Trickster (8 page)

I
t takes a while to get the horses into the grooming stalls because they’re all acting ornery. Gertie won’t budge unless you push her, Gus keeps dropping his head, and Claiborne wants to kick anything that gets too close.

“Jeez,” I say. “What did you do to these guys?”

Zoe takes off her riding helmet. “You mean what did they do to us? It was the strangest ride I’ve ever been on! Start. Stop. Start again. Stop. Walk two feet. Stop.”

Brenna takes a brush off the shelf and starts to brush down Elsa, her horse. “It was the perfect
pace, if you ask me. And Elsa was a lot easier to handle than Blitzen was.”

“If you went so slow, then why are they sweating so much?” I ask. “It looks like they were racing.”

Sunita gently strokes Gertie’s neck. “I think that’s why Jared brought us back early,” she says. “He said they looked stressed, though he didn’t know why. When we got close to the barn, he made us get down and walk.”

“You walked them back?” I ask.

“Whoa, girl,” Sunita says as Gertie stamps the cement impatiently. The old horse flares her nostrils and breathes fast. I’ve never seen her do that before.

“How long has she been breathing like this?” I ask as I reach for her halter.

“I’m not sure,” Sunita answers. “She was OK when we started, and then she started breathing rapidly like this.”

“The other horses are acting weird, too,” Zoe adds. “Even Claiborne.”

She pats his back, and Claiborne raises his hind foot to kick.

“Yikes!” Zoe says as she scoots out of the way. Instead Claiborne kicks his leg up toward
his stomach. Next to him, Elsa paws the ground anxiously.

“Maybe there’s a bug or something going around,” I say. “Starfire is definitely sick. Dr. Mac put him in isolation in the foaling barn. Gertie?”

Suddenly, Gertie coughs. The old mare’s body is quivering. Her eyes roll up in their sockets. Her legs shake. Gus and Claiborne snort and twist their heads, pulling on the cross-ties. Elsa whinnies.

Then Gertie’s front legs buckle. “Oh, no!” I shout. “Get out of the way, Sunita!”

As soon as it starts, it’s over. Gertie stops shaking and collapses to the floor, her legs folding under her. Her neck is stretched at an awkward angle. Her halter is still attached to the cross-tie ropes. Claiborne shrieks in distress and rises up on his hind feet.

“She’s going to choke! Here, help me!” I grab Gertie’s heavy head and try to release the cross-tie. “Brenna, help!”

“I’ll get Dr. Mac,” Sunita shouts.

Brenna helps me hold Gertie’s head while Maggie and Zoe fumble with the cross-ties.

“Lift the head higher!” Maggie says.

Brenna and I strain. Gertie better not wake up or we’ll all be in trouble.

“There!” Maggie says as she and Zoe release the cross-ties at the same time. Gertie’s head and neck suddenly sag, and we lower her to the floor.

“Is she …?” Zoe asks.

I feel for the pulse under Gertie’s jaw just like I’ve seen Dr. Mac do. “No, but her heart is racing.”

“What happened? What’s going on?” Dr. Mac asks as she runs up and kneels next to me.

“She was breathing hard and started shaking,” I say. “The other horses are acting weird, too.”

“Back up, everyone,” Dr. Mac says. “You, too, David—move away.”

We stand in the aisle as Dr. Mac listens to Gertie’s heart and lungs with a stethoscope. She moves down Gertie’s body, listening to her belly, too. Gertie’s eyelids flutter, and she thrashes her legs.

“Look out, she’s waking up!” Maggie says.

Dr. Mac scoots out of the way as Gertie struggles to her feet. The horse looks dazed, like she’s not sure where she is.

Dr. Mac grabs her halter to keep her still. “It’s
OK, girl, you’re safe.” She turns to us. “I want to get her out to the paddock by the foaling barn. Any horse acting strange should be brought out there. How are these guys?” she asks, pointing to Gus, Claiborne, and Elsa.

“They’re not right,” I answer quickly. “I think they’re sick.”

Dr. Mac points at Maggie. “I want you kids to wait by the van. I’ll call someone to come and take you home.”

“But—” Zoe starts.

