The Horse Whisperer Read online

  It captured the hearts of millions … shattered all the records …and took the world by storm.

  THE HORSE WHISPERER

  The blockbuster first novel by Nicholas Evans

  * Over 58 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List—

  jumped to #1 faster than any first novel in

  publishing history

  * Over 10 million copies in print worldwide

  * Translated into 36 languages

  * Topped bestseller lists throughout the world:

  #1 in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Finland,

  Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland,

  the United States, and others

  #1 New York Times Bestseller

  #1 Los Angeles Times Bestseller

  #1 Washington Post Bestseller

  #1 San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller

  #1 Chicago Tribune Bestseller

  #1 Boston Globe Bestseller

  #1 Philadelphia Inquirer Bestseller

  #1 Miami Herald Bestseller

  #1 Seattle Times Bestseller

  #1 Entertainment Weekly Bestseller

  #1 Houston Chronicle Bestseller

  #1 Publishers Weekly Bestseller

  #1 Denver Post Bestseller

  #1 Minneapolis Star Tribune Bestseller

  #1 Atlanta Journal and Constitution Bestseller

  #1 New York Daily News Bestseller

  #1 Portland Oregonian Bestseller

  #1 Dallas Morning News Bestseller

  A Main Selection of the Literary Guild

  Please turn the page for more extraordinary acclaim….

  HIGH PRAISE FOR

  NICHOLAS EVANS AND

  THE HORSE WHISPERER

  “SPRAWLING … COMPELLING … A REAL PAGE-TURNER.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A BOOK OF RARE POWER AND BEAUTY …EXPECT THIS OUTSTANDING NOVEL TO BE THE TALK OF THE SEASON!”. —Booklist

  “GRIPPING … Evans knows how to depict complicated emotions and interactions; he paints a compelling portrait of three people who love each other but can’t break through the self-created walls that keep them apart.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “SENSATIONAL … Part love story, part adventure, the book is above all a story of self-knowledge, healing and redemption.” —Telegraph Magazine

  “SEDUCTIVE.” —Glamour

  “ENGROSSING … lots of suspense to lasso you in …Evans’s descriptions of Big Sky country are richly detailed, and the knowledge he conveys about horses is both fascinating and oddly moving.” —Los Angeles Times

  “SEEMINGLY EFFORTLESS SCENES AND DIALOGUE … GRIPPING READABILITY.” —Library Journal

  “A SPLENDID NOVEL … AN EPIC LOVE STORY … the romance that evolves has an intensity which is rarely found in novels.”

  —The Cork Examiner

  “ONE OF THE MOST THRILLING, HEART-STOPPING OPENINGS TO A NOVEL THAT I CAN REMEMBER … ONE OF THE BEST READS I’VE HAD SINCE GONE WITH THE WIND.” —The Sunday Age (Melbourne)

  “FIRST-RATE … A WELL-WRITTEN TALE OF HORSES, FOLK WISDOM AND SEXUAL PASSION.” —Calgary Herald

  “A BRILLIANCE PERVADES THIS FIVE HANDKERCHIEF WEEPIE … READABLE AND INVOLVING.” —The Times (London)

  “GRIPPING … It’s the intimate relationship between the horse and his handlers that gives this novel its power.” —Us Magazine

  “The Horse Whisperer is an impressive debut. Its concerns are important, its author’s storytelling skills promising.” —Portland Oregonian

  “ENGAGING … INTENSE AND GRIPPING.” —Houston Chronicle

  For Jennifer

  Many thanks are due to the following:

  Huw Alban Davies, Michelle Hamer, Tim Galer, Josephine Haworth, Patrick de Freitas, Bob Peebles & family, Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt, Buck Brannaman, Leslie Desmond, Lonnie & Darlene Schwend, Beth Ferris & Bob Ream and two truckers, Rick and Chris, who took me for a ride in an anteater.

  Most of all, I am grateful to four good friends: Fred & Mary Davis, Caradoc King and James Long; and to Robbie Richardson, who first told me about whisperers.

  Pursue not the outer entanglements,

  Dwell not in the inner void;

  Be serene in the oneness of things,

  And dualism vanishes by itself.

  From “On Trust in the Heart”

  by Seng-t’san (d. 606)

  ONE

  ONE

  THERE WAS DEATH AT ITS BEGINNING AS THERE WOULD BE death again at its end. Though whether it was some fleeting shadow of this that passed across the girl’s dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered.

  The red glow of her alarm showed it was yet a halfhour till the time she had set it to wake her and she lay quite still, not lifting her head, trying to configure the change. It was dark but not as dark as it should be. Across the bedroom, she could clearly make out the dull glint of her riding trophies on cluttered shelves and above them the looming faces of rock stars she had once thought she should care about. She listened. The silence that filled the house was different too, expectant, like the pause between the intake of breath and the uttering of words. Soon there would be the muted roar of the furnace coming alive in the basement and the old farmhouse floorboards would start their ritual creaking complaint. She slipped out from the bedclothes and went to the window.

  There was snow. The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.

