Wild Horses Page 4

“Let me come!” Kirstie joined in. Lone Elm was a trailer park a couple of miles along the creek. The owner, Lennie Goodman, used the big yellow tractor-type vehicle with a giant metal scoop across the front to shift earth and make new sites for the big trailers and recreational vehicles that visited the area.

  Sandy glanced at her watch. “The guests are over in the dining room having lunch. We have half an hour before the afternoon rides. If we all lend a hand to saddle up the horses, I reckon Hadley and Kirstie could take the afternoon off.”

  “Great!” Kirstie jumped in, taking her mom at her word. She headed for the door, jamming a baseball cap onto her head, urging Hadley to hurry.

  But the old man never did anything in a rush. He said he would ring Lennie Goodman to check things out, sending Charlie after Kirstie across to the corral to help prepare the horses for the afternoon ride. Soon Matt and Sandy joined them there too.

  Kirstie went from horse to horse along the tethered row. She checked their stirrups and tightened their cinches after Charlie and Matt had lifted the heavy saddles across their broad backs. When she came to Silver Flash, however, she saw that the big sorrel horse stood in her head collar, without saddle or bridle.

  “Ronnie Vernon won’t be riding this afternoon,” Charlie told her. “He says he wants to go fishing instead.”

  “Hmm.” She wrinkled her nose, then sniffed. Personally, after the way he’d disobeyed orders and raced Silver Flash up out of the canyon this morning, she wouldn’t care if the man never rode again.

  “He feels pretty bad,” Charlie reported.

  “Tell me about it.” She raised her fair eyebrows until they disappeared under the peak of her cap. A glance toward the dining room showed her the man himself walking quickly in the other direction, away from the corral. “You could say he was the reason the stallion got hurt.”

  “You mean he started the landslide?” Matt frowned.

  Sandy stopped work to listen.

  Kirstie untethered Silver Flash, ready to lead her out to the remuda, the strip of grassland by Five Mile Creek. “He’s the one who set the first rocks sliding by making his horse lope up the track.”

  “Yeah, but there was a lot of rain coming down that ridge.” Charlie stepped in to remind them that Vernon shouldn’t take all the blame. “The water loosened the whole thing up. It could’ve happened to anyone.”

  Sandy nodded, giving Kirstie a meaningful look. “Let’s leave it, OK?”

  Kirstie blushed, realizing that she might be being hotheaded. She was worked up by vivid memories of the injured horse. “Sorry,” she said quietly.

  “No, it’s OK, I understand.” Her mom walked alongside as Kirstie led Silver Flash down to the meadow. “They tell me you fixed the stallion up pretty good.”

  “Let’s hope.” She recalled her last view of him, angered by the bandage around his leg, trapped in the canyon as more rain clouds rolled down the mountain.

  “You did a good job, Kirstie.” Sandy watched her daughter put Silver Flash to graze, then stretched an arm around her shoulder.

  “I wish Glen Woodford would get here!” Try as she might, she couldn’t get the main problem out of her mind: the first-aid treatment she’d given the badly injured horse wouldn’t hold out for long. What the stallion really needed was a vet. And quick.

  But she was distracted by the sight of a new figure riding on a bike down the dirt track from the main gates of Half Moon Ranch. She recognized the short red hair and long limbs of her best friend, Lisa Goodman. Lisa was Lennie Goodman’s granddaughter, the same age as Kirstie and in the same grade at San Luis Middle School.

  “Hey!” Lisa spotted Kirstie and Sandy and veered across the grass toward them. “I was at Lone Elm when Hadley called!” she explained, flinging her bike down. “He told us what happened.”

  “Can your grandpa lend Hadley the earth-mover?” Kirstie asked.

  “Sure. He’s driving it over from the trailer park right now. I came on ahead.” Breathless from her ride, Lisa walked back to the corral with Kirstie and her mother. “Sounds like you got a real problem on your hands,” she gasped. “Can I come see?”

  Quickly Kirstie nodded. She knew Lisa wouldn’t be in the way. “Hadley can take over and drive the JCB when your grandpa brings it. We’ll saddle Cadillac for you …”

  “Best ask Matt first,” Sandy reminded them. “He’s back home now, remember!”

