The Horse Whisperer Read online

  She had wanted to change his name to something prouder, like Cochise or Khan, but her mother, ever the tyrant liberal, said it was up to Grace of course, but in her opinion it was bad luck to change a horse’s name. So Pilgrim he remained.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” she said as she reached the stall. “Who’s my man?” She reached out for him and he let her touch the velvet of his muzzle, but only briefly, tilting his head up and away from her. “You are such a flirt. Come on, let’s get you fixed here.”

  Grace let herself into the stall and took off the horse’s blanket. When she swung the saddle over him, he shifted away a little as he always did and she told him firmly to keep still. She told him about the surprise he had waiting for him outside as she lightly fastened the girth and put on the bridle. Then she took a hoof pick from her pocket and methodically cleared the dirt from each of his feet. She could hear Judith already leading Gulliver out of his stall, so she hurried to tighten the girth and now they too were ready.

  They led the horses out into the yard and let them stand there a few moments appraising the snow while Judith went back to shut the barn door. Gulliver lowered his head and sniffed, concluding quickly it was the same stuff he had seen a hundred times before. Pilgrim however was amazed. He pawed it and was startled when it moved. He tried sniffing it, as he had seen the older horse do. But he sniffed too hard and gave a great sneeze that had the girls rocking with laughter.

  “Maybe he’s never seen it before,” said Judith.

  “He must have. Don’t they have snow in Kentucky?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.” She looked across at Mrs. Dyer’s house. “Hey, come on, let’s go or we’ll wake the dragon.”

  They led the horses out of the yard and into the top meadow and there they mounted up and rode in a slow, climbing traverse toward the gate that led into the woods. Their tracks cut a perfect diagonal across the unblemished square of the field. And as they reached the woods, at last the sun came up over the ridge and filled the valley behind them with tilted shadows.

  One of the things Grace’s mother hated most about weekends was the mountain of newsprint she had to read. It accumulated all week like some malign volcanic mass. Each day, recklessly, she stacked it higher with the weeklies and all those sections of The New York Times she didn’t dare trash. By Saturday it had become too menacing to ignore and with several more tons of Sunday’s New York Times horribly imminent, she knew that if she didn’t act now, she would be swept away and buried. All those words, let loose on the world. All that effort. Just to make you feel guilty. Annie tossed another slab to the floor and wearily picked up the New York Post.

  The Macleans’ apartment was on the eighth floor of an elegant old building on Central Park West. Annie sat with her feet tucked up on the yellow sofa by the window. She was wearing black leggings and a light gray sweatshirt. Her bobbed auburn hair, tied in a stubby ponytail, was set aflame by the sun that streamed in behind her and made a shadow of her on the matching sofa across the living room.

  The room was long and painted a pale yellow. It was lined at one end with books and there were pieces of African art and a grand piano, one gleaming end of which was now caught by the angling sun. If Annie had turned she would have seen seagulls strutting on the ice of the reservoir. Even in the snow, even this early on a Saturday morning, there were joggers out, pounding the circuit that she herself would be pounding as soon as she had finished the papers. She took a sip from her mug of tea and was about to junk the Post when she spotted a small item hidden away in a column she usually skipped.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said aloud. “You little rat.”

  She clunked the mug down on the table and went briskly to get the phone from the hallway. She came back already punching the number and stood facing the window now, tapping a foot while she waited for an answer. Below the reservoir an old man wearing skis and an absurdly large radio headset was tramping ferociously toward the trees. A woman was scolding a leashed gaggle of tiny dogs, all with matching knitted coats and with legs so short they had to leap and sledge to make progress.

  “Anthony? Did you see the Post?” Annie had obviously woken her young assistant but it didn’t occur to her to apologize. “They’ve got a piece about me and Fiske. The little shit’s saying I fired him and that I faked the new circulation figures.”

  Anthony said something sympathetic but it wasn’t sympathy Annie was after. “Do you have Don Farlow’s weekend number?” He went to get it. Out in the park, the dog woman had given up and was now dragging them back toward the street. Anthony returned with the number and Annie jotted it down.

