"The Horse Whisperer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Nicholas)

Chapter Two

Annie and Robert had met when she was only eighteen. It was the summer of 1968 and rather than go straight from school to Oxford University where she had been offered a place, Annie decided to take a year off. She signed up with an organization called Voluntary Service Overseas and was given a two-week crash course on how to teach English, avoid malaria and repel the advances of amorous locals (say no, loudly, and mean it).

Thus prepared, she flew to Senegal in West Africa and after a brief stay in the capital, Dakar, set off on the dusty five-hundred-mile ride south in an open-sided bus crammed with people, chickens and goats, to the small town that was to be her home for the next twelve months. On the second day, as night fell, they arrived at the banks of a great river.

The night air was hot and damp and clamorous with insects and Annie could see the lights of the town twinkling far across the water. But the ferry had shut down till morning and the driver and other passengers, now her friends, were concerned about where she would spend the night. There was no hotel and though they themselves would have no trouble finding a place to lay their heads, they clearly felt the young Englishwoman needed somewhere salubrious.

They told her there was a tubab living nearby who would surely put her up. Without the faintest idea of what a tubab might be, Annie found herself being led in a large posse bearing her bags along winding jungle tracks to a small mud house set among baobab and papaya trees. The tubab who answered the door - she later found out it meant white man - was Robert.

He was a Peace Corps volunteer and had been there a year, teaching English and building wells. He was twenty-four, a Harvard graduate and the most intelligent person Annie had ever met. That night he cooked her a wonderful meal of spiced fish and rice, washed down with bottles of cold local beer, and they talked by candlelight till three in the morning. Robert was from Connecticut and was going to be a lawyer. It was congenital, he apologized, eyes wryly aglint behind his gold-rim specs. Everyone in the family had been lawyers for as long as any of them could remember. It was the Curse of the Macleans.

And, like a lawyer, he cross-examined Annie about her life, forcing her to describe and analyze it in a way that made it seem as fresh to her as it did to him. She told him how her father had been a diplomat and how, for the first ten years of her life, they had moved from country to country whenever he was given a new post. She and her younger brother had been born in Egypt, then lived in Malaya, then Jamaica. And then her father had died, quite suddenly, from a massive heart attack. Annie had only recently found a way of saying this that didn't stop the conversation and make people study their shoes. Her mother had resettled in England, rapidly remarried and packed her and her brother off to boarding schools. Although Annie skimmed over this part of the story, she could see Robert sensed the depth of unresolved pain beneath it.

The following morning Robert took her in his jeep across on the ferry and delivered her safely to the Catholic convent where she was to live and teach for the coming year under the only occasionally disapproving eye of the mother superior, a kindly and conveniently myopic French-Canadian.

Over the course of the next three months, Annie met up with Robert every Wednesday when he came to buy supplies in town. He spoke Jola - the local language - fluently and gave her a weekly lesson. They became friends but not lovers. Instead, Annie lost her virginity to a beautiful Senegalese man called Xavier to whose amorous advances she remembered to say yes, loudly, and mean it.

Then Robert was transferred up to Dakar and the evening before he went, Annie crossed the river for a farewell supper. America was voting for a new president and the two of them listened in deepening gloom to a crackling radio as Nixon took state after state. It was as if someone close to Robert had died and Annie was moved as he explained to her in a voice choked with emotion what it meant for his country and the war many of his friends were fighting in Asia. She put her arms around him and held him and for the first time felt she was no longer a girl but a woman.

Only when he had gone and she met other Peace Corps volunteers, did she realize how unusual he was. Most of the others were dope-heads or bores or both. There was one guy with glazed, pink eyes and a headband who claimed he'd been high for a year.

She saw Robert once more when she went back up to Dakar to fly home the following July. Here people spoke another language called Wolof and he was already fluent. He was living out near the airport, so near that you had to stop talking whenever a plane went over. To make some virtue of this, he had got hold of a huge directory detailing every flight in and out of Dakar and, after two nights studying it, knew it by heart. When a plane flew over he would recite the name of the airline, its origin, route and destination. Annie laughed and he looked a little hurt. She flew home the night a man walked on the moon.

They didn't see each other again for seven years. Annie sailed triumphantly through Oxford, launching a radical and scurrilous magazine and sickening her friends by getting a brilliant First in English without ever appearing to do a stroke of work. Because it was the thing she least didn't want to do, she became a journalist, working on an evening newspaper in the far north-east of England. Her mother came to visit her just once and was so depressed by the landscape and the sooty hovel her daughter was living in that she cried all the way back to London. She had a point. Annie stuck it for a year then packed her bags, flew to New York and amazed even herself by bluffing her way into a job on Rolling Stone.

She specialized in hip, brutal profiles of celebrities more accustomed to adulation. Her detractors - and there were many - said she would soon run out of victims. But it didn't work out that way. They kept on coming. It became a kind of masochistic status symbol to be'done' or 'buried' (that quip had started even at Oxford) by Annie Graves.

Robert phoned her one day at the office and for a moment the name meant nothing to her. 'The tubab who gave you a bed one night in the jungle?' he prompted.

They met for a drink and he was much better looking than Annie remembered. He said he'd been following her byline and seemed to know every piece she'd written better than she did herself. He was an assistant district attorney and working, as much as his job allowed, for the Carter campaign. He was idealistic, bursting with enthusiasm and, most important of all, he made her laugh. He was also straighter and had shorter hair than any man she'd dated in five years.

