Chapter 10
What Everything Alive Knows
Copper's leg had carried Micah through the Blizzard of '83 and a hundred lesser hardships, and now it betrayed him quietly, the way old soldiers and old horses do. The sorrel gelding came up from the river one morning refusing all weight on the foreleg that had never quite healed, head bobbing, the hoof hot as a stove lid, and Micah's face, when he knelt in the corral dust and ran his hand down the cannon bone, was the face of a man hearing bad news about his only brother.
"Stone bruise gone deep," Tomaso said at the fence. "Or abscess growing. Either wayβ" He did not finish, out of respect for what everyone in the valley knew about men and the horses that had carried them through the worst night of their lives.
Micah brought the problem to Naya the way the whole valley brought her its problems, by asking.
"Will you look at him? I won't pretend I'd trust anyone else's looking half as much, but he's yours to refuse. I know your time's spent on two-legged foolishness mostly."
Naya looked at him a moment. "Bring him to the shade by the healing lodge. And Micah β it may be days. I will not hurry a hoof for a man's feelings."
"I'd think less of you if you did."
The hoof, pared carefully, told its story: a bruise deep as sin from the river rocks, and behind it an abscess ripening in the dark like a storm in a bottle. Naya worked with a hoof knife and hands that did not hesitate, and when the abscess opened Copper sighed through his whole body and leaned his knee, briefly, against her shoulder, trusting her with his full hurting weight in a way that made Tomaso cross himself at the fence.
Then came the regimen, and it ruled the valley's days like a small religion. Poultices of mashed prickly pear and creosote, changed at dawn and dusk. Soaks in spring water hauled cold from the river, the gelding standing fetlock-deep in a bucket with the patience of a saint at prayer, which he was not, being a horse who stole hats. Castor oil. Rest, enforced like law β and enforcement, in Copper's case, required a jailer.
Micah slept in the corral three nights running, his bedroll in the straw, his hat over his face, rising at every shift and stamp to talk the gelding quiet. He did not sleep in there uninvited; he asked Tomaso, and asked Naya whether his presence would fret the patient, and accepted her answer β "Horses heal better with their person near. You are his person" β with a gravity that told her exactly how much the sentence meant to him.
She came at dawn with fresh poultice makings and found man and horse asleep together, Copper's nose resting inches from Micah's shoulder, both of them breathing slow. She stood in the gray light with her basket on her arm and felt something in her chest move, like a stone in a riverbed shifting in the current.
"You talk in your sleep," she informed Micah when he woke, because tenderness unguarded frightened her and teasing was armor she owned.
"Anything incriminating?"
"You apologized to the horse. At some length."
"He's heard worse apologies. Mine mostly." He sat up, straw in his hair, and looked so entirely unashamed to be found foolish over a horse that she had to turn away to hide her smile in the work of unwrapping his leg.
On the fifth day Copper bore weight. On the sixth he walked to the water trough with only a ghost of the limp, and on the seventh, when Naya came at dawn, the gelding left a perfectly good pile of hay, crossed the corral with deliberate, dignified purpose, and pushed his great soft nose into her hands and blew warm breath over her fingers, claiming her.
Micah watched from the fence and said nothing, and his silence, as ever, said it more truly than praise would have.
Everything alive trusted her. He had known it in pieces β the children who ran to her, the nestling, the camp dogs, Marta, the Ellery boy fighting his fever toward her voice like a swimmer toward shore. Now his own horse, who trusted perhaps four living creatures and tolerated the rest, stood with his head in her hands rendering his verdict, and Micah understood that he was not watching a woman be kind to animals. He was watching the plain fact of who she was, visible to every creature that could not lie about what it sensed.
"Well," Naya said, scratching Copper's poll with assumed lightness, not looking at Micah, because the moment was large and she was not ready to carry it where he could see. "He forgives me the knife."
"He ain't forgiving," Micah said quietly. "He's thanking. There's a difference, and he knows it if I don't always."