Third-Time Lucky (7 page)

“And there’s a respiratory problem that we need to check out.”

“How’re we gonna do that?” Sandy asked. She’d assured Glen that the cost of getting the palomino back to full health wasn’t an issue. “Whatever it takes,” she’d insisted. “Never mind the expense.”

“First, we make a culture of the nasal discharge and look for bacterial infection. We’ll be looking for a herpes virus, say. That would fit in with a slight swelling I can feel beneath the horse’s jaw.”

As she listened to the technical stuff, Kirstie felt a little better. Glen sure knew what he was talking about. Not that Matt didn’t, but the vet from San Luis had years of experience in treating sick horses.

“If it’s herpes, all you need to do is rest Lucky until the infection clears up. Period.”

Lisa nudged Kirstie’s arm and smiled.

“If we find equine influenza, that’s more serious,” Glen went on.

“It’s not that!” Kirstie quickly reminded them about the up-to-date health program. “You vaccinated Lucky yourself, remember!”

“OK, so the other options include a streptococcus virus, so we have to watch out for abscesses under the jaw. Or else it could be emphysema: lung damage caused by an allergy to spores in mold that you get around fodder and bedding.”

By this time, Kirstie found that the long words had begun to have the reverse effect. Instead of being reassured by Glen’s knowledge, she felt scared by the number of serious illnesses a horse could get. And now he was moving on to an examination of the inside of Lucky’s airways which involved pushing a tube through his nostril, down the windpipe into his lungs.

“The tube contains fiber optic strands,” Glen explained. “They’re connected to this light source so we get to see the damage to the lungs, if any.”

As the vet approached Lucky with the tube, Kirstie backed away from the stall in dismay. She didn’t want to stay to see this, so she walked out of the barn, leaving the cluster of experts—her mom, Matt, and Glen—to carry out the examination. Lisa chose to watch, her face tense, her jaw clenched tight. But Tommy followed Kirstie out into the daylight.

“Jeez!” Closing her eyes, she leaned against the wall of the barn and took a deep breath. The wooden boards felt warm through her thin cotton shirt.

Tommy walked ahead a few paces, then kicked his toe against a tethering post. His mouth was screwed up tight and he gave a slight shake of his head. “Kirstie …”

“What?” She opened her eyes to squint into the sun at the hunched figure in a black T-shirt and jeans.

“I got something to tell you.” More uneasy than ever, he scuffed his boot in the dust.

“I’m not gonna like it, am I?” Pushing herself free of the wall, she edged toward him. Tommy was so quiet it was unusual for him to begin a conversation. He was just someone who was always there in the background, helping his dad with the paperwork that all vets carried with them.

“It’s about Lucky’s flu shot.” He paused, sighed, then forced himself to carry on. “The file for April shows that we gave all the Half Moon Ranch horses their booster for tetanus, influenza, and rhino …”

“Yeah?” They’d looked at the files when Moonshine fell ill. All the boxes had check marks filled in. “So?”

“The list ain’t right,” Tommy told her. He left off scuffing his boot and looked up at her with hooded eyes.

“How come?”

“It ain’t true that all the horses had their shots. I was the one checking them off, so I should know!”

“Meaning what exactly?” At times like this, when new possibilities exploded inside her head, she asked the dumbest questions.

“Meaning, we needed to get out of here fast, onto the next job. My pa gives the shots; I line up the horses and check them off the list. He deals with so many, he don’t remember the names of each and every horse. That’s my job.”

Kirstie clenched her fists and practically stopped breathing. What was Tommy building up to?

“So what I did when we ran short of time was look at a few horses way down the list: Cadillac, Moose, Crazy Horse, and Lucky. I see it’s only ninety days since we gave them the last booster, and I reckon there’s not much risk if we just leave them off the list that day, so long as I keep it in my head to put them at the top of the list next time.”

“But you put a check mark in the box to make it look as if we were up to date?” Another dumb question, but Kirstie found it hard to believe what Tommy was telling her.

He nodded, unable to look her in the eye any longer.

“So Lucky didn’t have the shot, which means right now he isn’t immune to tetanus …”

“Or rhinopneumonitis …”

“Or influenza!” she gasped. “Oh, my gosh, Tommy, why didn’t you tell us this before?”