  “Ask me what?” Matt came out of the tack-room to catch the end of the sentence. He’d taken off his college clothes and wore his Stetson and riding boots instead, ready for the afternoon’s work. “Does someone want to borrow my horse by any chance?”

  They arranged with him for Lisa to ride Matt’s white gelding, and while they were doing this, a black Jeep rode down the track to the ranch house.

  “Glen Woodford!” Kirstie cried, breaking away from the group. She climbed the corral fence and ran to meet him. “What kept you?”

  Ignoring her question, the vet jumped down from the Jeep, slammed the door, and strode toward her. “Hey, Kirstie, I hear you can put me in the picture. How’s this injured horse of yours doing?”

  As she explained, Charlie went out to the remuda to fetch yet another horse, this time for the vet. The wrangler said they should ride across country to the canyon to save time. “Dirt roads round here are flooded,” he told them. “According to Lennie, Five Mile Creek broke its banks.”

  Glen nodded and went to fetch his bag from the car, while Kirstie ran for a saddlebag for him and strapped it onto the back of his horse’s saddle. Meanwhile, Lisa was up on Cadillac, ready and waiting.

  “You got a two-way radio with you?” Sandy asked, as Kirstie mounted Lucky.

  She nodded.

  “Keep us in touch. I’ll be out leading the beginners’ ride.” Sandy glanced round to see the first guests leaving the dining room and heading for the corral.

  Glen Woodford promised to keep an eye on both girls. “We should reach the canyon before Hadley gets there with the JCB,” he guessed. “According to Kirstie, I should be able to climb down from the ridge. If it goes well, I can treat the horse’s injuries, give him a couple of shots of procaine, and be out of there before the work on moving the rocks begins. Then it’ll be up to Hadley to make a way out for the whole herd.”

  “Let’s go!” Impatient to set off, her hopes raised by the vet’s confident words, Kirstie tapped her heels against Lucky’s sides.

  The willing palomino strode out across the corral, followed by Lisa on Cadillac and Glen on a brown and white six-year-old paint called Yukon.

  “Forget the trails!” Kirstie called over her shoulder, heading Lucky straight up the slope behind the ranch. “We’ll bushwhack across country; it’ll be quicker!” She calculated roughly forty-five minutes to the canyon, caught a glimpse of the giant yellow earth-mover trundling slowly along Meltwater Trail as they rose high through the aspen trees. Overhead, the clouds still threatened, but for the moment the rain held off.

  Three-quarters of an hour of pushing the horses uphill, picking their way clear of the lime-green aspens into the darker, spikier ponderosa pines. Silent except for the occasional snorting of the hardworking horses, the three riders concentrated on finding the quickest route to Miners’ Ridge.

  “What’s this procaine shot you mentioned earlier?” Lisa asked Glen as they climbed the final slopes. Though she lived at a diner in town with her mother, Bonnie Goodman, and didn’t ride as often as Kirstie, she’d kept up well.

  “Procaine is a type of penicillin,” the vet explained. “And the stallion will need one big dose of tetanus, since these are wild horses we’re dealing with and there’s no chance of them being immunized already.”

  “And will you stitch the wound?” Lisa quizzed.

  Glen shrugged. “Don’t know yet. Sutures don’t generally hold if the laceration is across a joint. I may be able to give him something to keep down the swelling; let’s hold on and see what we find when we get there.”

  Ki
rstie listened without breaking her own silence. The other two were talking as if the stallion’s leg wasn’t broken, she realized. She hoped they were right.

  She let Lucky pick his way up the steep hill, ducking to avoid branches, keeping her weight slightly forward in the saddle. Soon they would reach the ridge. Noticing Lucky’s ears prick forward to listen, she motioned for Glen and Lisa to keep quiet.

  “Are we almost there?” Lisa called after a minute or two of now silent progress.

  Kirstie nodded. They were coming to mounds of waste stone, long since grassed over; stony relics left by the gold miners way back last century. They would dig deep into the mountain with dynamite and picks, haul the rock out to the mine entrance, and dump it before burrowing back deep into the earth. During one bad winter a big explosion had killed many miners, and the accident had given the nearby deep gully its name. Beyond the rough mounds the long, narrow ridge that overlooked the canyon began.

  “That’s weird.” Kirstie tilted her head to one side. Like Lucky, she’d been listening hard. “I can’t hear anything.”

