“How the hell do you prepare for bears, Amy?”
She slid the eggs, bacon, and two slices of toast on a plate and set it down in front of me. “Do you really want to know? Because I’d be happy to take you out some weekend and show you.”
“Nah, I’m good.”
Her gaze dipped and the corners of her mouth went right down with it. Was she…disappointed? She didn’t actually want me tagging along on her adventures, did she? My eyebrows pinched together, but she turned back to the counter, gathering the ingredients for a sandwich.
“Anyway, bears aren’t the scariest thing out there. Moose are worse.”
“Moose?”
“Yeah.” She nodded vehemently. “Moose are way scarier than bears.”
“Well, how do you prepare for a moose, then?”
She grinned. “You don’t.”
“What do you think?”Terry Quinn asked.
Just from the fact that he posed the question at all, I knew I had made a mistake. If I had done the job perfectly, he wouldn’t have asked for my opinion. He would have saidnice work, clapped me on the shoulder with his thick, gnarled hand, and we would have moved on to the next horse.
The problem was, until that very second, I had thought it was good. The old draft mare, Oreo, was a complicated case. Terry had a soft spot for the gentle giants, so he offered his services to Sunshine Rescue at a reduced rate. An interesting choice, because the work was easily four times as hard.
My back ached from the hours I had already spent hunched over these dinner-plate-sized feet, but I crouched so I was eye-level with her knees. “All right. Walk her toward me.”
Terry clucked his tongue and tugged the lead rope. The mare ambled forward, her heavy footfall muffled by the wood shavings. She looked fine. Not perfect, but we weren’t aiming for perfect, not yet. She had arrived at the farm with cracked, overgrown hooves that hadn’t seen a farrier in a decade. This was our second visit with her, and she still had a long road ahead of her before she was fully sound.
But what I was seeing now was a big improvement. No matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t see anything I’d do differently. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Terry that, but I bit it back.
Six months ago, when I started my apprenticeship after completing the technical program, Terry never asked me what I thought, maybe because my novice experience made my thoughts not worth sharing. He’d go over my mistakes in detail and I was expected to listen and ask questions, not provide insight myself. Somewhere along the way, when my mistakes became few and far between, he started asking for my opinion—even though he already knew the correct answer.
At first it felt like a trick question. Like he was setting me up to look like a fool, so he could yellgotcha!and feel good about himself.
It took me a while to understand it wasn’t a trap. He was teaching me to slow down and check my work, and he framed it like a question because I already knew the answer, too, if I would simply pull my head out of my ass long enough to see it. With forty-odd years of farrier experience under his belt, he took mentoring seriously.
So I bit back my bad attitude and said, “She looks good from the front. Circle her around and let me see how she moves from a different angle.”
Terry nodded and clucked his tongue again. I didn’t see anything amiss on the first pass—other than the obvious trauma that would take a few more visits to fully fix—but on the second pass I figured it out.
My knees crackled and popped as I straightened. “All four hooves are fine. Adequate. If I was going to be a nitpicky son of a bitch about it, I’d say the right hind could be better.”
Terry smacked the lead rope against his thigh. “You gonna be a nitpicky SOB about it?”
I considered the mare. She had that quiet, wilted look about her of an animal who had given up. I knew that look well, having seen it on my mom’s face for most of my life. Like she had spent so many years disappointed that now she couldn’t feel anything at all. Most horses would take the opportunity to share their weight with the farrier while they were being worked on, but not Oreo. She hadn’t leaned on me even a little. Not on the first visit, and not even now on the second visit.
On the outside, she had improved a hundred times over between the two visits. Her overgrown, split hooves were now healthy enough that she could walk with minimal pain. But on the inside? There was no spark of life in those big, brown eyes. Would she even notice if I went the extra mile on a hoof that was already an adequate job? Probably not.
Probablynot.
That didn’t much change how I felt about it, though.
I lifted the hem of my t-shirt and dragged it down my sweaty face. “Yeah, I reckon I will.”
Terry grinned. “That’s what I figured you’d say. Let’s get her back on the stand.”
“Light day tomorrow.”Terry consulted his phone as I steered into his driveway. “Just the Taylor farm.”
“That’s on purpose,” I reminded him. Terry’s mind was a steel trap when it came to anything equine related, but dates and scheduling slipped from his brain like water through a sieve. His wife, Angie, controlled his calendar and handled the day-to-day paperwork. “My sister, Amy, is starting at the University of Colorado this fall. I promised her I’d drive her out there and get the lay of it all.”
