on, thoroughly unconcerned by the antics behind him, his head moving up and down to the rhythm of his feet. Along the trail, every twenty yards or so, bright orange posters were pinned to the trees, threatening prosecution for anyone caught hunting, trapping or trespassing.

At the crest of the ridge that separated the two valleys was a small, circular clearing where normally, if they approached quietly, they might find deer or wild turkey. Today however, when the girls rode out from the trees and into the sun, all they found was the bloody, severed wing of a bird. It lay almost exactly in the middle of the clearing like the mark of some savage compass and the girls stopped there and looked down at it.

“What is it, a pheasant or something?” said Grace.

“I guess. A former pheasant anyway. Part of a former pheasant.”

Grace frowned. “How did it get here?”

“I don’t know. A fox maybe.”

“It couldn’t be, where are the tracks?”

There weren’t any. Nor was there any sign of a struggle. It was as if the wing had flown there on its own. Judith shrugged.

“Maybe somebody shot it.”

“What, and the rest of it flew on with one wing?”

They both pondered a moment. Then Judith nodded sagely. “A hawk. Dropped by a passing hawk.”

Grace thought it over. “A hawk. Uh-huh. I’ll buy that.” They nudged the horses into a walk again.

“Or a passing airplane.”

Grace laughed. “That’s it,” she said. “It looks like the chicken they served on that flight to London last year. Only better.”

Usually when they rode up here to the ridge they would give the horses a canter across the clearing and then loop back down to the stables by another trail. But the snow and the sun and the clear morning sky made both girls want more than that today. They decided to do something they had done only once before, a couple of years ago, when Grace still had Gypsy, her stocky little palomino pony. They would cross over into the next valley, cut down through the woods and come back around the hill the long way, beside Kinderhook Creek. It meant crossing a road or two, but Pilgrim seemed to have settled down and anyway, this early on a snowy Saturday morning, there would be nothing much about.

As they left the clearing and passed again into the shade of the woods, Grace and Judith fell silent. There were hickories and poplars on this side of the ridge with no obvious trail among them and the girls had frequently to lower their heads to pass beneath the branches so that soon they and the horses were covered with a fine sprinkling of dislodged snow. They negotiated their way slowly down beside a stream. Crusts of ice overhung it, spreading jaggedly from the banks and allowing but a glimpse of the water that rushed darkly beneath. The slope grew ever steeper and the horses now moved with caution, taking care where they placed their feet. Once Gulliver slipped lurchingly on a hidden rock, but he righted himself without panic. The sun slanting down through the trees made crazed patterns
on the snow and lit the clouds of breath billowing from the horses’ nostrils. But neither girl paid heed, for they were concentrating too hard on the descent and their heads were filled only with the feel of the animals they rode.

It was with relief that at last they saw the glint of Kinderhook Creek below them through the trees. The descent had been more difficult than either girl had expected and only now did they feel able to look at each other and grin.

“Nice one, huh?” Judith said, gently bringing Gulliver to a stop. Grace laughed.

“No problem.” She leaned forward and rubbed Pilgrim’s neck. “Didn’t these guys do well?”

“They did great.”

“I don’t remember it being steep like that.”

“It wasn’t. I think we followed a different stream. I figure we’re about a mile farther south than we should be.”

They brushed the snow from their clothes and hats and peered down through the trees. Below the woods a meadow of virgin white sloped gently down to the river. Along the near side of the river they could just make out the fence posts of the old road that led to the pulp mill. It was a road no longer used since a wider, more direct access had been built from the highway which lay half a mile away on the other side of the river. The girls would have to follow the old mill road north to pick up the route they had planned to get home.

   Just as he’d feared, the road down to Chatham hadn’t been cleared. But Wayne Tanner soon realized he needn’t have worried. Others had been out before him
and the Kenworth’s eighteen heavy-duty tires cut into their tracks and grabbed the surface firmly. He hadn’t needed the damn chains after all. He passed a snowplow coming the other way and even though that wasn’t a whole lot of use to him, such was his relief that he gave the guy a wave and a friendly blast on the horn.

He lit a cigarette and looked at his watch. He was earlier than he’d said he would be. After his run-in with the cops, he’d called Atlanta and told them to fix things with the mill people for him to deliver the turbines in the morning. Nobody liked working on a Saturday and he guessed he wasn’t going to be too popular when he got there. Still, that was their problem. He shoved in another Garth Brooks tape and started looking out for the entrance to the mill.

   The old mill road was easy going after the woods and the girls and their horses relaxed as they made their way along it, side by side in the sunshine. Away to their left, a pair of blue jays chased each other in the trees fringing the river and through their shrill chatter and the rustle of water on rock, Grace could hear what she assumed was a snowplow out clearing the highway.

“Here we go.” Judith nodded up ahead.

It was the place they had been looking for, where once a railroad had crossed first the mill road and then the river. It was many years since the railroad had closed and though the river bridge remained intact, the top of the bridge across the road had been removed. All that remained were its tall concrete sides, a roofless tunnel through which the road now passed before disappearing in a bend. Just before it was a steep path that led up the embankment to the level of the railroad and
it was up here that the girls needed to go to get onto the river bridge.

Judith went first, steering Gulliver up the path. He took a few steps then stopped.

“Come on boy, it’s okay.”

The horse gently pawed the snow, as if testing it. Judith urged him on with her heels now.

“Come on lazybones, up we go.”