While Annie's wardrobe was full of black leather and safety pins, his was all button-down collars and corduroy. When they went out, it was L.L. Bean meets the Sex Pistols. And the unconventionality of this pairing was an unspoken thrill to them both.

In bed, the zone of their relationship so long postponed and which, if she was honest with herself, she had secretly dreaded, Robert proved surprisingly free of the inhibitions she had expected. Indeed he was far more inventive than most of the drug-slackened coolsters she had lain with since coming to New York. When, weeks later, she remarked on this, Robert ruminated a moment, as she recalled him doing before declaiming details from the Dakar flight directory, and replied in perfect seriousness that he'd always believed sex, like the law, was best practiced with all due diligence.

They were married the following spring and Grace, their only child, was born three years later.

Annie had brought work with her on the train not through habit but in the hope that it might distract her. She had it stacked in front of her, the proofs of what she hoped was a seminal State of the Nation piece, commissioned at huge expense from a great and grizzled pain-in-the-ass novelist. One of her big-shot writers, as Grace would say. Annie had read the first paragraph three times and hadn't taken in a word.

Then Robert called on her cellular phone. He was at the hospital. There was no change. Grace was still unconscious.

'In a coma, you mean,' Annie said, her tone challenging him to talk straight with her.

'That's not what they're calling it, but yes, I guess that's what it is.'

'What else?' There was a pause. 'Come on Robert, for God's sake.'

'Her leg's pretty bad too. It seems the truck went over it.' Annie took a wincing little breath.

'They're looking at it now. Listen Annie, I better get back there. I'll meet you at the train.'

'No, don't. Stay with her. I'll get a cab.'

'Okay. I'll call you again if there's news.' He paused. 'She's going to be alright.'

'Yes, I know.' She pressed a button on the phone and put it down. Outside, sunlit fields of perfect white altered their geometry as the train sped by. Annie rummaged in her bag for her sunglasses, put them on and laid her head back against the seat.

The guilt had started immediately upon Robert's first call. She should have been up there. It was the first thing she said to Don Farlow when she hung up. He was sweet and came and put his arm around her, saying all the right things.

'It would have made no difference Annie. You couldn't have done anything.'

'Yes I could. I could have stopped her going. What was Robert thinking of, letting her go out riding on a day like this?'

'It's a beautiful day. You wouldn't have stopped her.'

Farlow was right of course, but the guilt remained because it wasn't, she knew, about whether or not she should have gone up with them last night. It was the mere tip of a long seam of guilt that snaked its way back through the thirteen years her daughter had been alive.

Annie had taken six weeks off work when Grace was born and had loved every minute. True, a lot of the less lovable minutes had been delegated to Elsa, their Jamaican nanny, who remained to this day the linchpin of their domestic life.

Like many ambitious women of her generation, Annie had been determined to prove the compatibility of motherhood and career. But while other media mothers used their work to promote this ethic, Annie, had never flaunted it, shunning so many requests for photo spreads of her with Grace that women's magazines soon stopped asking. Not so long ago she had found Grace flipping through such a piece about a TV anchor-woman, proudly pictured with her new baby.

'Why didn't we ever do this?' Grace said, not looking up. Annie answered, rather too tartly, that she thought it was immoral, like product placement. And Grace had nodded thoughtfully, still not looking at her. 'Uh-huh,' she said, matter-of-fact, flipping on to something else. 'I guess people think you're younger if you make out you haven't got kids.'

This comment and the fact that it was uttered without a trace of malice had given Annie such a shock that for several weeks she thought of little else than her relationship with Grace or, as she now saw it, her lack of one.

It hadn't always been so. In fact until four years ago when she'd taken her first editorship, Annie had prided herself that she and Grace were closer than almost any mother and daughter she could think of. As a celebrated journalist, more famous than many of those she wrote about, her time until then had been her own. If she so chose, she could work from home or take days off whenever she wanted. When she traveled, she would often take Grace with her. Once they'd spent the best part of a week, just the two of them, at a famously fancy hotel in Paris, waiting for some prima donna fashion designer to grant Annie a promised audience. Every day they walked miles shopping and sightseeing and spent the evenings guzzling delicious room service in front of the TV, snuggled in a gilded, emperor-size bed like a pair of naughty sisters.

Executive life was very different. And in the strain and euphoria of transforming a stuffy, little-read magazine into the hottest read in town, Annie had at first refused to acknowledge the toll it was taking at home. She and Grace now had what she proudly referred to as 'quality time'. From her present perspective, its main quality seemed to Annie to be oppression.

They had one hour together in the mornings when she forced the child to do her piano practice and two hours in the evening when she forced her to do homework. Words intended as motherly guidance seemed increasingly doomed to be taken as criticism.

At weekends things were better and the horse riding helped keep intact what fragile bridge there remained between them. Annie herself no longer rode but, unlike Robert, had from her own childhood an understanding of the peculiar tribal world of riding and showjumping. She enjoyed driving Grace and her horse to events. But even at its best, their time together never matched the easy trust that Grace shared with Robert.

In a myriad minor ways, it was to her father that the girl first turned. And Annie was by now resigned to the notion that here history was inexorably repeating. She herself had been her father's child, her mother unwilling or unable to see beyond the pool of golden light encircling Annie's brother. Now Annie, with no such excuse, felt herself propelled by pitiless genes to replicate the pattern with Grace.

