Free The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans Page A

Annie had never really studied the photograph before but now that she did she found the horse’s steady gaze unsettling.
    She had no idea if Pilgrim was still alive. All she knew was from a message Mrs. Dyer had left yesterday evening at the hospital, that he’d been taken to the vet’s place in Chatham and was to be transferred to Cornell. Now, looking at him in this picture, Annie felt herself reproached. Not for her ignorance of his fate, but for something else, something deeper that she didn’t yet understand. She put the picture in the bag, switched off the light and went downstairs.
    A pale light was already coming in through the tall windows in the hall. Annie put the bag down and went into the kitchen without turning on any lights. Before checking the phone messages, she thought she would make herself a cup of coffee. As she waited for the old copper kettle to boil, she walked over to the window.
    Outside, only a few yards from where she stood, was a group of whitetail deer. They were standing completely still, staring back at her. Was it food they were after? She’d never seen them this close to the house before, even in the harshest of winters. What did it mean? She counted them. There were twelve, no, thirteen. One for each year of her daughter’s life. Annie told herself not to be ridiculous.
    There was a low, burgeoning whistle as-the kettle started to boil. The deer heard it too and they turned as one and fled, their tails bouncing madly as they headed up past the pond to the woods. Christ almighty, thought Annie, she’s dead.

T HREE
     
    H ARRY LOGAN PARKED HIS CAR UNDER A SIGN THAT SAID large animal hospital and thought it odd that a university couldn’t come up with wording to indicate more precisely whether it was the animals who were large or the hospital. He got out and trudged through the furrows of gray sludge which were all that remained of the weekend snow. Three days had passed since the accident and as Logan wove his way through the rows of parked cars and trailers, he thought how astonishing it was that the horse was still alive.
    It had taken him nearly four hours to mend that chest wound. It was full of fragments of glass and flakes of black paint from the truck and he’d had to pick them out and sluice it clean. Then he’d trimmed the ragged edges of flesh with scissors, stapled up the artery and sewn in some drainage tubes. After that, as his assistants supervised the anesthetic, air supply and a long-overdue blood transfusion, Logan got to work with needle and thread.
    He had to do it in three layers: first the muscle, then the fibrous tissue, then the skin, some seventy stitches ineach layer, the inner two of them done with soluble thread. And all this for a horse he thought would never wake up. But the damn thing had woken up. It was incredible. And what’s more he had just as much fight in him as he’d had down in the river. As Pilgrim struggled to his feet in the recovery chamber, Logan prayed he wouldn’t tear the stitches out. He couldn’t face the idea of doing it all over again.
    They had kept Pilgrim on sedatives for the next twenty-four hours by which time they thought he had stabilized enough to stand the four-hour trip over here to Cornell.
    Logan knew the university and its veterinary hospital well, though it had changed a lot since he was here as a student in the late sixties. It held a lot of good memories for him, most of them to do with women. Sweet Jesus, did they have some times. Especially on summer evenings when you could lie under the trees and look down at Lake Cayuga. It was about the prettiest campus he knew. But not today. It was cold and starting to rain and you couldn’t even see the damn lake. On top of that, he felt lousy. He had been sneezing all morning, the result no doubt of having his balls frozen off in Kinderhook Creek. He hurried into the warmth of the glass-walled reception area and asked the young woman at the desk for Dorothy Chen, the