act fast. She felt in her pocket for her phone, then realized it was back in the truck. She didn’t slow down.
It wasn’t colic.
Her best gelding, Cooper, was on his back with his feet in the air, entangled in strands of smooth wire fencing, his sides heaving as he struggled to breathe. It looked as if he’d rolled into the fence while taking a dust bath, got his feet caught in the wire and then panicked. His eyes showed white as Libby approached. She quickly assessed the situation and then raced back to the house, the dogs at her heels. She needed wire cutters and she needed help.
The vet was on speed dial, but when she hit Stan’s number the answering service came on, telling her he was away for the week and to contact his colleague, Sam Hyatt, in Wesley. Libby didn’t have time to wait for Sam to drive down from Wesley.
She hit Jason’s number. He answered immediately and she blurted out her story.
“Lib, I’m in Elko,” he said when she paused to take a breath.
Libby cursed, squeezing her eyes shut against tears of frustration. “I’ll call Menace.” She couldn’t think of anything else to do.
There was no sound on the other end of the line for a few tense seconds, then Jason said, “Call Kade. He’s close and he knows horses.”
Libby’s eyes snapped open. “Are you kidding?”
“He can get there fast and he’ll be way more help than anyone else near your place. Especially Menace.”
“I don’t have Kade’s number.”
“He just gave it to me. Hold on a sec.” When Jason gave her the number, she hung up, repeating the digits over and over until she’d punched them into the keypad. Kade answered on the second ring.
“It’s Libby,” she said without hesitation. “I have a horse down. I need help.”
“Should I bring anything?”
“Wire cutters. Big ones. I’ll be at the far end of the field.”
The phone went dead and Libby grabbed her vet kit and headed out to where Cooper was struggling. She started working on the tautly stretched wire, trying to cut it with the only cutters she had at hand, but they were too small for the job. She needed her fencing pliers, wherever they might be.
Cooper’s breathing was ragged, but Libby couldn’t get the wire loose, much less get him back onto his side so that he could breathe better. She was frantically hacking away when she heard Kade speak behind her.
“Let me.”
Libby backed off, letting him crouch down to use his cutters. He did live nearby, but he must have driven ninety miles an hour to get there that fast.
“Watch it,” he said as he squeezed the handles. After the first wire popped, zinging wildly, he cut the second. The horse heaved, making the ends of a third wire, which was still wrapped around his hind leg, bounce.
“Damn,” Kade murmured as he saw how tightly it was wound, cutting the animal’s flesh.
He snapped the last wire, then started unwrapping it as Libby held the horse’s head steady.
“I did everything I could to make the pastures safe.”
Her parents had never done a damned thing for the small ranch, except let it fall down around them. When Libby had returned to Otto after college, she’d bought the property from them so that they could move to Arizona and continue drinking themselves to death.
The house and barn had been in fairly decent shape, only needing new roofs, which had almost bankrupted her, but the outbuildings were shot and the pastures had lain fallow for years. The fence posts were rotten and barbed wire was strewn everywhere, cropping up out of the ground in unexpected places, where a fence had gone down and had then been overgrown.
Libby had spent most of her free time cleaning wire out of the pastures and refencing them before she turned out her horses to graze. She didn’t want any of her animals injured, and now one of her horses was.
“If you have animals, accidents will happen,” Kade said without looking at her. He glanced up at what was left of the fence. “He must have got caught while rolling.”
“That’s what I thought.” It felt so odd, being there with Kade, agreeing with him, as if there was no bad history between them.
“Do you still ride him?”
“I did.”
“You’ll ride him again.”
Libby swallowed hard as she watched Kade work, stroking the horse’s neck to reassure him that she was there and that they were helping. Kade was probably right, but now Cooper’s hind legs were badly skinned and burned where the wire had cut and rubbed against them. Recovery was going to take time.
“Do you have a clean area where we can treat him?” Kade asked as he carefully unwound the last bit of wire from Cooper’s leg. The other horses were standing a short distance away, edging closer, curious about what was happening to their compadre.
“There’s a stall in the barn,” Libby said. “I’ll have to run the rest of the horses into the next field so they don’t escape.”
“Go do that.”
Libby jogged across the pasture to the gate. The horses, sensing greener grass on the other side of the fence, followed her. Libby opened the gate to let them walk through. By the time she crossed the field again, Kade had Cooper on his feet.
The horse took a tentative step forward and then another. The three of them walked slowly to the barn, Kade on one side of Cooper and Libby on the other, her hand on the gelding’s neck, talking to him in a soothing voice.
“His leg will probably swell like crazy,” Kade said once they had him in the stall. Libby had spread clean straw and then found a big roll of gauze. Together they cleaned and wrapped the damaged areas on Cooper’s hind legs, duct-taping the top and bottom of the bandages to keep them from slipping off.
Kade opened his own first-aid kit and took out a plastic tube of horse analgesic, phenylbutazone, which he shoved into the corner of the horse’s mouth, pushing the plunger all the way down.
“Do you want me to leave it?” he asked, referring to the medication.
She shook her head. “I have bute, too.”
As she walked with Kade to his truck afterward, she felt as if she were waking from a dream, one in which events and actions that had seemed so reasonable at the time became utterly bizarre upon waking. She would never have expected to end the day by having Kade rescue her horse—or by feeling grateful that he’d come to help.
“Do you want me stop by in the morning to check the bandage?” Kade asked as he set his vet kit on the seat of his truck.
“I can handle it.” She shoved her hands into her back pockets and glanced at the barn. “Thank you for coming.”
“I did it for the horse.”
Libby
