50. Colt
“Iswear today’s a punishment for the sins I committed in a past life,” I grumble as I run my hand over my head, wishing I could do something for Harriet when there’s nothing to be done during a healthy labor.
My fingers, knuckles, and wrists ache from the pounding I served Clyde earlier and my voice is nasal after my face met Cole’s fist, but it’s all worth it.
The sense of accomplishment in my chest is at odds with the gnawing anxiety for Harriet.
After the day we had, Callan can’t lose Harriet too.
Having canceled Cole’s birthday party, I forced Callan to go to bed because it’s his graduation tomorrow and he knows she’s in good hands. I don’t want to wake him up with the news that his father was charged with trespassing and fabricating evidence (no vehicular manslaughter charge yet) and that his horse and her foal died during labor.
“I’m surrounded by melodramatic people,” Zee grouches, but the arm she’s slung around my waist tightens in a half hug.
“She’s done this so many times, she’s an old pro,” Margot, our vet, chirps from my other side. “You need to take a chill pill, Colt.”
“Is that your official diagnosis?”
“Yup!”
Barely an hour ago, Harriet’s foal alert warned us she was going into labor and Margot bounded in fifteen minutes later. We were lucky she was at Theo’s ranch.
Bea’s sister Margot has been with us for years. Once the breeding program becomes more established, I intend to hire her full-time.
As used to this process as I am, it doesn’t stop me from wincing when Harriet drops to her forelegs and tumbles onto her side.
“You’re such a man,” Margot jibes with a soft laugh at my reaction. “Do you need nitrous oxide?”
I shoot her a disgruntled look but flick my eyes over the mom-to-be as I inform Zee, “She made it to day 320. This whole thing has been cut too close to the wire.”
“I told you she would,” Margot inserts.
“You a seer?”
“Horse whisperer.” She taps her nose. “That’s me.”
I’d call her out but she isn’t lying. Margot’s our local miracle worker.
“I wish this weren’t coming so quickly. We’d have gotten the straw out for her but she wasn’t showing any of the signs?—”
“She’ll be fine.”
Harriet grunts as if to tell me Margot’s lying. The whites of her eyes are showing as the muscles in her abdomen cramp and flow over her side like a wave. In between grunts, her legs jerk and spasm.
She rolls onto her forelegs and stands so she can pace. That’s when I get a good view of her back end where her tail’s erect and the milky-colored sac droops from her with two small hooves peeping through the opaque membrane.
“She’s making progress but we’re edging toward forty-five minutes,” Margot murmurs in an aside.
Unbeknown to Harriet, who’s unaware that nature needs to hurry the hell up, her abdomen heaves from exertion while her grunts echo around this half of the stables that’s empty of other mares as we’re out of foaling season.
When the exhausted dam plops down, this time, she does it with her back end in plain view. Contractions expose a breach in the sac, revealing two skinny black legs.
The sight triggers activity from Margot and me.
“You wanna pitch in?” she asks.
Though it’s her job, we both know there hasn’t been a foal birthed on the Seven Cs without me around since I returned home from university. Even then, I’d travel back as soon as I could to be with the dam and her new foal.
A sharp neigh from the mare has Margot tossing me a towel. Cautiously, I approach Harriet, who lifts her head so she can huff angrily at me.
“It wasn’t me,” I protest. “And we’ll keep Fen away from you in the future, I promise.”
My reassurances are ignored once I’ve wrapped up the foal’s hooves in the towel and, in time to her contractions, help her where I can. The ticking of the clock as we edge toward a birth that runs too long echoes in my head.
My relief when the foal’s forelegs are fully out shifts as she rolls upright only to fall back down. Her exhaustion has me gritting my teeth.
“There’s a good girl,” Margot praises.
Zee chimes in, “You got this, honey.”
For what feels like endless moments, Harriet lies there, building the strength for what needs to be done.
“Margot?”
“It’s fine, Colt. Just a couple more minutes then I’ll intervene. But I know she’s got this.”
Like she agrees, Harriet snorts and, with one big push and a soft tug from me, the foal’s head finally pops out, the sac covering the whole of its face.
My relief is intense. As is my gratitude. The guilt I’ve been feeling since Fen’s breakout—all three-hundred-and-twenty days of it—dissolves in a rush.
“Almost there, Harriet,” I cheer as, shifting the towel under the shoulders, I bring the foal out into the warm summer night.
More comfortable with this part of labor, I quickly clear off the sac, rub the towel over the snout and eyes, and scrub away the amniotic fluid as gently as I can while checking they’re breathing.
“Do you know what it is yet?”
I find Zee watching me with a soft smile lighting up her features and I can’t help but be happy she was here.
With a grin, I answer, “We’re about to find out.”
I beckon her into the stall but she hesitates. “Will Harriet let me? She barely knows me. She won’t recognize my scent.”
“She needs some love after going through that, don’t you, Harriet?” is Margot’s cheery declaration as she bustles around in the background.
Still hesitant, Zee steps into the stall and moves away from the foal and over to Harriet’s head. Crouching down and gently petting her, she croons soft words of praise to the mare who’s been hard at work for the past fifty minutes.
I switch roles with Margot who exclaims, “And we have a colt, Colt.”
“It wasn’t funny the first time, Margot, and that was at least fourteen foals ago.”
She cackles. “Got a name yet?”
The foal rocks his shoulders back and forth, flailing as he stretches his forelegs like he’s ready to stand, which he definitely isn’t, so I move beside Zee and run a hand over Harriet’s still-heaving side.
Her exhausted whinnies have me grimacing with guilt. “I’ll padlock his stall, Harriet. I swear.”
She nickers as if that’s precisely what she wanted to hear.
Zee chuckles. “I think she’s pissed at Fen.”
“He needs to watch his back. You got a name?”
Her eyes widen. “You can’t give me that task!”
“Sure I can. Only right. The first foal of our marriage…”
“Some women get jewelry or flowers, Colt,” Margot inserts.
“Some women would prefer that if they weren’t born on a ranch,” Zee defends hotly, making me chuckle as she glowers at the vet.
Which, of course, is when I remember they were both in school together.
Harriet breaks into the standoff by rearing upright, having decided it’s time to investigate her baby.
As she sniffs him, we back off a few steps while a couple stablehands come in to clear up the birth.
It’s only when Harriet stands and begins licking the foal that Zee tucks her arm around my waist. “Trever.”
“Trever?”
She shrugs. “With two E’s. He looks like a Trever with two E’s.”
“I didn’t know they had characteristics.”
A soft smile dances on her lips. “You have to be a special kind of person to recognize them.”
Chuckling, I press a kiss to her temple. “Trever it is.”