Free The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans Page B

clinician who was looking after Pilgrim.
    They were building a big new clinic across the road and, as he waited, Logan looked out at the pinched faces of the construction workers and felt better. There was even a little ping of excitement at the thought of seeing Dorothy again. Her smile was the reason he wasn’t going to mind driving a couple of hundred miles every day to see Pilgrim. She was like a virgin princess from one of those Chinese art movies his wife liked. Ahell of a figure too. And young enough for him to know better. He saw her reflection coming through the door and turned to face her.
    “Hi Dorothy! How’re you doing?”
    “Cold. And not very happy with you,” she wagged a finger at him and frowned, mock-stern. Logan held up his hands.
    “Dorothy, I drive a million miles for one of your smiles, what have I done?”
    “You send me a monster like this and I’m supposed to smile at you?” But she did. “Come on. We got the X rays.”
    She led the way through a maze of corridors and Logan listened to her talking and tried not to watch the delicate way her hips moved inside her white coat.
    There were enough X rays to mount a small exhibition. Dorothy pinned them up on the light box and they stood side by side, studying them. As Logan had thought, there were cracked ribs, five of them, and the nasal bone was broken. The ribs would heal themselves, and the nasal bone Dorothy had already operated on. She’d had to lever it out, drill holes and wire it back in place. It had gone well, though they still had to remove the swabs packed into the clotted cavity of Pilgrim’s sinus.
    “I’ll know who to come to when I need a nose job,” said Logan. Dorothy laughed.
    “You wait till you see it. He’s going to have the profile of a prizefighter.”
    Logan had been worried there might be some fracture high on the right foreleg or shoulder, but there wasn’t. The whole area was just terribly bruised from the impact and there was severe damage to the network of nerves that served the leg.
    “How’s the chest?” said Logan.
    “It’s fine. You did a great job there. How many stitches?”
    “Oh, about two hundred.” He felt himself blushing like a schoolboy. “Shall we go see him?”
    Pilgrim was out in one of the recovery stalls and they could hear him long before they got there. He was calling out and his voice was cracked from all the noise he’d been making since the last lot of sedatives had worn off. The walls of the stall were thickly padded but even so they seemed to shake under the constant thumping of his hooves. Some students were in the next stall and the pony they were looking at was clearly bothered by Pilgrim’s din.
    “Come to see the Minotaur?” one of them asked.
    “Yeah,” said Logan. “Hope you guys already fed him.”
    Dorothy slid the bolt to open the top part of the door. As soon as she did so, the noise inside stopped. She opened the door just enough for them to look in. Pilgrim was backed into the far corner with his head low and his ears pinned right back, looking at them like something from a horror comic. Almost every part of him seemed to be wrapped in bloody bandage. He snorted at them then raised his muzzle and bared his teeth.
    “And it’s good to see you too,” said Logan.
    “You ever see a horse this freaked before?” Dorothy asked. He shook his head.
    “Me neither.”
    They stood there for a while, looking at him. What on earth were they going to do with him, he wondered. The Maclean woman had called him yesterday for the first time and had been real nice. Probably a little ashamed, he thought, about the message she’d sent through Mrs. Dyer. Logan wasn’t bitter, in fact he wassorry for the woman after what had happened to her daughter. But when she saw the horse she’d probably want to sue him for letting the wretched thing live.
    “We should give him another shot of sedative,” said Dorothy. “Trouble is there aren’t too many volunteers to do it.