  Glen Woodford rode up alongside. “So? What should we hear?”

  “Hooves,” she explained. Earlier that morning, the wild horses had made a lot of noise as they pounded up and down the canyon. Now all was silent. “Really weird!”

  “Maybe they’re resting.” Lisa looked for an explanation. “Or listening to us sneaking up on them.”

  They rode on until they reached the top of the ridge and were able to look down.

  Still no noise. No restless shifting of hooves, no nervous whinnies echoing from the cliffs. Nothing.

  “Empty!” Kirstie gasped.

  No mares and foals huddled together, jostling down the far end of the gully.

  “How come?” Lisa stared at the blocked entrance where the fallen rocks towered, seemingly too high for a horse to climb.

  Kirstie slipped from the saddle and crouched by the sheer drop. “I don’t know!” she breathed. Her hands gripped at the edge of the cliff as she peered down.

  The canyon was deserted. There wasn’t a living thing down there. But how could a whole herd of wild horses have escaped? And the biggest question of all; where in the world was the injured black stallion?

  5

  “Where in the world?” was a good question. This out-of-the-way place with its unhappy history and its recent sudden disaster was starting to feel like it wasn’t in the real world after all. Maybe Kirstie had got it wrong, had imagined the storm and the landslide, the black stallion and the wild herd; maybe she’d dreamed them all.

  “Weird!” Lisa echoed Kirstie’s uneasy doubts.

  Glen Woodford got down slowly from Yukon, pausing to unstrap the saddlebag and bring his vet’s kit with him. He came and crouched at the edge of the ravine beside Kirstie and Lisa, hunching his broad shoulders inside his dark green jacket. “What do we reckon?” he asked, calm as ever.

  Kirstie shook her head. “They were here!” she insisted. “And there was no way out!”

  Lisa stood up and walked a few steps along the ridge to peer down the canyon from a different angle. “Zilch,” she reported in a flat voice. “Big round zero.”

  “OK, you guys, let’s get this clear.” The vet looked Kirstie straight in the eyes. His square, even-featured face beneath the neat dark hair was serious but showed no sign of irritation. “This is the right place?”

  This time Kirstie nodded. “For sure. You can ask Charlie.” No way could she have mistaken the canyon.

  Glen considered things. “So maybe the herd climbed out after you left.”

  “Maybe.” She was prepared to admit it was possible. “If they watched Lucky and me pick a new way up to the ridge, I guess they could have got the idea and followed.”

  She pictured the dozen or so horses tackling the difficult route.

  “But there were foals?” Glen asked. “The mares would have a tough time leading them up the cliff.”

  “I know.” Kirstie sighed and appealed to Lisa for a bright idea.

  Lisa looked sideways out of her green eyes, then turned away, muttering.

  “Well, maybe. But what beats me is how this injured stallion made it out.” The vet stood up and gazed around, as if the answer to the mystery might be across the far side of the canyon, or further up the mountain. “You say the leg was real bad?”

  “OK, listen. Number one, he was knocked unconscious by falling rocks. Number two, he lost a lot of blood.” Kirstie grew desperate to convince them. “That means he would be weak. And number three, the knee was so bad I thought it might even be broken!”

  Glen took this in. “So the good news is, you were wrong.” He went on in response to her blank look. “The knee wasn’t that bad…not broken, so he found he could put his weight on it and follow the other horses up the track.”

  “In other words, he made it out of there on his own?” Lisa got the idea. “Which means he’s doing OK.”

  Taking a deep breath, Kirstie nodded slowly. “I guess.”

  “What else?” The vet invited any other explanation. “…Which means he didn’t need my help after all,” he said after a long pause.

  Kirstie felt her face grow hot and flushed at the idea that she’d dragged Glen Woodford all the way from San Luis under false pretenses. “I’m real sorry,” she stammered.

  “Don’t be.” He smiled kindly, returning to Yukon to pack his vet’s kit back into the saddlebags. “This kind of happy ending I like!”

  “So, what we do now is radio a message through to your mom with the good news, then get back to the ranch in time for one of your awesome cowboy cookouts!” Lisa quickly looked on the bright side. She glanced up at the lightening sky and unzipped her yellow waterproof slicker. “Saturday. Cookout day. What’s to eat?”