  Grace Maclean had come up from New York City the night before with her father, just the two of them. She always enjoyed the trip, two and a half hours on the Taconic State Parkway, cocooned together in the long Mercedes, listening to tapes and chatting easily about school or some new case he was working on. She liked to hear him talk as he drove, liked having him to herself, seeing him slowly unwind in his studiously weekend clothes. Her mother, as usual, had some dinner or function or something and would be catching the train to Hudson this morning, which she preferred to do anyway. The Friday-night crawl of traffic invariably made her crabby and impatient and she would compensate by taking charge, telling Robert, Grace’s father, to slow down or speed up or take some devious route to avoid delays. He never bothered to argue, just did as he was told, though sometimes he would sigh or give Grace, relegated to the backseat, a wry glance in the mirror. Her parents’ relationship had long been a mystery to her, a complicated world where dominance and compliance were never quite what they seemed. Rather than get involved, Grace would simply retreat into the sanctuary of her Walkman.

  On the train her mother would work for the entire journey, undistracted and undistractable. Accompanying her once recently, Grace had watched her and marveled that she never even looked out of the window except perhaps in a glazed, unseeing scan when some big-shot writer or one of her more eager assistant editors called on the cellular phone.

  The light on the landing outside Grace’s room was still on. She tiptoed in her socks past the half-open door of her parents’ bedroom and paused. She could hear the ticking of the wall clock in the hall below and now the reassuring, soft snoring of her father. She came down the stairs into the hall, its azure walls and ceiling already aglow from the r
eflection of snow through undraped windows. In the kitchen, she drank a glass of milk in one long tilt and ate a chocolate-chip cookie as she scribbled a note for her father on the pad by the phone. Gone riding. Back around 10. Luv, G.

  She took another cookie and ate it on the move as she went through to the passageway by the back door where they left coats and muddy boots. She put on her fleece jacket and hopped elegantly, holding the cookie in her mouth, as she pulled on her riding boots. She zipped her jacket to the neck, put on her gloves and took her riding hat down off the shelf, wondering briefly if she should phone Judith to check if she still wanted to ride now that it had snowed. But there was no need. Judith would be just as excited as she was. As Grace opened the door to step out into the freezing air, she heard the furnace come to life down in the basement.

  Wayne P. Tanner looked gloomily over the rim of his coffee cup at the rows of snowcrusted trucks parked outside the diner. He hated the snow but, more than that, he hated being caught out. And in the space of just a few hours it had happened twice.

  Those New York state troopers had enjoyed every minute of it, smug Yankee bastards. He had seen them slide up behind him and hang there on his tail for a couple of miles, knowing damn well he’d seen them and enjoying it. Then the lights coming on, telling him to pull over and the smartass, no more than a kid, swaggering up alongside in his Stetson like some goddamn movie cop. He’d asked for the daily logbook and Wayne found it, handed it down and watched as the kid read it.

  “Atlanta huh?” he Said, flipping the pages.

  “Yes sir,” Wayne replied. “And it’s one helluva lot warmer down there, I can tell you.” The tone usually worked with cops, respectful but fraternal, implying some working kinship of the road. But the kid didn’t look up.

  “Uh-huh. You know that radar detector you’ve got there is illegal, don’t you?”

  Wayne glanced at the little black box bolted to the dash and wondered for a moment whether to play all innocent. In New York fuzz-busters were only illegal for trucks over eighteen thousand pounds. He was packing about three or four times that. Pleading ignorance, he reckoned, might just make the little bastard meaner still. He turned back with a mock-guilty grin but it was wasted because the kid still didn’t look at him. “Don’t you?” he said again.

  “Yeah, well. I guess.”

  The kid shut the logbook and handed it back up to him, at last meeting his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Now let’s see the other one.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The other logbook. The real one. This one here’s for the fairies.” Something turned over in Wayne’s stomach.

  For fifteen years, like thousands of other truck drivers, he’d kept two logs, one telling the truth about driving times, mileage, rest-overs and all and the other, fabricated specially for situations like this, showing he’d stuck by all the legal limits. And in all that time, pulled over God knows how many dozens of times, coast to coast, never had any cop done this. Shit, damn near every trucker he knew kept a phony log, they called them comic books, it was a joke. If you were on your own and no partner to take shifts, how the hell were you supposed to meet deadlines? How the hell were you supposed to make a goddamn living? Jesus. The companies all knew about it, they just turned a blind eye.

  He had tried spinning it out awhile, playing hurt, even showing a little outrage, but he knew it was no good. The kid’s partner, a big bull-necked guy with a smirk on his face, got out of the patrol car, not wanting to miss out on the fun, and they told him to get down from the cab while they searched it. Seeing they meant to pull the place apart, he decided to come clean, fished the book out from its hiding place under the bunk and gave it to them. It showed he had driven over nine hundred miles in twenty-four hours with only one stop and even that was for only half the eight hours required by law.

  So now he was looking at a thousand-, maybe thirteen-hundred-dollar fine, more if they got him for the goddamn radar detector. He might even lose his commercial driver’s license. The troopers gave him a fistful of paper and escorted him to this truck stop, warning him he’d better not even think of setting out again till morning.

