Hope Rising (7 page)

Now she was safe—but she was not well.

I looked directly back into my young challengers’ eyes. “I need your help,” I said simply. And I began to share with them about Elora, our devastated mare. At first the boys seemed unimpressed. But suddenly the similarities between the horse and the boys came into sharp focus. I decided to follow the list and tell the boys about … themselves.

“She was left behind by the people who were supposed to love and care for her,” I said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Her sense of trust has been destroyed, and she is struggling to overcome all the hurt that she has known. She is so broken up inside that she even keeps herself away from the other horses.” I paused, observing my tough, heavy-metal boys. “She believes she is completely alone in this world. What she doesn’t understand is that the prison door is open. She doesn’t realize that there are many who are willing to love her back to life. All she needs is someone to help her find the way out.”

All of the chained, icy black attitude began to melt into a pool somewhere below their feet. The momentary inward glimpse revealed the broken hearts of two little boys. The once-jutting lower jaws were now hanging in front of small sunken chests. They turned slightly away from each other, hiding their downcast eyes—eyes that I could see were beginning to shine with tears.

“She doesn’t need a lot—just to feel loved again. Can you help me do that?” I asked. Still looking away, they both nodded.

The instructions were simple—part of our basic rehabilitation plan for every horse we rescue. Together we
prepared a special pan of feed. All I asked Chad and Mason to do was talk to her and stroke her as she ate. When I led her out from behind the barn, they were already waiting, seated on top of the picnic table. They looked so displaced, sitting in the pool of black that they had created. Their baggy clothing looked less imposing than it had at first—more like a hiding place, a camouflaged shelter to flinch behind. Their bulky chains clanked together in sharp contrast with the sound of the wind softly blowing through pine branches over their heads. Their combined heavy darkness was no match for the grassy lawn below, the endless rolling sky above, and the brilliant, laughing flowers around them.

When they first saw her, their eyes grew large and soft. Elora was a small horse, made even smaller by her diminished spirit. She moved with her head and eyes in a lowered, downcast position. She was the very picture of sorrow. Her walk was made difficult by a limp from her right front leg. From a previous unknown injury, her right knee was completely blown and permanently swollen to nearly twice its normal size. She quietly began eating from their laps, the boys neither moved nor spoke. I silently coiled Elora’s lead rope and laid it on the table beside them. Smiling softly, I backed away.

Forty-five minutes later, the ranch was alive with leaders, children, and horses. Dust rose like a great halo over the arena. Although days like these are a tremendous amount of work, the joy far outweighs the job.

I started to make my way back to the boys. Although Chad had gone on to other activities, through the rising dust I could see the once black-haired Mason alone with the mare. I stopped. He was gently holding each of her
rounded cheeks as she rested her chin on his thighs. His lips were moving and his face was very close to hers. I watched him, over and over, repeat this loving cycle—tenderly leaning his forehead against Elora’s and whispering, then pulling back and kissing her face.

The mare’s eyes were nearly closed. From where I stood, I watched as two hearts made their way toward the light of newfound hope. In my own heart I could hear chains falling to the ground. The prisoners were going free. For a long while I silently watched before wiping my eyes and approaching them.

Mason rolled his head to look at me, his eyes warm and tender. His cheek was resting between Elora’s closed eyes. He smiled. My heart melted. I put my hand over my mouth and was thankful for sunglasses. I’m sure he knew I was crying.

I climbed up onto the table and sat next to them and put my hand on Mason’s back. When I was able, I quietly said, “Look what you’ve done.”

He looked up at me. The heavy metal juvenile was gone. In his place sat a young boy with unruly hair, dressed in black, loving a destitute horse. “You showed her it’s okay to trust again. You showed her how to open the door.” I smiled at him. “Mason, you did it.”

Fear Knot
 

I
AM NO
carpenter, but in the last handful of years I have hammered down thousands of nails. My tool belt swagger matches that of the best journeymen. I have abused to destruction more DeWalt drills than I wish to confess, and I am certain that I have spent more time eyeballing lengths of wood than buying food at the market. I’ve even grown to enjoy the fragrant allure of lumberyards and learned from those more experienced than I, the art of long-eyeing each board.

Every piece of wood must be lifted to allow a visual and tactile check of dryness, balance, and straightness. Then it is eyed down its length to see if it is true—not warped or bowed in any way. But this comes only after the board has passed a visual knot test. Experienced carpenters know that knots weaken the wood around them. Knots, typically, are viewed as flaws. And human nature usually dictates that the more flaws something has, the more it is to be avoided.

At the ranch we are constantly in need of true one-by-twelve-inch barn boards—the longer the better—for constructing and repairing the many outbuildings. One hot September day I decided to go in search of lumber to finish the upper wind shelters.

Clean and straight one-by-twelves can be hard to find—most lumberyards do not have enough demand to keep them in stock. Sorting through stacks of assorted heavy boards has taught me what a blessing it is to find what I need on top. But this day it was a frustrating search. At first I thought, shifting a massive sixteen footer,
Ah well, the Lord loves variety. What an uninteresting world it would be if everything were perfect
. But this whole stack was a bust. Every board was full of knots.