Gulliver relented and moved on again up the path. Grace waited down in the road, watching. She was vaguely aware that the sound of the snowplow out on the highway seemed louder. Pilgrim’s ears twitched. She reached down and patted his sweaty neck.

“How is it?” she called up to Judith.

“It’s okay. Take it gently though.”

It happened just as Gulliver was almost at the top of the embankment. Grace had started up behind him, following his tracks as precisely as she could, letting Pilgrim take his time. She was halfway up when she heard the rasp of Gulliver’s shoe on ice and Judith’s frightened cry.

Had the girls ridden here more recently, they would have known that the slope they were climbing had, since late summer, run with water from a leaking culvert. The blanket of snow now concealed a sheet of sheer ice.

Gulliver staggered, trying to find purchase with his hind feet, kicking up a spray of snow and ice shards. But as each foot failed to hold, his rear end swung down and across the slope so that he was now squarely on the ice. One of his forelegs skewed sideways and he went down on one knee, still sliding. Judith cried out as she was flung forward and lost a stirrup. But she managed to grab the horse’s neck and stayed on, yelling down at Grace now.

“Get out of the way! Grace!”

Grace was transfixed. There was a roar of blood in her head that seemed to freeze and separate her from what she was watching above her. But upon Judith’s second cry she reconnected and tried to turn Pilgrim down the slope. The horse yanked his head, frightened, fighting her. He took several small sideways steps, twisting his neck up the slope until his feet too skidded and he nickered in alarm. They were now directly in the path of Gulliver’s slide. Grace screamed and wrenched the reins.

“Pilgrim, come on! Move!”

In the odd stillness of the moment before Gulliver hit them, Grace knew there was more to the roar in her head than the rushing of blood. That snowplow wasn’t out on the highway., It was too loud for that. It was somewhere nearer. The thought was vaporized by the shuddering impact of Gulliver’s hindquarters. He bulldozed into them, hitting Pilgrim’s shoulder and spinning him around. Grace felt herself being lifted out of the saddle, whiplashed up the slope. And had one hand not found the rump of the other horse she would have fallen then as Judith fell. But she stayed on, wrapping a fist into Pilgrim’s silky mane as he slid down the slope beneath her.

Gulliver and Judith were past her now and she watched her friend being flung like a discarded doll across the horse’s rear, then jerk and twist viciously back as her foot snagged in the stirrup. Judith’s body bounced and swung sideways and as she hit the ice hard with the back of her head, her foot took another twist in the stirrup, locking itself there so that now she was being dragged. In one seething, frenzied tangle, the two horses and their riders careered down toward the road.

Wayne Tanner saw them as soon as he came out of
the bend. Assuming he would be approaching from the south, the mill people hadn’t thought to mention the old access road farther north. So Wayne had seen the turn and taken it and was relieved to find the Kenworth’s wheels seemed to hold the untracked snow as well as they had back on the highway. When he came around the bend he saw, maybe a hundred yards ahead, the concrete walls of the bridge and beyond it, framed by it, some animal, a horse, trailing something. Wayne’s stomach turned over.

“What the hell?”

He hit the brakes, but not too hard, for he knew that if he made things too sudden the wheels would lock, so he worked the trolley valve on the steering wheel, trying to get drag from the brakes at the back of the trailer. He couldn’t even feel it. The gears would have to bring him down and he smacked the heel of his hand into the shift and double-declutched, making the six cylinders of the Cummins roar. Shit, he’d been going too fast. There were two horses there now, one with a rider on it. What the hell were they doing? Why didn’t they get off the goddamn road? His heart was pounding and he could feel a sweat breaking out as he worked the trailer brakes and the shift, finding a rhythm in the mantra going through his head:
Hit the binders, grab a gear, hit the binders, grab a gear
. But the bridge was looming up too fast. For Christsake, couldn’t they hear him coming? Couldn’t they see him?

They could. Even Judith, in her agony on the ground, could see him, fleetingly, as she was thrashed around screaming through the snow. Her thighbone had snapped when she fell and in the slide to the road both horses had stepped on her, crushing ribs and splintering a forearm. In that first stumble Gulliver had cracked a knee and torn tendons and the pain and fear that filled
his head showed in the whites of his eyes as he reeled and pranced and tried to free himself of this thing that hung hooked to his side.

Grace saw the truck as soon as they reached the road. One look was enough. Somehow she had managed not to fall and now she had to get them all off the road. If she could get hold of Gulliver’s reins, she could lead him off to safety, dragging Judith behind. But Pilgrim was as freaked as the older horse and the two of them circled frantically, feeding each other’s fear.

With all her strength, Grace tugged on Pilgrim’s mouth and for a moment had his attention. She backed him toward the other horse, leaning precariously from her saddle, and reached out for Gulliver’s bridle. He moved off, but she shadowed him, stretching out her arm till she thought it would pop from its socket. Her fingers were nearly on it when the truck blasted its horn.

Wayne saw both horses leap at the sound and for the first time realized what it was that hung from the side of the one that had no rider.

“Holy shit.”

He said it out loud and at the same time found he had run out of gears. He was in first and the bridge and the horses were coming up so fast he knew all he could do now was go for the tractor brakes. He murmured a little prayer and stepped harder than he knew he should on the foot valve. For a second it seemed to work. He could feel the wheels at the back of the cab bite home.

“Yeah! That’s my girl.”

Then the wheels locked and Wayne felt forty tons of steel take charge of their own destiny.