“No buts, Zoe. You don’t have enough experience being around horses to help here. It’s one thing to help with an injured cat or dog, quite another when we’re dealing with a thousand pounds of horse.” Dr. Mac is not fooling around.

The others take off, but I stay with Dr. Mac. She takes the cell phone out of her equipment box and punches in a number, tapping her foot impatiently as she waits for the connection to go through.

“Let me stay,” I ask. “I can help—you know I can.”

Dr. Mac holds up one finger. “Yes, hello,” she says into the phone. “Gabe? It’s J.J. Get down to
Quinn’s—stat! We have a situation here. Starfire is having heart problems, another horse just had a seizure, and we have a couple of cases that look like colic. Yes, it’s ugly. Hurry.”

“What is it, Dr. Mac?” I ask as she puts the phone away. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know yet—some kind of strange viral infection, something in the water, or it could be a plant they ate in the pasture. I just hope we can figure it out in time,” she says grimly.

“You don’t mean …”

“Yes, I do. This is serious, David. These horses might be dying. Now go with the others. There is nothing you can do to help around here, and I would feel better if you were home.”

It takes a second for everything to sink in … Gertie’s seizure, Starfire’s heart problem, all the horses acting weird. Then it hits me like a hammer.

“Dr. Mac, I think Trickster’s in trouble, too!”

W
e find Trickster writhing on the ground in his stall, rolling in pain. His coat is sweaty and covered with bits of straw and manure. The stall that I just cleaned—what, half an hour ago?—is already a mess again. It smells really awful, not at all like regular horse manure.

“Trickster!” I shout.

He twists his head around toward us, then tries to get to his feet, but freezes when he’s halfway up. He looks like he’s sitting up like a dog.

C’mon, buddy. Stand up
.

“Classic colic sign,” Dr. Mac says. “His stomach is hurting him something awful. If he sits
like that, it makes him feel a little better. What we don’t want is for him to roll around on the ground. That could make his intestines twist. Horses can die from that.”

Trickster slowly gets on his feet, his back legs shaking. His eyes roll back in his head as his belly spasms.

“Let’s get him out of there,” Dr. Mac says. “Walking can make a colicky horse feel better.”

“But what about his leg?” I ask.

“That’s the least of his problems right now. Help me here.”

Dr. Mac enters Trickster’s stall, clips a rope to his halter, and leads him out. Trickster steps gingerly on the concrete.

“Walk ahead of us,” Dr. Mac says. “He’ll follow better if he can see you.”

We slowly make our way through the barn, Trickster’s lopsided clip-clopping noise on the floor reminding me of his injury.

The paddock outside the foaling barn looks like a hospital waiting room, except the patients have four legs and long tails. Gertie, Gus, Claiborne, and Elsa wander in the paddock, their
heads low and necks dark with sweat. Jared sits on the fence keeping an eye on them. Through the foaling barn door, I can see Mr. Quinn talking to Starfire.

“J.J.,” he calls to Dr. Mac. “I think his fever is going up.”

“Claiborne keeps urinating,” Jared says.

“Where should we put Trickster?” I ask.

“Too many horses, not enough hands,” Dr. Mac mutters. She takes a deep breath. “OK, here’s what we’re going to do. We can’t let them walk around the paddock. I want you two to take each of these horses into a foaling barn stall.”

As soon as we bring the first horse, Claiborne, into a stall, Dr. Mac starts examining him. Dr. Gabe arrives, pulling his car around the side of the barn. He jumps out and starts unloading supplies. Dr. Mac and I run over to help.

“Did you get everything?” asks Dr. Mac.

“Everything you asked for and a few things you didn’t,” Dr. Gabe says, grinning as usual. He hustles a cooler of intravenous fluid and medicine into the barn.

With two vets, the examinations go quickly. They check the vital signs—temperature, respiratory rate, and heart rate—of each horse. Dr.
Gabe presses his stethoscope against Trickster’s chest. “Seventy-two beats a minute,” he says.

That’s way too high. A normal pulse rate for a horse is thirty-five to forty beats a minute.

“It’s got to be more than colic,” Mr. Quinn says.

“The stomach pain looks like colic,” Dr. Mac says, “but they all have diarrhea, so everything is flowing through their intestines well. Too well.”