It was like fitting a new piece in a difficult jigsaw, the fact that Lucky and several other horses at Half Moon Ranch had been left wide open to infection.

“Horse flu is what killed Moonshine!” Kirstie walked with Lisa up and down the ranch house porch. “It turns into pneumonia and kills them. At the very least, they have permanent damage to their lungs!”

“Wait!” Lisa’s advice was brief. She’d watched and listened hard as Tommy had come back into the barn after his talk with Kirstie to confess what he’d done.

“How can I? Like, waiting is the last thing we should do. Didn’t we lose enough time already?” Kirstie meant the hours lost because of Tommy’s guilty silence.

“Look, Glen did all the tests and took them off to the lab, didn’t he? Now we just have to hang on until he gets the results.”

“It’s flu,” Kirstie said in a flat, fatalistic voice, her face marked by a grim frown. “I feel that’s what it is. Lucky was the one who got closest of all to Whisper. The pony was coughing those bugs all over him.”

“Say you’re right.” Lisa caught her arm to stop her pacing up and down. “It’s still good nursing and a whole lot of patience that’s gonna pull Lucky through.”

Kirstie broke free and stepped down into the yard. Over in the corral, guests were gathering for the afternoon rides. The routine of the ranch carried on regardless. “It’s weird!” She turned back to Lisa. “We got all these tests and drugs with fancy, scientific names; we got labs and hospitals for horses and all the modern stuff, but we still can’t do a single thing to help Lucky!”

Matt had tried and Glen Woodford was doing his best, but still no one was certain what was wrong. And the thing everyone told her was “Wait and see.”

“There must be something else!” she insisted.

“Yeah, modern stuff …” Lisa echoed. Knitting her brows and catching her bottom lip between her teeth, she stepped down absentmindedly from the porch, staring at Hadley who was in the corral helping riders to mount their horses.

“Here we are, the turn of the millennium, living in a country with the most up-to-date Western medicines you could wish for, and they say ‘Rest.’ That’s it! ‘Rest’ and ‘Wait and see’!” Kirstie’s impatience took her across the yard toward the corral, to lean on the fence.

Lisa joined her. “Uhmm … Kirstie …”

“Yeah?” Once the rides were out of the way, her plan was to help Charlie dissolve Lucky’s next dose of penicillin in his drinking water.

“… Say we stopped thinking modern here. Say we started thinking something more traditional.” Lisa spoke slowly and quietly, without her usual bubbling self-confidence. She was still staring thoughtfully at the senior wrangler.

Puzzled, Kirstie followed her line of vision. “No use asking Hadley,” she objected before Lisa could even suggest it. “He already said that the type of infection Lucky’s got is bad news. ‘The ruin of many a good saddle horse,’ to use his words.” The old man had looked in on Lucky over lunch and more or less written him off.

“I wasn’t thinking of asking Hadley’s advice.” Lisa sniffed and climbed the fence. She headed for the lean, slightly stooped figure of the longest serving member of the Half Moon Ranch crew. “It’s his brains I’m interested in. Pure information, honest!”

Kirstie clicked out of her gloomy mood and followed, weaving between horses and riders, avoiding Charlie’s long rake as it cleared the yard.

“Hey, Hadley!” Lisa looked up at him as he settled in the saddle on Silver Flash, his hat pulled well down, a blue neckerchief protecting the back of his neck from the sun. “You remember a guy called Red Mitchell who worked here way back?”

“Uh-huh.” Hadley backed his sorrel horse away from the post, one eye on the group of advanced riders.

“That means, ‘Uh-huh; yep’?” Lisa reached for Silver Flash’s rein.

A nod, a shrug, so what?

“He had a horse called Bandit?”

“Black-and-white paint,” came the swift reply. Hadley was always more interested in talking about horses than about people. “That gelding had great presence: part Morgan, part quarter horse. Never lost his cool, most hardworking cutter you ever seen.”

“That’s the one!” Lisa stole a quick glance at Kirstie to see if she was clued in. “OK, so Red Mitchell took Bandit to some horse doctor when he fell sick one year.” She recounted the story her grandpa had told her.