  “Good,” she said. “Go back to sleep.” She hung up and immediately dialed Farlow’s number.

  Don Farlow was the publishing group’s stormtrooper lawyer. In the six months since Annie Graves (professionally she had always used her maiden name) was brought in as editor-in-chief to salvage its sinking flagship magazine, he had become an ally and almost a friend. Together they had set about the ousting of the Old Guard. Blood had flowed—new blood in and old blood out—and the press had relished every drop. Among those to whom she and Farlow had shown the door were several well-connected writers who had promptly taken their revenge in the gossip columns. The place became known as the Graves Yard.

  Annie could understand their bitterness. Some had been there so many years, they felt they owned the place. To be uprooted at all was demeaning enough. To be uprooted by an upstart forty-three-year-old woman, and English to boot, was intolerable. The purge was now almost over, however, and Annie and Farlow had recently become skillful at constructing payoff deals which bought the silence of those departing. She thought they had done just that with Fenimore Fiske, the magazine’s aging and insufferable movie critic who was now badmouthing her in the Post. The rat. But as Annie waited for Farlow to answer the phone, she took comfort from the fact that Fiske had made a big mistake in calling her increased circulation figures a sham. They weren’t and she could prove it.

  Farlow was not only up, he had seen the Post piece too. They agreed to meet in two hours’ time in her office. They would sue the old bastard for every penny they’d bought him off with.

  Annie called her husband in Chatham and got her own voice on the answering machine. She left a message telling Robert it was time he was up, that she would be catching the later train and not to go to the supermarket before she got there. Then she took the elevator down and went out into the snow to join the joggers. Except, of course, Annie Graves didn’t jog. She ran. And although this distinction was not immediately obvious from either her speed or her technique, to Annie it was as clear and vital as the cold morning air into which she now plunged.

  The interstate was fine, as Wayne Tanner had expected. There wasn’t too much else on the road what with it being a Saturday and he reckoned he’d be better keeping on up 87 till it hit 90, cross the Hudson River there and head on down to Chatham from the north. He’d studied the map and figured that though it wasn’t the most direct route, less of it would be on smaller roads that might not have been cleared. With no chains, he only hoped this access road to the mill they’d told him about wasn’t just some dirt track or something.

  By the time he picked up the signs for 90 and swung east, he was starting to feel better. The countryside looked like a Christmas card and with Garth Brooks on the tape machine and the sun bouncing off the Kenworth’s mighty nose, things didn’t seem so bad as they had last night. Hell, if it came to the worst and he lost his license, he could always go back and be a mechanic like he was trained to be. It wouldn’t be so much money, for sure. It was a goddamn insult how little they paid a guy who’d done years of training and had to buy himself ten thousand dollars’ worth of tools. But sometimes lately he’d been getting tired of being on the road so much. Maybe it would be nice to spend more time at home with his wife and kids. Well, maybe. Spend more time fishing, anyway.

  With a jolt, Wayne spotted the exit for Chatham coming up and he g
ot to work, pumping the brakes and taking the truck down through its nine gears, making the big four-twenty-five horsepower Cummins engine roar in complaint. As he forked away from the interstate he flipped the four-wheel-drive switch, locking in the cab’s front axle. From here, he calculated, it was maybe just five or six miles to the mill.

  High in the woods that morning there was a stillness, as if life itself had been suspended. Neither bird nor animal spoke and the only sound was the sporadic soft thud of snow from overladen boughs. Up into this waiting vacuum, through maple and birch, rose the distant laughter of the girls.

  They were making their way slowly up the winding trail that led to the ridge, letting the horses choose the pace. Judith was in front and she was twisted around, propped with one hand on the cantle of Gulliver’s saddle, looking back at Pilgrim and laughing.

  “You should put him in a circus,” she said. “The guy’s a natural clown.”

  Grace was laughing too much to reply. Pilgrim was walking with his head down, pushing his nose through the snow like a shovel. Then he would toss a load of it into the air with a sneeze and break into a little trot, pretending to be frightened of it as it scattered.