  He waited for them to go, then walked over to the gas station and bought a stale turkey sandwich and a six-pack. He spent the night in the bunk at the back of the cab. It was spacious and comfortable enough and he felt a little better after a couple of beers, but he still spent most of the night worrying. And then he woke up to see the snow and discovered he’d been caught out again.

  In the balm of a Georgia morning two days earlier, Wayne hadn’t thought to check that he had his snow chains. And when he’d looked in the locker this morning, the damn things weren’t there. He couldn’t believe it. Some dumbfuck must have borrowed or stolen them. Wayne knew the interstate would be okay, they’d have had the snowplows and sanders out hours ago. But the two giant turbines he was carrying had to be delivered to a pulp mill in a little place called Chatham and he would have to leave the turnpike and cut across country. The roads would be winding and narrow and probably as yet uncleared. Wayne cursed himself again, finished his coffee and laid down a five-dollar bill.

  Outside the door he stopped to light a cigarette and tugged his Braves baseball cap down hard against the cold. He could hear the drone of trucks already moving out on the interstate. His boots scrunched in the snow as he made his way over the lot toward his truck.

  There were forty or fifty trucks there, lined up side by side, all eighteen-wheelers like his, mainly Peterbilts, Freightliners and Kenworths. Wayne’s was a black and chrome Kenworth Conventional, “anteaters” they called them, because of the long, sloping nose. And though it looked better hitched to a standard highsided, reefer trailer than it did now with the two turbines mounted on a flatbed, in the snowy half-light of dawn, he thought it was still the prettiest truck on the lot. He stood there for a moment admiring it, finishing his cigarette. Unlike the younger drivers who didn’t give a shit nowadays, he always kept his cab gleaming. He had even cleared all the snow off before going in for breakfast. Unlike him though, he suddenly remembered, they probably hadn’t forgotten their goddamn chains. Wayne Tanner squashed his cigarette into the snow and hauled himself up into the cab.

  Two sets of footprints converged at the mouth of the long driveway that led up to the stables. With immaculate timing, the two girls had arrived there only moments apart and made their way up the hill together, their laughter carrying down into the valley. Even though the sun had yet to show, the white picket fence, confining their tracks on either side, looked dowdy against the snow, as did the jumps in the fields beyond. The girls’ tracks curved to the brow of the hill and disappeared into the group of low buildings that huddled, as if for protection, around the vast red barn where the horses were kept.

  As Grace and Judith turned into the stable yard, a cat skittered away from them, spoiling the snow. They stopped and stood there a moment, looking over toward the house. There was no sign of life. Mrs. Dyer, the woman who owned the place and had taught them both to ride, would normally be up and about by now.

  “Do you think we should tell her we’re going out?” Grace whispered.

  The two girls had grown up together, seeing each other at weekends up here in the country for as long as either could remember. Both lived on the Upper West Side, both went to schools on the East Side and both had fathers who were lawyers. But it occurred to neither of them that they should see each other during the week. The friendship belonged here, with their horses. Just turned fourteen, Judith was nearly a year older than Grace and in decisions as weighty as risking the ever-ready wrath of Mrs. Dyer, Grace was happy to defer. Judith sniffed and screwed up her face.

  “Nah,” she said. “She’d only bawl us out for waking her up. Come on.”

  The air inside the barn was warm and heavy with the sweet smell of hay and dung. As the girls came in with their saddles and closed the door, a dozen horses watched from their stalls, ears pricked forward, sensing something differen
t about the dawn outside just as Grace had. Judith’s horse, a soft-eyed chestnut gelding called Gulliver, whinnied as she came up to the stall, putting his face forward for her to rub.

  “Hi baby,” she said. “How are you today, huh?” The horse backed off gently from the gate so Judith would have room to come in with the tack.

  Grace walked on. Her horse was in the last stall at the far end of the barn. Grace spoke softly to the others as she passed them, greeting them by name. She could see Pilgrim, his head erect and still, watching her all the way. He was a four-year-old Morgan, a gelding of a bay so dark that in some lights he looked black. Her parents had bought him for her last summer for her birthday, reluctantly. They had worried he was too big and too young for her, altogether too much of a horse. For Grace, it was love at first sight.

  They had flown down to Kentucky to see him and when they were taken out to the field, he came right over to the fence to check her out. He didn’t let her touch him, just sniffed her hand, brushing it lightly with his whiskers. Then he tossed his head like some haughty prince and ran off, flagging his long tail, his coat glistening in the sun like polished ebony.

  The woman who was selling him let Grace ride him and it was only then that her parents gave each other a look and she knew they would let her have him. Her mother hadn’t ridden since she was a child but she could be counted on to recognize class when she saw it. And Pilgrim was class alright. There was no doubting he was also a handful and quite different from any other horse she had ridden. But when Grace was on him and could feel all that life pounding away inside him, she knew that in his heart he was good and not mean and that they would be okay together. They would be a team.