“Yep.” Hadley clammed up again, making it clear he didn’t have time to chat.

“This horse doctor; where did he hang out?” Refusing to let go of Silver Flash’s rein, Lisa followed Hadley across the corral.

“In the mountains, way out West, I forget.”

“In Colorado? Wyoming? Montana?”

“Montana.” Hadley saw that he wouldn’t get rid of Lisa until he’d given her some answers. “Long way from here. Place called Rainbow Mountain.”

“And when was this?” Lisa realized her time was running out. Hadley’s group had surrounded him, eager to leave. “Twenty years back? Thirty? What was the guy’s name, do you remember?”

“Twenty, twenty-five years. I didn’t pay too much attention. All I know is, Red Mitchell got some damn fool idea into his head that his sick horse needed special medicine from a guy holed up in the mountains. Had some Native American blood, as I recall. Sioux maybe, or Comanche.”

Lisa nodded eagerly, storing the information for future reference. “His name!” she pleaded.

Hadley raked through his memory one last time. “Maybe it was Stone. Zak Stone. Yeah, I guess that was it.”

“Hang on just a minute!” Sandy Scott had trouble taking in Kirstie’s eager plan. She’d returned from her afternoon ride to find her daughter transformed. Instead of a listless, anxious wreck, she’d been greeted by this energetic blonde whirlwind. “Tell me one more time!”

“Zak Stone!” Kirstie repeated the name. “Lisa and me asked Hadley about him. Then we called all the old-timers on the ranches around here!”

“You’ve been running up my phone bill, huh?” Her mom refused to be drawn in. Instead, she poured herself a cup of coffee.

“Grandpa couldn’t recall much more than Hadley,” Lisa reported. “But Jim Mullins at Lazy B said everyone knew about Zak Stone in those days. He had a name as the best horse doctor in the West.”

“So how come I never heard of him?” Sandy sat down wearily at the table.

“Because he’s a hermit!” Kirstie jumped back in. “You know; he don’t.”

“‘Doesn’t’!” Sandy corrected.

“He doesn’t like having folks around. Lives in the backwoods on Rainbow Mountain in south east Montana. If people want to see him, they gotta find their own way. You could drive for days across country, I guess, and turn up at his place without knowing for sure that you’d find him home.”

“Very convenient!” Sandy looked up at Matt, who had just come in, with a sigh that said “Help!”

“Find who home?” Kirstie’s brother asked. He too looked dead beat.

“Zak Stone!” Kirstie began the explanations all over again. “Part Sioux…old, Native American remedies…herbs and stuff…works like magic… holed up in the mountains of Montana!”

“And all this is over twenty years back,” Sandy stressed. “He hasn’t even been heard of in these parts for at least five years. So forget it, Matt. And Kirstie, don’t even think what I think you’re thinking about!”

“The best in the West!” Kirstie repeated.

It was late evening. She and Matt stood in the barn, gazing quietly into Lucky’s stall. The only sounds were the whispering rustles of hidden, small creatures creeping through the hay or perched on rafters, and the painful rasps of Lucky’s lungs as he struggled to draw breath.

“Yeah, but logically, Mom’s got a point.” Matt had a foot in each camp; he saw that the Zak Stone option might be a straw to clutch at, but equally he agreed with Sandy that it was at best a long shot as far as finding a cure for Lucky went.

In…out, in and out again. Kirstie stared at the difficult, double lift of Lucky’s ribcage as he breathed out through the blocked airways. “What’s logic got to do with it?” she whispered.

“Sandy? Lennie Goodman here.”

Kirstie had picked up the phone early next morning, thinking it might be Glen Woodford with Lucky’s test results. “Hi, Lennie. This is Kirstie. Mom’s right here.”

She handed over the phone and stuck around, hearing the mild surprise in Sandy’s voice and her repetition of Lisa’s grandpa’s words.

“Zak Stone? Not that name again!” Kirstie’s mom tried to make light of the question that had been hanging over the family all night. “My crazy daughter’s half persuaded my sane son that driving a truck across America with a sick horse to see a Sioux horse doctor who might not even be alive after all these years is a good idea!”