Free A Good Day's Work by John Demont Page A

hours. Horses are a lot faster. That her water has broken implies that she will foal in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. “But there’s no happy medium with foals,” Jessica says. “They’re either really easy going, or it’s really, really hard.”
    We’re heading southwest from Moncton, down an unremarkable stretch of Trans-Canada Highway before turning off onto a country road. The Arctic temperature seems to give everything outside a hard, metallic look. Jessica’s cell rings: “Have you seen any signs of heat … I can book something for next week in the morning … Oh, I know Lola. What’s her due date again … I’ll call you later when I have my book and we’ll make an appointment.”
    The community we’re bound for, Havelock, sits at the junction of Route 880 and the Hicks Settlement Road. When I look on my iPhone, I note that the settlement—along with towns in Nebraska and New Zealand and streets in Singapore and Kanpur—is named after a British general famous for putting down an uprising in Raj-era India. The Internet also tells me that Havelock’s most famous citizen is an evangelist named George McCready Price, known for his creationist thinking.
    I personally believe in evolution. However life comes to be, there is no mistaking the wondrous yet messy path of the natural world inside the barn where Maryanne, dressed in ladylike pink, leads us. Paints in stalls line either side of the barn. Amelia’s space is the last one on the left. She’s not alone: kneeling in the hay, a fifteen-minute-old Clydesdale foal blinks from the shock of entering this here world.
    I may have gasped. I may have thrown my hands up in the air like a three-year-old coming down the stairs on Christmas morning. I can’t really recall. All I can relay for certain is my abiding sense that city folks don’t often get the opportunity to see such things, and recall the way that foal looked—eyes barely open, white forehead, muzzle twitching, I imagine, in confusion—and how his mother, covered in blankets to keep her warm after the exertion of birth, just stood there obliviously munching hay.
    A horse like Amelia is probably worth fifteen to twenty thousand dollars. So I understand why Marc, kneeling by the foal’s side, is so excited. He reaches up to shake my hand, then goes back to cleaning the foal’s coat and whispering encouraging words. Jessica, at this point, just stands by the entrance to the stall watching things unfold. Marc and Maryanne try to get the foal to rise, fail, then try again. Finally, on the shakiest of legs, it gets to its feet. “Holy sweet mother, look at the size,” says Maryanne. The horse, now about forty minutes old, reaches almost to her shoulders. Marc looks like he may weep with joy. Jessica makes an appreciative noise and notes the time: 3:06 p.m.
    Foalings are supposed to follow what she calls the “one-two-three principle.” If all goes well, the foal is supposed to be upright within an hour. Within two hours of being born it issupposed to be feeding. An hour later the mare is supposed to clear the placenta, which at this moment hangs a foot or so out of Amelia’s rear end. If the placenta doesn’t clear by this time, the danger of infection increases. Jessica watches Maryanne and Marc try to get the foal to latch onto its mother to feed. Then, after a while, she opens the metallic case.
    She lifts out a vial of oxytocin, the hormone responsible for producing the uterine contractions that birth the foal and push out the afterbirth. She pops the needle of a hypodermic syringe into the centre of the ampoule and draws out the medicine. As Marc calms the horse, she hits the jugular with the needle, plunging the medicine into the Clydesdale’s bloodstream. Then there’s nothing for her to do but watch and wait.

    JESSICA does not text. She does not look