The train slowed in a long curve and came to a halt in Hudson and she sat still and looked out toward the restored veranda of the platform, with its cast-iron pillars. There was a man standing exactly where Robert normally waited and he stepped forward and held out his arms to a woman with two small children who had just climbed down from the train. Annie watched him hug each of them in turn, then shepherd them toward the parking lot. The boy insisted on trying to carry the heaviest bag and the man laughed and let him. Annie looked away and was glad when the train started to move out again. In twenty-five minutes she would be in Albany.

They picked up Pilgrim's tracks farther back along the road. There were spots of blood still red in the snow among the hoofprints. It was the hunter who saw them first and he followed them, leading Logan and Koopman down through the trees toward the river.

Harry Logan knew the horse they were looking for, though not as well as the one whose mangled carcass he had just watched them cut from the wreckage of the jackknifed trailer. Gulliver was one of a number of horses he looked after up at Mrs Dyer's place but the Macleans used another local vet instead. Logan had noticed the flashy new Morgan a couple of times in the stable. From the blood it was trailing, he knew it must be badly hurt. He still felt shaken by what he had seen and wished he could have got here earlier to put Gulliver out of his misery. But then he might have had to watch them taking Judith's body away and that would have been tough. She was such a nice kid. It was bad enough seeing the Maclean girl whom he hardly knew.

The rushing noise of the river was getting loud and now he caught sight of it down there through the trees. The hunter had stopped and was waiting for them. Logan stumbled on a dead branch and nearly fell and the hunter looked at him with scarcely veiled contempt. Macho little shit, thought Logan. He had taken an instant dislike to the guy as he did to all hunters. He wished he'd told him to put his goddamn rifle back in the car.

The water was running fast, breaking over rocks and surging around a silver birch that had toppled from the bank. The three men stood looking down at where the tracks disappeared by the water.

'Must have tried crossing over or something,' said Koopman, trying to be helpful. But the hunter shook his head. The opposite bank was steep and there were no tracks going up it.

They walked along the bank, nobody speaking. Then the hunter stopped and put his hand out for them to do the same.

'There,' he said, in a low voice, nodding up ahead.

They were about twenty yards from the old railroad bridge. Logan peered, shielding his eyes against the sun. He couldn't see a thing. Then there was a movement under the bridge and at last Logan saw him. The horse was on the far side, in the shadows, looking right at them. His face was wet and there was a steady dark dripping from his chest into the water. There seemed to be something stuck to his front, just below the base of the neck, though from here Logan couldn't make out what it was. Every so often the horse jerked his head down and to the side and blew out a strand of pink froth that floated quickly away downstream and dissolved. The hunter swung the gun bag off his shoulder and started unzipping it.

'Sorry pal, they're out of season,' Logan said, casual as he could, pushing past. The hunter didn't even look up, just pulled the rifle out, a sleek Winchester .308 with a telescopic sight as fat as a bottle. Koopman looked on admiringly. The hunter took some bullets from a pocket and calmly started loading the rifle.

'Thing's bleedin' to death,' he said.

'Oh yeah?' said Logan. 'You're a vet too, huh?'

The guy gave a scornful little laugh. He went on slotting bullets into the magazine with the infuriating air of someone who knew he would be proven right. Logan wanted to strangle him. He turned back toward the bridge and took a careful step forward. Immediately the horse backed away and now he was in the sunlight on the far side of the bridge and Logan could see there wasn't anything stuck to the animal's chest. It was a flap of pink skin hanging loose from a terrible L-shaped gash, about two feet long. Blood was pulsing out of the exposed flesh and streaming down his breast into the water. Logan could now see that the wetness on the horse's face was blood too. Even from here he could tell the nasal bone had been smashed in.

Logan had a sinking feeling in his stomach. This was one hell of a beautiful horse and he hated the idea of putting him down. But even if he could get near enough to control the bleeding, the damage looked so severe, it was odds on the animal would die. He took another step toward him and Pilgrim backed off again, turning to check out the escape upstream. There was a sharp sound behind him, the hunter racking the bolt of his rifle. Logan turned on him.

'Will you shut the fuck up?'

The hunter didn't respond, just gave Koopman a knowing look. There was a rapport developing here that Logan was keen to break. He put his bag down and squatted to get some things out of it, talking to Koopman now.

'I want to see if I can get to him. Could you loop over to the far side of the bridge there and block him off?'

'Yes sir.'

'Maybe get yourself a branch or something and wave it at him if he looks like heading your way. You might have to get your feet wet.'

'Yes sir.' He was already going back up into the trees. Logan called after him.

'Holler when you're ready. And don't get too close!'

Logan loaded a syringe with sedative and stuffed some other things he thought he might need into the pockets of his parka. He was aware of the hunter's eyes on him but ignored him and stood up. Pilgrim's head was low but he was watching every move they made. They waited, the rush of water loud about them. Then Koopman called and as the horse turned to see, Logan stepped carefully down into the river, concealing the syringe in his hand as best he could.

Here and there among the torrent were slabs of exposed rock, washed clean of snow, and he tried to use them as stepping-stones. Pilgrim turned back and saw him. He was getting agitated now, not knowing which way to run and he pawed the water and snorted out another slick of bloody froth. Logan had run out of stepping-stones and knew the moment had come to get wet. He lowered one foot into the current and felt the icy surge over the top of his boot. It was so cold, it made him gasp.

Koopman appeared in the bend of the river beyond the bridge. He too was up to his knees in the water and he had a big birch branch in his hand. The horse was looking from one of them to the other. Logan could see the fear in the animal's eye and there was something else there too which scared him a little. But he spoke to him in a soft, soothing lilt.

'It's okay fella. It's okay now.'

