1
BOONE
DAY 100: MARCH 17
I step onto the packed dirt just outside the front door and rub my hands together. I blow on them for good measure, which never helps. There’s something comforting in the gesture, though, like maybe I have some minuscule bit of control over this one simple thing, warming my fingers.
Of course, that’s a complete joke.
Where the hell are the leather work gloves, the ones I’ve only recently started to think of as my own? The gloves used to belong to my father, like most everything else in my life.
I head to the paddock, say, “Yeah, same to you,” as the gelding grumbles a low whinny. The sound is both friendly and demanding, like, I love you, man. Now, throw my freaking breakfast over the fence. For some reason, it makes me want to wrap my arms around the horse’s neck in a hug. Diablo would never stand for it, though. Not until after he’d finished eating.
I grab a fat flake of alfalfa from the open bale on a pallet in the makeshift feed room. I take the purple bucket from its hook and scoop some sweet, expensive senior feed into it until the bucket’s a third full. Try not to think about what me and Mom and Diablo are going to do now that my hours at the Feed & Seed have been cut to just weekends. Even though it’s still cold, it’s not the right season for loading up the truck with firewood and selling it on the side of the road. It’s actually the opposite of the right season.
The horse is a ridiculous expense. If I wasn’t able to turn him out into the big pasture from late spring until fall like I do, there’s no way we’d be able to keep him.
For the past two-plus years, ever since horse chores fell to me (all chores, really), I’ve made a habit of checking Diablo’s water trough for everything from slobbery clumps of half-chewed alfalfa to floating turds. Horses can be disgusting like that, and I like to clean stuff out of his tank before it gets too gross. When you live out in the middle of nowhere and have to haul your own water, you learn to conserve it pretty quickly.
This time, I don’t find either of those things in the trough. Instead, I find two dead birds. Barn swallows, maybe, or wild finches—I can never keep them straight. Their wings are splayed out on the slushy surface of the water. The tip of one bird’s right wing and the other bird’s left wing are touching, like only seconds before death they reached for each other.
I just stand there, can’t believe it. The backs of their wings are totally dry. For a crazy split second I think maybe they could still be alive. But, no. The birds are still, and the water is still. Which means they’ve been there for a while, possibly since right after I left for school this morning. I feel so awful all of a sudden—and so foolish for feeling awful about two stupid dead birds—that I clench my fists and hold them to my forehead. I tense all the muscles in my body as tight as they’ll go until I feel like I might scream or explode. After a minute, I let everything relax again and drop my hands to my sides.
I walk to the shed for the mucking fork to fish the birds out of the trough. It occurs to me to wonder if they have a nest somewhere. Spring is just a couple days away, after all. It’s not unusual at this time of year to see small birds trying to guard their nests from huge, pillaging ravens. Somewhere close by, a cluster of naked, wide-beaked chicks might be, right this very second, cheeping for their parents to return with some tasty earthworms. I could try to locate any potential babies, but then what? Their chances of survival with two dead parents would be nil, and it’s not like I have time to nurse a nest full of newly hatched mouths to feed.
It does no good to linger on that thought. It does the opposite of good, in fact. Lingering on thoughts like that is just one more thing that makes me weak, so I push the image from my mind. Remind myself that nature can be a heartless bitch. Swipe at my eyes with the cuff of my jacket, then look around in case anyone saw. Which is moronic. Who’d be crazy enough to be standing around way out here in the middle of nowhere this late in the day in this kind of weather? Don’t answer that, I think, trying to cheer myself up. It’s probably the first sign that I’ve finally gone completely mental.
Back at the trough, I lower the mucking fork into the water and bring it carefully up under the birds. A part of me is half-afraid they’ll startle and flap at the sensation, but nothing happens. One bird falls from the mucking fork as I lift it. Plops back into the water, wings akimbo. In the process of being scooped up again, both birds get twisted and tangled. When I finally get them onto the plastic tines, they’re like feathered pretzels, dripping wet. They’ll be frozen solid before some other animal finds and eats them in the next day or so. Circle of life and whatever. I say a few words in my head before flinging them as far over the pasture fence as possible, something like, Thank you for these birds, amen.
It will be getting dark soon. After hanging the fork back on its hook inside the feed room, I head toward the forest with a flashlight to look for a piece of wood to keep in the trough. Years ago, I overheard one of my dad’s horseshoeing clients talking about how it was smart to keep a fat stick inside big water tanks so animals that got in could get out. Otherwise, they’d drown in there, creating a botulism threat. And when that happens, you have no choice but to empty the whole trough and bleach it, wasting potentially hundreds of gallons of water that you’ve spent precious time, money, and wear-and-tear on the truck hauling from town to your cistern.
Which is exactly, I realize, what I’m going to have to do now.
Text copyright © 2016 Nicole McInnes
