luck and the whims of God would hold her responsible for the death of Joe, of a pronghorn antelope, and now of this tiny bird. She would never have the opportunity to be a licensed vet, let alone a supernatural one.
Beth let loose a yell of frustration that came up from the bottom of her belly, and she hurled the dead bird like a baseball into the cottonwood’s thick trunk. She wished the bird back the moment it left her fingers. This was not the behavior of a compassionate human being. But the airborne body was beyond her reach in an instant.
The sparrow bounced off the grooved bark, and then after a shocking, flapping, noisy tumble through the air, it flew away.
Beth watched a feather float down onto the exposed roots of the tree and didn’t believe what she had seen. She must have startled another bird out of the branches overhead. That was all.
When she finally uprooted her feet from the earth, she searched for the evidence of her involuntary birdslaughter. She examined the nooks of the cottonwood’s roots. She ran her hands up and down the rough trunk. She covered the ground in a widening spiral.
She couldn’t even find any dead leaves on the ground.
When the path of her spiral took her to the base of another tree, Beth stopped her search. She placed her hand on the grooved bark because it was real and tangible. Above her head, a bird chirped once. She looked up and was not surprised to see a brown house sparrow.
Beth tried to read nothing into it. The common birds flocked together. They all looked the same to her. Avian species were not her specialty. Still she couldn’t stop sweat from breaking out across the palms of her hands.
The bird chirped again and eyed her with a cocked head. She had no idea what this might mean.
But her heart said, Go. Gert’s waiting for you.
She had to figure out how this worked. She left immediately.
10
The horse pasture and the house where generations of Borzois had lived since the late eighteen hundreds were on the north end of the Blazing B. Here the property tapered to a narrow boundary between the county road and the creek that poured out of foothills littered with black volcanic rock. Several horse shelters protected the animals from the stiff weather of the wider landscape. A horseshoe-shaped line of ninety-foot cottonwood trees offered further protection and privacy.
Beth hurried to the barn, her head full of flying sparrows and elegant antelope and expectations for Jacob’s horse. God would make everything clear. He would do it before the family lost everything, in the nick of time. Miracles always came in the nick of time.
Throughout the summer, the female trees dropped their fluffy seeds like fairies in wedding dresses onto the horses’ backs. Gert was lying on her side next to the barn, covered in a veil of cottonwood white that mimicked the snowflake pattern of her lovely mottled coat. The horse’s lungs worked as if she’d just run a race, but she didn’t have a drop of sweat on her.
“When did she go down?” Beth asked.
Jacob was sitting in the dust by Gert’s head. “Right after you hung up.”
“Sorry to make you wait. Dr. O’Connor is out on a call.”
“I know.”
She knew then that he’d called the vet first, before her, and she felt mildly embarrassed that she’d assumed otherwise. But she couldn’t figure why he wouldn’t just come out and say it.
“Who else did you call?” she asked.
“Stanton, from up in Villa Grove, but it’ll be another hour before he gets over.”
Beth ran her hands over Gert’s throat, which was quite hot and dry to the touch. She placed a forefinger under the left side of the horse’s jawbone and easily found the pulsating artery there.
“Count fifteen seconds for me,” she said. Jacob glanced at his wristwatch and gave her a go-ahead.
“Time,” he said.
Beth multiplied her count by four. “Heart rate’s fifty-six,” she said.
“That’s what I got too.”
“You might have mentioned that.”
“I answered all your questions.”
“Okay, then. Is this a game? One point for you, Jacob.”
“No game,” he said.
“Did you take her temp by yourself too?”
“All my answers were truthful,” Jacob said, tipping his hat back on his head. The band inside left a reddish impression above his eyebrows. “I respect my horse’s dignity.”
“But you know how to do it if you had to.”
“What kind of a cowboy would I be if I didn’t know how? She’s pushing 103.”