  “Hmm?” Reluctant to leave the ridge, Kirstie still stared down into the empty canyon. “I got another idea,” she said slowly.

  Lisa came close. “How come I get the feeling I’m not going to like this so-called idea?” she asked, gingerly crouching down beside Kirstie.

  Through her continuing worries about the stallion and her puzzled surprise at finding Dead Man’s Canyon empty, Kirstie managed a grin. “Because it doesn’t involve supper at Half Moon Ranch?” she quipped.

  “What’s with the ‘we’?” Lisa demanded as she stood by Cadillac’s side and waved Glen Woodford and Yukon off down the mountain. “You told your mom that ‘we’ wanted to camp the night by Dead Man’s Canyon!”

  She made Kirstie laugh with her over-the-top expression of disgust. “We want to find the stallion, don’t we?”

  “Yeah …”

  “And we like sleeping out in summer?” She’d persuaded her mom that it would be great for her and Lisa to make camp up here.

  “What will you use for a tent?” Sandy had asked over the two-way radio. “And what will you eat?”

  Kirstie’s answer had been that Matt could ride up to the ridge before supper with the camping gear and food for both the girls and the horses.

  Sandy Scott had thought about it, then asked her to hand over the radio to Glen Woodford for his opinion.

  “They’d do fine,” the vet had told her with a wink at the girls. “No problem!”

  So it had been fixed. Kirstie and Lisa were sleeping out.

  A message had been sent to Hadley that the earth-moving equipment wouldn’t after all be needed right away. The wrangler had turned around and begun to head back to Lone Elm trailer park. And Matt had, as expected, been easygoing about bringing supplies when Sandy had reached him by two-way radio.

  “Great, Mom. Thanks!” Kirstie had clicked off the radio just as the vet had been ready to leave. Now she too waved and wished him a safe journey back to the ranch.

  “So… ?” Lisa watched Glen disappear down the slope, then took off her slicker, rolled it, and stuffed it into a saddlebag hitched to the back of Cadillac’s saddle.

  “So, we wait till Matt gets here with the feed for Cadillac
and Lucky. Then we pitch the tent and cook beans and burgers …”

  “Yuck!” Lisa pulled a face.

  “You said you wanted a cookout!” Kirstie reminded her.

  “Yeah. I was thinking more like chicken, marinated and grilled over an open fire. Baked potatoes, coleslaw…the full works. Not beans!” Lisa’s face was comically disappointed.

  “So … cowboy-up!” she told her with a big grin. It was the Scott family’s motto, half-jokey, half-serious. “It’s tough, but you know we can do it!”

  Lisa rolled her eyes again and pretended to sink against the rough bark of the tall pine tree. “There you go with that ‘we’ thing again!” she sighed.

  The small, dome-shaped tent was up. Beans were cooking on the tiny stove.

  “You don’t find it kinda…spooky up here?” Matt mentioned as he gave Lucky and Cadillac their feed.

  “Nope!” Kirstie said with lightning speed.

  “Yep!” Lisa shot back.

  “To me it feels like this place never gets the sun,” Matt went on. “It’s kind of shadowy, reminds me of, well, spooks, I guess.”

  “Thanks, Matt!” Kirstie muttered. Lisa was already jittery enough, without him putting his size ten boots in it.

  “Oh, don’t …” Lisa stared around at the lengthening shadows. A breeze in the trees rattled branches. Some small creature, a chipmunk or a ground squirrel, scuttled off through the bushes.

  Matt smiled to himself. He waited until Lucky had finished feeding, then let him wander off to a safe distance to chew on a small patch of new grass. “All those dead miners,” he reminded them in a ghostly voice. “Lost in the rush to grab gold from the mountain. Killed by greed!”

  “Yeah, that was way back,” Kirstie insisted. “You’re talking centuries here.” Nevertheless, she did glance up from the stove toward the grassed-over mounds of waste from the old mines.

  Lisa followed her gaze. “What’s that?” She pointed with a shaking hand about fifty yards up the hill to what looked like a cave between the mounds.

  “That’s an old mine entrance.” Matt saw she was hooked on his story. “I guess it goes pretty deep; a black hole into the heart of the mountain! A scar on nature left by man’s lust for gold!”