He was within twenty feet of the horse now and was trying to figure out how he was going to do this. If he could get hold of the bridle, he might have a chance of giving the shot in the neck. In case something went wrong, he had loaded more sedative into the syringe than he would need. If he could get it into a vein in the neck, he would have to inject less than if he shot into a muscle. In either case, he would have to take care not to give too much. A horse in as bad a state as this couldn't be allowed to fall unconscious. He would have to try and inject just enough to calm him so they could lead him out of the river and get him somewhere safer.

Now that he was this close, Logan could see the chest wound. It was as bad as anything he'd ever seen and he knew they didn't have long. From the way the blood was pumping, he figured that the horse had already lost maybe up to a gallon of it.

'It's okay young fella. No one's going to hurt you.'

Pilgrim snorted and wheeled away from him, taking a few steps toward Koopman, stumbling and sending up a flash of water that rainbowed in the sun.

'Shake your branch!' Logan yelled.

Koopman did and Pilgrim stopped. Logan used the flurry to lunge nearer, stepping into a hole as he did and wetting himself up to the crotch. Sweet Jesus, it was cold. The horse's white-rimmed eyes saw him come and he started off again toward Koopman.

'And again!'

The shake of the branch stopped him and Logan dived forward and made a grab. He got the reins, taking a turn in them and felt the horse brace and twist against him. He tried to step into the shoulder, keeping as clear as he could from the hind feet that were coming around to get him and he reached up quickly and managed to get the needle into the horse's neck. At the touch of the needle, Pilgrim exploded. He reared up, screaming in alarm and Logan had a fraction of a moment to push the plunger. But as he did so, the horse knocked him sideways, driving into him so that Logan lost all balance and control. Without meaning to, he injected the entire contents of the syringe into Pilgrim's neck.

The horse knew now who was the more dangerous of these men and he leapt away toward Koopman. Logan still had the reins twisted over his left hand, so he was whipped off his feet and pulled headfirst into the water. He felt the icy water streaming through his clothes as he was dragged along like a tangled waterskier. All he could see was surf. The reins bit into the flesh of his hand and his shoulder hit a rock and he cried out in pain. Then the reins came free and he was able to lift his head and take a lungful of air. He could see Koopman now, diving out of the way and the horse splashing past him and scrambling up the bank. The syringe was still hanging from his neck. Logan stood up and watched the horse disappearing up through the trees.

'Shit,' he said.

'You alright?' Koopman asked.

Logan just nodded and started to wring the water from his parka. Something caught his eye up on the bridge and he looked up to see the hunter, leaning on the parapet. He'd been watching and was grinning from ear to ear.

'Why don't you get the fuck out of here,' said Logan.

She saw Robert as soon as she came through the swing doors. At the end of the corridor there was a waiting area with pale gray sofas and a low table with flowers on it and he was standing there looking out of a tall window, the sun streaming in about him. He turned at the sound of her footsteps and had to screw his eyes up to see into the relative dark of the corridor. Annie was touched by how vulnerable he looked in this moment before he saw her, with half his face lit by the sun and his skin so pale it was all but translucent. Then he found her and came walking toward her, with a grim little smile. They put their arms around each other and stayed like that for a while, saying nothing.

'Where is she?' Annie asked at last.

He took hold of her arms and held her away from him a little so he could look at her.

'They've taken her downstairs. They're operating on her now.' He saw her frown and went on quickly before she could say anything. 'They said she's going to be okay. She's still unconscious but they've done all these checks and scans and it doesn't look like there's any brain damage.'

He stopped and swallowed and Annie waited, watching his face. She knew from the way he was trying so hard to keep his voice steady that of course there was something else.

'Go on.'

But he couldn't. He started to cry. Just hung his head and stood there with his shoulders shaking. He was still holding Annie's arms and she gently disengaged herself and held him the same way.

'Go on. Tell me.'

He took a long breath and tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling before he could look at her again. He made one false start then managed to say it.

'They're taking her leg off.'

Annie would later come to feel both wonder and shame at her reaction that afternoon. She had never thought herself particularly stalwart in moments of crisis, except at work where she positively relished them. Nor did she normally find it difficult to show her emotions. Perhaps it was simply that Robert made the decision for her by breaking down. He cried, so she didn't. Someone had to hold on or they would all be swept away.

But Annie had no doubt that it could easily have gone the other way. As it was, the news of what they were doing to her daughter in that building at that very moment entered her like a shaft of ice. Apart from a quickly suppressed urge to scream, all that came into her head was a string of questions, so objective and practical that they seemed callous. 'How much of it?' He frowned, lost. 'What?' 'Her leg. How much of it are they taking off?' 'From above the—' He broke off, having to summon control. The detail seemed so shocking. 'Above the knee.'

'Which leg?'

'The right.'

'How far above the knee?'

'Jesus Christ Annie! What the hell does it matter?' He pulled away from her, freeing himself, wiping his wet face with the back of a hand.

'Well, it matters quite a lot I think.' She was astonishing even herself. He was right, of course it didn't matter. It was academic, ghoulish even, to pursue it but she wasn't going to stop now. 'Is it just above the knee or is she losing the top of her leg as well?'

'Just above the knee. I haven't got the exact measurements but why don't you just go on down and I'm sure they'll let you have a look.'

He turned away to the window and Annie stood watching as he took out a handkerchief and did a proper job on the mucus and tears, angry at himself now for having wept. There were footsteps in the corridor behind her.

'Mrs Maclean?'

