God, he was so skinny. She couldn’t believe he was still on his feet, much less energetic enough to be suspicious of her. Fiery hatred for the people on the other side of the pasture filled her to the brim.
“Okay, Smoky, my love,” she cooed as she eased her pack from her back and set it on the frozen ground. The horse immediately went to snuffle and paw at it. “Yes, there’s more to eat in there. I’ve got carrots, too, but for those, you need to let me halter you. Okay?”
Keeping an eye on his reaction, she eased open the zipper of the largest compartment. Smoky shied a bit at the sound of the zip, but when he saw the opening, he tried to shove his snout in right away. All of this was immensely promising.
“No carrots there.” Phoebe eased his nose back and slowly pulled out the halter, lead already clipped on. “Those awful people tell me you can’t abide a halter or bridle. Is that true?”
Horses became head-shy for two reasons: pain or fear. Actually, those were the same reason: pain made fear. One way or another, a head-shy horse had come into contact with at least one terrible person.
Laying the halter over her hands, she let Smoky investigate. The halter itself didn’t faze him, but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that bit of woven nylon going up near his eyes.
Working in all but complete darkness now became a help. Though horses had good night vision, it was still less keen than their day vision, and that gave Phoebe a little bit of room to work around his fear, especially since she’d taken the time to gain some trust.
Hanging the halter and lead over her shoulder so Smoky could still investigate it, she pulled out the feedbag she’d modified for just this purpose.
At the bottom of the bag was about two cups of sweet feed. Smoky caught scent of that and just about knocked her over trying to get to it. Laughing, Phoebe held the bag open, and the horse plunged his head in. While he snacked on oats, corn, and molasses, she eased the bag up his nose, over his eyes—she’d covered the bug screens with opaque nylon—and over his ears with minimal resistance.
Horses were prey animals with sharp eyesight, a big blind spot right in front of their face, and very few defensive moves. Flight was their primary defense, so they were afraid of a whole lot. In the horse world, jokes were legion about all the things, real and imaginary, that could send a horse flying off in abject terror and often taking their person on a wild ride. You could train a horse to get used to a lot of visual and aural commotion, which is how they became mounts for herding, police, search and rescue, or the military, but that training was intense, and the horses were carefully chosen for it. Most horses could at least habituate to their living conditions and the people they lived with, and a horse raised with kids was usually a lot more tolerant of fuss, so long as it was fuss that happened regularly. But in general, horses were giant scaredy-cats and absolutely despised change.
However, they were not great thinkers. If you covered their eyes, and weird noises weren’t happening, they generally forgot there was something scary around and calmed at once.
With the hooded feedbag on, Smoky barely noticed the halter going on over it. Now Phoebe wished she’d brought the blanket out here, so she could have gotten that on easily as well. But it wouldn’t have fit in her pack.
When the feedbag was empty, the horse got restless, trying to find a way to get more. His eyes were still covered, so she had no trouble getting the bag off, and Smoky immediately began searching her for more goodies. He sniffed out the carrots in her pocket, and snatched them from her hand before she could get them all the way out.
“Easy, baby,” she chuckled. “You gotta start slow after going without so long. Don’t want to make yourself sick.”
Overfeeding a horse meant more than a night moaning on the couch with their jeans unzipped. Horses couldn’t vomit; they had a specialized, one-way digestive system. If their stomach rejected what went down, it was pretty much their stomach itself that came up—and that was fatal. Thus, refeeding a starved horse was a delicate process. Phoebe had to balance the needs of rescuing Smoky with the needs of returning him to health.
Now, though, she had a haltered animal who had decided she was an angel sent from above. So she gave him the rest of the carrots, put her lightened pack on her back, loosely looped the rope lead in her hand, and led him leisurely across the dark pasture, watching each step so she didn’t fold an ankle on the hoof-heaved earth.
When they got to the gate, Ricky and his wife were gone. Lights in the house were on, and she saw the wife at the kitchen window. They’d walked away and left her to her own devices.
Good. She had the surrender paperwork signed and folded up in the pack, so she didn’t need them anymore, anyway. It would have been nice to have another pair of hands in case Smoky balked at the trailer, but she thought they’d become friends enough she could manage to convince him.
He stood calmly while she put a heavy blanket over his back and fastened it, but he did balk at the trailer. He got all the way to the ramp without trouble, but when Phoebe tried to lead him up, he reared back. She’d made the mistake of wrapping the lead too tightly around her hand, doing it without thinking while she was trying to convince him to come forward, and he pulled her off her feet. She face-planted on the ramp and slammed her cheek pretty hard. Ouch. Fuck.
Thankfully, Smoky didn’t run off. As soon as she fell, he settled and came close to nose at her, worried.
“I’m okay, baby,” Phoebe said as she sat up. She stroked his nose. “I’m okay. But now you owe me. You gotta get on this trailer.”
Not until she offered him another apple did he comply. But as he finally stepped onto the ramp, she heard a sickening crack and saw her phone in actual pieces on the ridged steel. It must have fallen from her coat pocket when she fell, and the horse had crushed it under one cracked hoof.
Smoky had not noticed that noise. He walked the rest of the way into the stall and finished his apple, then started in on the fresh hay. Phoebe stood with the pieces of her phone in her hand and stared at the bony grey ass of the horse she’d finally rescued.
“Win some, lose some,” she muttered and dropped the corpse of her phone into her pack. “Hope we don’t need to make a call on the way home.”
~oOo~
Smoky hated the trailer. As soon as it started to roll, he panicked. Phoebe had to stop every thirty minutes or so and spend fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes back there settling him again, trying to convince him that it was going to be okay, that he had no need to break through the trailer and escape.
Doing this by herself was a huge pain in the pooper. But Margot was away for the weekend, and Vin’s stump was infected, so he was wheelchair-bound outside the house. She’d known it would be a hard day when she’d headed out alone this morning, but damn.
It was past midnight when Phoebe reached the western limit of Tulsa and finally felt stress unspool from her spine. Last hour of the trip. Maybe they’d made their last stop before home.
Sadly, while this might well have been Smoky’s lucky day, it was not Phoebe’s.
Just as she put the southeastern limit of the city behind her, a bang like an explosion filled the air.
A massive flashback surged into Phoebe’s head and she went into battle-mode at once, which probably saved her and Smoky both. Not until it was all over and her head was back in the present, with her ass planted in the cushy seat of her truck, was she able to understand what had really happened in the past minute or so.