“Defective! Defective! Defective!” I muttered, rubbing grimy hands on my jeans. There was nothing. Not one keeper in the entire lot. It was a little discouraging, knowing how badly I needed the lumber and how high the prices were. I picked out the best knotty boards I could find, paid, and headed back to the ranch.

We had rescued the two-year-old bay colt and his chestnut half-brother in July. Both were stunted in growth and grossly underweight. The bay’s skeletal body also had been stricken with chronic diarrhea, a condition that often signifies a lethal slide toward death. All his legs tended to collapse toward his center in a pitiful attempt to support his frail body.

But the bay didn’t die. In eight weeks he gained nearly a hundred pounds. We called him Lazarus because his initial condition had been so bad that he appeared, almost literally, to have been raised from the dead.

At first, Lazarus was uncertain of human touch—common behavior, we have come to recognize, for a starving horse who turns all his focus inward. But as his strength increased, so did the expression of his mischievous
personality. He grew rapidly into a silly ranch clown.

Scratching Lazarus is always a trigger for laughter because he does something I’ve never seen before. Most horses express pleasure by pushing their upper lip forward in a kind of equine smile. Lazarus does just the opposite, pulling his lip backward until it flattens against his teeth. If someone really tickles him, he wiggles his flattened lip from side to side like a rabbit.

His sweet baby face draws kids like a magnet, so I like to include him when I give tours of the ranch. Once when I was showing several girls around, I told them about Lazarus on the way to visit him. The staff and I have come to realize that children bond with horses more quickly when they know the animal’s background and have had a proper introduction.

Lazarus was being true to his goofy form. After encouraging us to scratch him thoroughly, he decided to finish the job himself by rolling around inside his wind shelter. Every time he rolled over he tried to rub his face on the wall. When that didn’t satisfy him, he stretched his legs out straight, which only pushed him farther from the wall. Then—I don’t know if he was entertaining himself or us—he used the wall as a springboard to flip himself back over again.

We watched Laz repeat this silliness several times before moving on. Our little group was heading toward the corral gate when we heard his banging and thumping against the wall grow louder. Afraid that he might have gotten stuck in a position from which he couldn’t stand up again, I backtracked and peeked around the wall of the shelter. Laz was still lying down, but he could easily get up if he wanted to. He turned to look at me, his head lolling back. His playful brown eyes seemed to twinkle with a
convincing look that said, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” I laughed and shook my head at him.

I jogged back down the path toward my group of girls when another loud crash snapped my head around. The colt’s front hoof had hit the bottom of a one-by-twelve so hard that it tore loose the screws holding it in place. Not amused, I wheeled around, intending to roll him up and shift him to something less expensive to destroy. Before I could take another step, his entire front leg shot through the new opening.

Instantly I knew the scenario, and adrenaline jolted me like an electric shock.
Please, Jesus, help!
flashed through my mind. The situation had exploded from annoying to life threatening. Horses are animals of flight—their instinct is always to run from danger first, to reason later. Lazarus would panic the moment he knew his leg was trapped. He would pull with as much force as it took to free himself, even if it meant breaking his leg or literally pulling off his hoof, which is not as rare as it sounds. Such an injury cannot be fixed and nearly always means certain death.

My body felt caught in a slow-motion dream. I was running, but I couldn’t move fast enough. I had to get to Laz before he started to pull his leg back through the narrow gap between the loose board and the bottom four-by-four that had once anchored it.

His leg began to disappear into the gap—until the heavy board closed firmly above his hoof. I saw his leg pull back—a trial movement that confirmed he was stuck. In a single heartbeat his panic rose into a violent series of bone crushing jerks.

Lord!
my heart screamed.
Help us! He’s going to pull his foot off!
All I could hear was my own pulse hammering against my
eardrums. I lunged forward as though through quicksand toward the trapped colt. His fear crescendoed into an explosion of frenzied panic. Pain was searing through his leg with a grip that he could not escape. In rising terror, he launched a final burst of sheer force. In one last Herculean jerk—it was over. Shards of splintered wood flew toward my face as the heavy board shattered.

I nearly fell into the wind shelter. “Laz!” I cried, reaching out to calm him. Almost too afraid to look, my eyes followed the length of his leg down to his hoof. Amazed but grateful, I saw that his hoof was still attached.

Within minutes, Shawn, one of our most supportive and dear veterinary friends, arrived to examine Lazarus. To my great relief, he said that no vital or permanent damage had been done. The colt had a gash that went right down to the bone, but Shawn assured me it looked worse than it was. He stitched it neatly while I cradled Laz’s baby face against my chest and stroked his forehead. I shuddered to think what would have happened if the board hadn’t broken when it did.

Watching Shawn’s steadfast expertise as he sutured the wound, listening to him patiently explain his every move to a fascinated little boy who was watching, I felt the adrenaline high drain from my body. Relief washed over me. The knowledge that Lazarus was all right flowed out of me like a deeply held breath.

At last, Shawn wrapped the sutured cut, and I led Lazarus back to his paddock.
Lord, he’s just a baby
, I thought, looking down at his tiny hooves. My brain shut down abruptly. That board was fully one inch thick and twelve inches wide. How could a stunted little horse, only recently
rescued from starvation, shatter such a monstrous plank?