Annie turned. A young nurse, all in white, darted a look at Robert and decided Annie was the one to talk to.

'There's a call for you.'

The nurse led the way, walking in small rapid steps, her white shoes making no sound on the shining tiled floor of the corridor so that she seemed to Annie to be gliding. She showed Annie to a phone near the reception desk and put the call through from the office.

It was Joan Dyer from the stables. She apologized for calling and asked nervously after Grace. Annie said she was still in a coma. She didn't mention the leg. Mrs Dyer didn't linger. The reason she had called was Pilgrim. They'd found him and Harry Logan had been on the phone asking what they should do.

'What do you mean?' Annie asked.

'The horse is in a very bad way. There are broken bones, deep flesh wounds and he's lost a lot of blood. Even if they do all they can to save him and he survives, he's never going to be the same.'

'Where's Liz? Can't we get her down there?'

Liz Hammond was the vet who looked after Pilgrim and was also a family friend. It was she who had gone down to Kentucky for them last summer to check Pilgrim out before they bought him. She'd been equally smitten.

'She's away on some conference,' Mrs Dyer said. 'She's not back until next weekend.'

'Logan wants to put him down?'

'Yes. I'm sorry Annie. Pilgrim's under sedation now and Harry says he may not even come around. He'd like your authority to put him down.'

'You mean shoot him?' She heard herself doing it again, hammering away at irrelevant detail as she had just now with Robert. What the hell did it matter how they were going to kill the horse?

'By injection, I imagine.'

'And what if I say no?'

There was a pause at the other end.

'Well, I suppose they'd have to try and get him somewhere they could operate on him. Cornell maybe.' She paused again. 'Apart from anything else Annie, it would end up costing you a lot more than he's insured for.'

It was the mention of money that clinched it for Annie, for the thought had yet to coalesce that there might be some connection between the life of this horse and the life of her daughter.

'I don't care what the hell it costs,' she snapped and she could feel the older woman flinch. 'You tell Logan if he kills that horse, I'll sue him.'

She hung up.

'Come on. You're okay, come on.'

Koopman was walking backward down the slope, waving the truck on with both arms. It reversed slowly down after him into the trees and the chains hanging from the hoist on its rear end swung and clinked as it came. It was the truck that the mill people had standing by to unload their new turbines and Koopman had commandeered it, and them, for this new purpose. Following close behind it was a big Ford pickup hitched to an open-top trailer. Koopman looked over his shoulder to where Logan and a small crowd of helpers were kneeling around the horse.

Pilgrim was lying on his side in a giant bloodstain that was spreading out through the snow under the knees of those trying to save him. This was as far as he'd got when the flood of sedative hit. His forelegs buckled and he went down on his knees. For a few moments he'd tried to fight it but by the time Logan arrived he was out for the count.

Logan had got Koopman to call Joan Dyer on his mobile and was glad the hunter wasn't around to hear him asking her to get the owner's permission to put the animal down. Then he'd sent Koopman running for help, knelt by the horse and got to work trying to stem the bleeding. He reached deep into the steaming chest wound, his hand groping through layers of torn soft-tissue till he was up to his elbow in gore. He felt around for the source of the bleeding and found it, a punctured artery, thank God a small one. He could feel it pumping hot blood into his hand and he remembered the little clamps he had put in his pocket and scrabbled with his other hand to find one. He clipped it on and immediately felt the pumping stop. But there was still blood flowing from a hundred ruptured veins so he struggled out of his sodden parka, emptied its pockets and squeezed as much water and blood as he could from it. Then he rolled it up and stuffed it as gently as he could into the wound. He cursed out loud. What he really needed now was fluids. The bag of Plasmalyte he had brought was in his bag down by the river. He got to his feet and half ran, half fell back down there to get it.

By the time he returned, the rescue-squad paramedics were there and were covering Pilgrim with blankets. One of them was holding out a phone to him.

'Mrs Dyer for you,' he said.

'I can't talk to her now, for Christsakes,' Logan said. He knelt down and hitched the five-liter bag of Plasmalyte to Pilgrim's neck, then gave him a shot of steroids to fight the shock. The horse's breathing was shallow and irregular and his limbs rapidly losing temperature and Logan yelled for more blankets to wrap around the animal's legs after they had bandaged them to lessen the blood flow.

One of the rescue-squad people had some green drapes from an ambulance and Logan carefully extracted his blood-soaked parka from the chest wound and packed the drapes in instead. He leaned back on his heels, out of breath, and started loading a syringe with penicillin. His shirt was dark red and sodden and blood dripped from his elbows as he held the syringe up to flick the bubbles out.

'This is fucking crazy,' he said.

He injected the penicillin into Pilgrim's neck. The horse was as good as dead. The chest wound alone was enough to justify putting him down but that wasn't the half of it. His nasal bone was hideously crunched in, there were clearly some broken ribs, an ugly gash over the left cannon bone and God knows how many other smaller cuts and bruises. He could also tell from the way the horse had run up the slope that there was lameness high up in the right foreleg. He should just put the poor beast out of its agony. But now he'd got this far, he was damned if he was going to give that trigger-happy little fucker of a hunter the satisfaction of knowing he was right. If the horse died of his own accord, so be it.

Koopman had the mill truck and the trailer down beside them now and Logan saw they had managed to find a canvas sling from somewhere. The rescue-squad guy still had Mrs Dyer standing by on the phone and Logan took it from him.

'Okay, I'm yours,' he said and as he listened, he indicated to them where to put the sling. When he heard the poor woman's tactful rendering of Annie's message, he just smiled and shook his head.