  “Hey, come on now you, that’s enough,” said Grace, reining him in, getting control. Pilgrim settled back into a walk and Judith, still grinning, shook her head and turned to face the trail again. Gulliver walked on, thoroughly unconcerned by the antics behind him, his head moving up and down to the rhythm of his feet. Along the trail, every twenty yards or so, bright orange posters were pinned to the trees, threatening prosecution for anyone caught hunting, trapping or trespassing.

  At the crest of the ridge that separated the two valleys was a small, circular clearing where normally, if they approached quietly, they might find deer or wild turkey. Today however, when the girls rode out from the trees and into the sun, all they found was the bloody, severed wing of a bird. It lay almost exactly in the middle of the clearing like the mark of some savage compass and the girls stopped there and looked down at it.

  “What is it, a pheasant or something?” said Grace.

  “I guess. A former pheasant anyway. Part of a former pheasant.”

  Grace frowned. “How did it get here?”

  “I don’t know. A fox maybe.”

  “It couldn’t be, where are the tracks?”

  There weren’t any. Nor was there any sign of a struggle. It was as if the wing had flown there on its own. Judith shrugged.

  “Maybe somebody shot it.”

  “What, and the rest of it flew on with one wing?”

  They both pondered a moment. Then Judith nodded sagely. “A hawk. Dropped by a passing hawk.”

  Grace thought it over. “A hawk. Uh-huh. I’ll buy that.” They nudged the horses into a walk again.

  “Or a passing airplane.”

  Grace laughed. “That’s it,” she said. “It looks like the chicken they served on that flight to London last year. Only better.”

  Usually when they rode up here to the ridge they would give the horses a canter across the clearing and then loop back down to the stables by another trail. But the snow and the sun and the clear morning sky made both girls want more than that today. They decided to do something they had done only once before, a couple of years ago, when Grace still had Gypsy, her stocky little palomino pony. They would cross over into the next valley, cut down through the woods and come back around the hill the long way, beside Kinderhook Creek. It meant crossing a road or two, but Pilgrim seemed to have settled down and anyway, this early on a snowy Saturday morning, there would be nothing much about.

  As they left the clearing and passed again into the shade of the woods, Grace and Judith fell silent. There were hickories and poplars on this side of the ridge with no obvious trail among them and the girls had frequently to lower their heads to pass beneath the branches so that soon they and the horses were covered with a fine sprinkling of dislodged snow. They negotiated their way slowly down beside a stream. Crusts of ice overhung it, spreading jaggedly from the banks and allowing but a glimpse of the water that rushed darkly beneath. The slope grew ever steeper and the horses now moved with caution, taking care where they placed their feet. Once Gulliver slipped lurchingly on a hidden rock, but he righted himself without panic. The sun slanting down through the trees made crazed patterns on the snow and lit the clouds of breath billowing from the horses’ nostrils. But neither girl paid heed, for they were concentrating too hard on the descent and their heads were filled only with the feel of the animals they rode.

  It was with relief that at last they saw the glint of Kinderhook Creek below them through the trees. The descent had been more difficult than either girl had expected and only now did they feel able to look at each other and grin.

  “Nice one, huh?” Judith said, gently bringing Gulliver to a stop. Grace laughed.

  “No problem.” She leaned forward and rubbed Pilgrim’s neck. “Didn’t these guys do well?”

  “They did great.”

  “I don’t remember it being steep like that.”

  “It wasn’t. I think we followed a different stream. I figure we’re about a mile farther south than we should be.”

  They brushed the snow from their clothes and hats and peered down through the trees. Below the woods a meadow of virgin white sloped gently down to the river. Along the near side of the river they could just make out the fence posts of the old road that led to the pulp mill. It was a road no longer used since a wider, more direct access had been built from the highway which lay half a mile away on the other side of the river. The girls would have to follow the old mill road north to pick up the route they had planned to get home.