'Terrific,' he said.'Nice to be appreciated.'

He handed the phone back and helped drag the two canvas sling straps under Pilgrim's barrel, through what was now a sea of red slush. Everyone was standing and Logan thought they all looked funny with their matching red knees. Someone handed him a dry jacket and for the first time since he was in the river he realized how cold he was.

Koopman and the driver hitched the ends of the sling to the hoist chains and then stood back with the others as Pilgrim was slowly lifted into the air and swung like a carcass onto the trailer. Logan climbed up there with two paramedics and they manhandled the horse's limbs so that eventually he lay as before on his side. Koopman passed the vet's things up to him while others spread blankets over the horse.

Logan gave another shot of steroids and took out a new bag of Plasmalyte. He suddenly felt very tired. He figured the chances of the horse being alive by the time they got to his clinic were odds on against.

'We'll call ahead,' Koopman said. 'So they'll know when to expect you.'

'Thanks.'

'All set now?'

'I guess so.'

Koopman slapped the rear end of the pickup that was hitched to the trailer and yelled for the driver to move out. It started slowly up the slope.

'Good luck,' Koopman called after them but Logan didn't seem to hear. The young deputy looked vaguely disappointed. It was all over and everyone was going home. There was a zipping sound behind him and he turned to look. The hunter was putting his rifle back in its bag.

'Thanks for your help,' Koopman said. The hunter nodded, swung the bag over his shoulder and walked away.

Robert woke with a jolt and for a moment thought he was in his office. The screen of his computer had gone berserk, quivering green lines racing each other across ranges of jagged peaks. Oh no, he thought, a virus. Rampaging through his files on the Dunford Securities case. Then he saw the bed with its covers neatly tented over what remained of his daughter's leg and he remembered where he was.

He looked at his watch. It was nearly five a.m. The room was dark except for where the angle-lamp behind the bed cast a cocoon of soft light over Grace's head and her naked shoulders. Her eyes were closed and her face serene as if she didn't mind at all the snaking coils of plastic tube that had invaded her body. There was a tube into her mouth from the respirator and another up her nose and down into her stomach through which she could be fed. More tubes looped down from the bottles and bags that hung above the bed and they met in a tangled fury at her neck, as if fighting to be first into the valve slotted into her jugular. The valve was masked by flesh-colored tape, as were the electrodes on her temples and chest and the hole they had cut above one of her young breasts to insert a fiber-optic tube into her heart.

Without a riding hat, the doctors said, the girl might well be dead. When her head hit the road, the hat had cracked but not the skull. A second scan however had found some diffused bleeding in the brain so they had drilled a tiny hole in her skull and inserted something that was now monitoring the pressure inside. The respirator, they said, would help stop the swelling in the brain. Its rhythmic whoosh, like the waves of a mechanical sea breaking on shingle, was what had lulled Robert into sleep. He had been holding her hand and it lay palm up where he had unwittingly discarded it. He took it again in both of his and felt the falsely reassuring warmth of her.

He leaned forward and gently pressed down a piece of tape that had come unstuck from one of the catheters in her arm. He looked up at the battery of machines each of whose precise purpose Robert had insisted on having them explain. Now, without having to move, he carried out a systematic check, scanned each screen, valve and fluid level to make sure nothing had happened while he slept. He knew it was all computerized and alarms would sound at the central monitoring desk around the corner if anything went wrong, but he had to see for himself. Satisfied now, still holding Grace's hand, he settled back in his seat. Annie was sleeping in a little room they had provided down the corridor. She had wanted him to wake her at midnight so that she could take over the vigil but as he himself had dozed Robert thought he would let her go on sleeping.

He stared at Grace's face and thought that amid all this brutish technology she looked like a child half her age. She had always been so healthy. Apart from having a knee stitched once when she fell off a bicycle, she hadn't been in a hospital since she was born. Though there had been drama enough then to last a good few years.

It was an emergency caesarean section. After twelve hours of labor they had given Annie an epidural and because nothing seemed likely to happen for a while, Robert had wandered off to the cafeteria to get himself a cup of coffee and a sandwich. When he came back up to her room half an hour later all hell had broken loose. It was like the deck of a warship, people in green running all over the place, wheeling equipment around, yelling orders. While he was away, someone told him, the internal monitoring had shown the baby was in distress. Like some hero from a forties war movie, the obstetrician had swept in and declared to his troops that he was 'going in'.

Robert had always imagined caesareans were peaceful affairs. No panting, shoving and screaming, just a simple cut along a plotted line and the baby lifted effortlessly out. Nothing then had prepared him for the wrestling match that followed. It was already under way when they let him in and stood him wide-eyed in a corner. Annie was under general anesthetic and he watched these men, these total strangers, delving inside her, up to their elbows in gore, hauling it out and sloshing it in dollops into a corner. Then stretching the hole with metal clamps and grunting and heaving and twisting until one of them, the war hero, had it in his hands and the others suddenly went still and watched him lift this little thing, marbled white with womb grease, out of Annie's gaping belly.

He fancied himself as a comic too, this man, and said casually over his shoulder to Robert: 'Better luck next time. It's a girl.' Robert could have killed him. But after they had quickly wiped her clean and checked that she had the right number of fingers and toes, they handed her to him, wrapped in a white blanket and he forgot his anger and held her in his arms. Then he laid her on Annie's pillow so that when she woke up Grace was the first thing she saw.

Better luck next time. There had never been a next time. Both of them had wanted another child but Annie had miscarried four times, the last time dangerously, well into the pregnancy. They were told it was unwise to go on trying but they didn't need telling. For with each loss the pain multiplied exponentially and in the end neither felt able to face it again. After the last one, four years ago, Annie said she wanted to be sterilized. He could tell it was because she wanted to punish herself and he had begged her not to. In the end, reluctantly, she'd relented and had a coil fitted instead, making a grim joke that with luck it might have the same effect anyway.

It was at precisely this time that Annie was offered and, to Robert's amazement, accepted her first editorship. Then, as he watched her channel her anger and disappointment into her new role, he realized she'd taken it either to distract or, again, to punish herself. Perhaps both. But he wasn't in the least surprised when she made such a brilliant success of it that almost every major magazine in the country started trying to poach her.

Their joint failure to produce another child was a sorrow he and Annie never now discussed. But it had seeped silently into every crevice of their relationship.

It had been there, unspoken, this afternoon when Annie arrived at the hospital and he had so stupidly broken down and wept. He knew Annie felt he blamed her for being unable to give him another child. Maybe she had reacted so harshly to his tears because somehow she could see in them a trace of that blame. Maybe she was right. For this fragile child, lying here maimed by a surgeon's knife, was all they had. How rash, how mean of Annie to have spawned but one. Did he really think that? Surely not. But how then could he speak the thought so freely to himself?

Robert had always felt that he loved his wife more than she would ever love him. That she did love him he had no doubt. Their marriage, compared with many he had observed, was good. Both mentally and physically they still seemed able to give each other pleasure. But barely a day had gone by in all these years when Robert hadn't counted himself lucky to have held on to her. Why someone so vibrant should want to be with a man like him, he never ceased to wonder.

Not that Robert underestimated himself. Objectively (and objectivity he considered, objectively, to be one of his strengths) he was one of the most gifted lawyers he knew. He was also a good father, a good friend to those few close friends he had and, despite all those lawyer gags you heard nowadays, he was a genuinely moral man. But though he would never have thought himself dull, he knew he lacked Annie's sparkle. No, not her sparkle, her spark. Which is what had always excited him about her, from that very first night in Africa when he opened his door and saw her standing there with her bags.

He was six years older than she was but it had often felt much more. And what with all the glamorous, powerful people she met, Robert thought it nothing less than a minor miracle that she should be content with him. More than that, he was sure - or as sure as a thinking man could be about such matters - that she had never been unfaithful to him.

Since the spring however, when Annie had taken on this new job, things had become strained. The office bloodletting had made her irritable and more than usually critical. Grace too, and even Elsa, had noticed the change and watched themselves when Annie was around. Elsa looked relieved nowadays when it was he rather than Annie who got home first from the office. She would quickly hand over messages, show him what she had cooked for dinner and then hurry off before Annie arrived.

Robert now felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see his wife standing beside him, as though summoned by his thoughts. There were dark rings under her eyes. He took her hand and pressed it to his cheek.

'Did you sleep?' he asked.

'Like a baby. You were going to wake me.'

'I fell asleep too.'

She smiled and looked down at Grace. 'No change.'

He shook his head. They had spoken softly as if for fear of waking the girl. For a while they both watched her, Annie's hand still on his shoulder, the whoosh of the respirator measuring the silence between them all. Then Annie shivered and took her hand away. She wrapped her woolen jacket tightly around her, folding her arms.

'I thought I'd go home and get some of her things,' she said. 'You know, so when she wakes up, they'll be there.'

'I'll go. You don't want to drive now.'

'No, I want to. Really. Can I have your keys?'

He found them and gave them to her.

'I'll pack a bag for us too. Is there anything special you need?'

'Just clothes, a razor maybe.'

She bent and kissed him on the forehead.

'Be careful,' he said.

'I will. I won't be long.'

He watched her go. She stopped at the door and looked back at him and he could tell there was something she wanted to say.

'What?' he said. But she just smiled and shook her head. Then she turned and was gone.

The roads were clear and at this hour, apart from a lonely sand-truck or two, quite deserted. Annie drove south on 87 and then east on 90, taking the same exit the truck had taken the morning before.

There had been no thaw and the car's headlights lit the low walls of soiled snow along the roadside. Robert had fitted the snow tires and they made a low roar on the gritted blacktop. There was a phone-in on the radio, a woman saying how worried she was about her teenage son. She'd recently bought a new car, a Nissan, and the boy seemed to have fallen in love with it. He spent hours sitting in it, stroking it and today she'd walked into the garage and caught him making love to its tailpipe.

'Kinda what you'd call a fixation, huh?' said the show's host, whose name was Melvin. All phone-ins seemed to have these ruthless wiseguy hosts nowadays and Annie could never understand why people kept calling, knowing full well they would get humiliated. Perhaps that was the point. This caller sailed on oblivious.

'Yes, I guess that's what it is,' she said. 'But I don't know what to do about it.'

'Don't do anything,' cried Melvin. 'The kid'll soon get exhausted. Next caller…'

Annie turned off the highway onto the lane that curled up the shoulder of the hill to their house. The road surface here was glistening hard-pack snow and she drove carefully through the tunnel of trees and pulled into the driveway that Robert must have cleared this morning. Her headlights panned across the white clapboard front of the house above her, its gables lost among towering beech trees. There were no lights on inside and the hall walls and ceiling gave a glimpse of blue as the headlights shafted briefly in. An outside light came on automatically as Annie drove around to the back of the house and waited for the door of the basement garage to raise.