  Just as he’d feared, the road down to Chatham hadn’t been cleared. But Wayne Tanner soon realized he needn’t have worried. Others had been out before him and the Kenworth’s eighteen heavy-duty tires cut into their tracks and grabbed the surface firmly. He hadn’t needed the damn chains after all. He passed a snowplow coming the other way and even though that wasn’t a whole lot of use to him, such was his relief that he gave the guy a wave and a friendly blast on the horn.

  He lit a cigarette and looked at his watch. He was earlier than he’d said he would be. After his run-in with the cops, he’d called Atlanta and told them to fix things with the mill people for him to deliver the turbines in the morning. Nobody liked working on a Saturday and he guessed he wasn’t going to be too popular when he got there. Still, that was their problem. He shoved in another Garth Brooks tape and started looking out for the entrance to the mill.

  The old mill road was easy going after the woods and the girls and their horses relaxed as they made their way along it, side by side in the sunshine. Away to their left, a pair of blue jays chased each other in the trees fringing the river and through their shrill chatter and the rustle of water on rock, Grace could hear what she assumed was a snowplow out clearing the highway.

  “Here we go.” Judith nodded up ahead.

  It was the place they had been looking for, where once a railroad had crossed first the mill road and then the river. It was many years since the railroad had closed and though the river bridge remained intact, the top of the bridge across the road had been removed. All that remained were its tall concrete sides, a roofless tunnel through which the road now passed before disappearing in a bend. Just before it was a steep path that led up the embankment to the level of the railroad and it was up here that the girls needed to go to get onto the river bridge.

  Judith went first, steering Gulliver up the path. He took a few steps then stopped.

  “Come on boy, it’s okay.”

  The horse gently pawed the snow, as if testing it. Judith urged him on with her heels now.

  “Come on lazybones, up we go.”

  Gulliver relented and moved on again up the path. Grace waited down in the road, watching. She was vaguely aware that the sound of the snowplow out on the highway seemed louder. Pilgrim’s ears twitched. She reached down and pat
ted his sweaty neck.

  “How is it?” she called up to Judith.

  “It’s okay. Take it gently though.”

  It happened just as Gulliver was almost at the top of the embankment. Grace had started up behind him, following his tracks as precisely as she could, letting Pilgrim take his time. She was halfway up when she heard the rasp of Gulliver’s shoe on ice and Judith’s frightened cry.

  Had the girls ridden here more recently, they would have known that the slope they were climbing had, since late summer, run with water from a leaking culvert. The blanket of snow now concealed a sheet of sheer ice.

  Gulliver staggered, trying to find purchase with his hind feet, kicking up a spray of snow and ice shards. But as each foot failed to hold, his rear end swung down and across the slope so that he was now squarely on the ice. One of his forelegs skewed sideways and he went down on one knee, still sliding. Judith cried out as she was flung forward and lost a stirrup. But she managed to grab the horse’s neck and stayed on, yelling down at Grace now.

  “Get out of the way! Grace!”

  Grace was transfixed. There was a roar of blood in her head that seemed to freeze and separate her from what she was watching above her. But upon Judith’s second cry she reconnected and tried to turn Pilgrim down the slope. The horse yanked his head, frightened, fighting her. He took several small sideways steps, twisting his neck up the slope until his feet too skidded and he nickered in alarm. They were now directly in the path of Gulliver’s slide. Grace screamed and wrenched the reins.

  “Pilgrim, come on! Move!”

  In the odd stillness of the moment before Gulliver hit them, Grace knew there was more to the roar in her head than the rushing of blood. That snowplow wasn’t out on the highway., It was too loud for that. It was somewhere nearer. The thought was vaporized by the shuddering impact of Gulliver’s hindquarters. He bulldozed into them, hitting Pilgrim’s shoulder and spinning him around. Grace felt herself being lifted out of the saddle, whiplashed up the slope. And had one hand not found the rump of the other horse she would have fallen then as Judith fell. But she stayed on, wrapping a fist into Pilgrim’s silky mane as he slid down the slope beneath her.