The kitchen was how Robert had left it. Cupboard doors hung open and on the table stood the two unpacked grocery bags. Some ice cream in one of them had melted and leaked and was dripping off the table into a small pink lake on the floor. The red light was flashing on the answering machine, showing there were messages. But Annie didn't feel like listening to them. She saw the note Grace had written to Robert and stared at it, somehow not wanting to touch it. Then she turned abruptly and got to work clearing the ice cream and putting away the food that hadn't been spoiled.

Upstairs, packing a bag for Robert and herself, she felt oddly robotic, as if her every action were programmed. She supposed the numbness had something to do with shock or maybe it was some kind of denial.

It was certainly true that when she first saw Grace after the operation, the sight was so alien, so extreme, that she couldn't take it in. She had been almost jealous of the pain it wrought so palpably in Robert. She had seen the way his eyes kept roving over Grace's body, siphoning agony from every intrusion the doctors had made. But Annie just stared. This new version they had made of her daughter was a fact that made no sense at all.

Annie's clothes and hair smelled of the hospital so she undressed and showered. She let the water run down over her for a while then adjusted it till it was almost too hot to bear. Then she reached up and switched the shower head to its most vicious setting so that the water pricked her like hot needles. She closed her eyes and held her face up into it and the pain made her cry out loud. But she kept it there, happy that it hurt. Yes, she could feel this. At least she could feel this.

The bathroom was full of steam when she stepped out of the shower. She wiped the towel across the mirror, only partly clearing it, then dried herself before it, watching the smeared, liquid image of a creature that didn't seem to be her. She had always liked her body, though it was fuller and bigger-breasted than the sylphs who strutted the style pages of her magazine. But the blurred mirror was giving her back a distorted, pink abstraction of herself, like a Francis Bacon painting, and Annie found it so disturbing that she turned off the light and went quickly back into the bedroom.

Grace's room was just as she must have left it the previous morning. The long T-shirt she wore as a nightdress was lying on the end of the unmade bed. There was a pair of jeans on the floor and Annie bent to pick them up. They were the ones that had fraying holes in the knees, patched inside with pieces cut from an old floral-print dress of Annie's. She remembered how she had offered to do it and how hurt she had been when Grace said nonchalantly that she'd rather Elsa do it. Annie did her usual trick and, with just a little hurt flick of an eyebrow, made Grace feel guilty.

'Mom, I'm sorry,' she said, putting her arms around her. 'But you know you can't sew.'

'I can too,' Annie said, turning into a joke what they both knew hadn't been.

'Well, maybe you can. But not as good as Elsa.'

'Not as well as Elsa, you mean.' Annie always picked her up on the way she spoke, adopting her loftiest English accent to do so. It always prompted Grace to come back in flawless Valley Girl.

'Hey Mom, whatever. Like, you know, really.'

Annie folded the jeans and put them away. Then she tidied the bed and stood there, scanning the room, wondering what to take to the hospital. In a sort of hammock slung above the bed were dozens of cuddly toys, a whole zoo of them, from bears and buffalo to kites and killer whales. They came from every corner of the globe, borne by family and friends and now, convening here, took turns in sharing Grace's bed. Each night, with scrupulous fairness, she would select two or three, depending on their size, and prop them on her pillow. Last night, Annie could see, it had been a skunk and some lurid dragon-creature Robert had once brought back from Hong Kong. Annie put them back in the hammock and rummaged to find Grace's oldest friend, a penguin called Godfrey, sent to the hospital by Robert's friends at the office on the day Grace was born. One eye was now a button and he was sagging and faded from too many trips to the laundry. Annie hauled him out and stuffed him in the bag.

She went over to the desk by the window and packed Grace's Walkman and the box of tapes she always took on trips. The doctor had said they should try playing music to her. There were two framed photographs on the desk. One was of the three of them on a boat. Grace was in the middle with her arms around both their shoulders and all of them were laughing. It had been taken five years ago in Cape Cod; one of the happiest vacations they'd ever had. Annie put it in the bag and picked up the other picture. It was of Pilgrim, taken in the field above the stables shortly after they got him last summer. He had no saddle or bridle on him, not even a halter, and the sun gleamed on his coat. His body was pointing away but he had turned his head and was looking right at the camera. Annie had never really studied the photograph before but now that she did she found the horse's steady gaze unsettling.

She had no idea if Pilgrim was still alive. All she knew was from a message Mrs Dyer had left yesterday evening at the hospital, that he'd been taken to the vet's place in Chatham and was to be transferred to Cornell. Now, looking at him in this picture, Annie felt herself reproached. Not for her ignorance of his fate, but for something else, something deeper that she didn't yet understand. She put the picture in the bag, switched off the light and went downstairs.

A pale light was already coming in through the tall windows in the hall. Annie put the bag down and went into the kitchen without turning on any lights. Before checking the phone messages, she thought she would make herself a cup of coffee. As she waited for the old copper kettle to boil, she walked over to the window.

Outside, only a few yards from where she stood, was a group of whitetail deer. They were standing completely still, staring back at her. Was it food they were after? She'd never seen them this close to the house before, even in the harshest of winters. What did it mean? She counted them. There were twelve, no, thirteen. One for each year of her daughter's life. Annie told herself not to be ridiculous.

There was a low, burgeoning whistle as the kettle started to boil. The deer heard it too and they turned as one and fled, their tails bouncing madly as they headed up past the pond to the woods. Christ almighty, thought Annie, she's dead.