“They’re dehydrated,” Dr. Gabe observes.

“They’ve been drinking, but it’s all coming out the other end,” Dr. Mac explains. “It’s got to be intestinal. A toxicosis of some sort. Let’s get I.V.s started on everyone.”

She strokes Trickster’s neck, then smoothly inserts a needle into a vein. She connects the needle to a long tube that leads to the bag of clear I.V. fluid. The bags are hung from a hook on the wall of the stall.

“We have to keep his fluid level and electrolytes up. We don’t want his blood pressure to drop or him to lose consciousness,” Dr. Mac says. She moves down to Gertie and prepares to start her I.V.

“Wait a minute,” I say suddenly. “Dr. Mac,
stop. Go back to Trickster. Look in his mouth, on the edge of his lips. He has bumps.”

“Bumps?”

“I saw them earlier. He was drinking weird, too. He would stick his whole nose in the water bucket. He’d lift it to breathe, then stick it back in the water.”

“What else did you notice?” She lifts Trickster’s lips to look at his gums. “Think carefully.”

“His stall. Jared said he had cleaned it, but when I got there, manure was everywhere. I cleaned it, but it’s a mess again already. He’s been having really bad diarrhea.”

Dr. Mac peers in Trickster’s mouth, then releases it and scratches his jaw. She looks over at Dr. Gabe. “Cantharidin.”

“Couldn’t be,” Dr. Gabe replies, shaking his head.

“Has to be,” Dr. Mac argues. “Look at these blisters.”

Dr. Gabe hands Elsa’s I.V. bag to Jared and looks into Trickster’s mouth. He pulls a penlight out of the pocket of his coat and flashes it along Trickster’s tongue.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Blister beetles,” Dr. Mac says. “These horses
may have been poisoned by blister beetles in their hay. What a nightmare.”

“Blister beetles? You’re kidding me,” Mr. Quinn says. “We’ve never had blister beetles before. How can you be sure?”

Dr. Mac gently holds Starfire’s head and pries open his jaw. Sure enough, way back in the throat I can see the same kind of blisters I saw in Trickster’s mouth, smaller but still ugly.

“That’s one way to be sure,” she says, releasing the horse. Starfire shakes his head and coughs. He has started to drool a bit. “We’ll run some urine tests to confirm.”

“What’s a blister beetle?” I ask.

Dr. Mac goes back down the line and starts Gertie’s I.V.

“Blister beetles live on plants like alfalfa, which is harvested for hay,” she explains. “They have a chemical in their body called cantharidin. Cantharidin is not nice. It burns body tissues. And it explains all these symptoms. Trickster was keeping his whole mouth in the water bucket because it cooled the blisters on his lips. The cantharidin has irritated their stomachs, kidneys, and intestines, blistering their insides, too. That’s why they are acting colicky. Their insides
really, really hurt. The irritation has caused the diarrhea.”

“And Gertie’s seizures? Starfire’s fever?” Mr. Quinn asks.

“Everything,” Dr. Mac says.

Linda enters the foaling barn. She must have just come back from town. “What’s going on? Why are the horses still in the pasture? Jared, you have students arriving in a few minutes.”

Dr. Mac looks up. “We’re pretty sure these animals have been accidentally poisoned,” she quickly explains. “Have you gotten any new hay recently?”

Linda frowns. “Yeah, yesterday. It came in the nick of time. We were almost down to the barn floor.” She pauses. “These horses were the first ones to get it. What’s wrong? Is the hay moldy?”

Mr. Quinn dashes toward the big barn as Dr. Mac explains about the blister beetles again. Linda looks like she just came out of a horror movie.

“You mean, they were in the hay? But I didn’t see any bugs. I would never feed them anything with bugs in it!”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Dr. Mac says. “They
were probably chopped up, in tiny pieces. It only takes a couple of blister beetles to kill a horse. The fact that the horses are still alive proves they didn’t eat very much.”

Mr. Quinn steps back into the barn with a flake of hay. “Here’s a sample.”

Dr. Gabe stays with the horses, and the rest of us file outside to watch. Mr. Quinn puts on a pair of work gloves and scatters the hay on the ground. Dr. Mac and Linda get on their knees.

“Here, is this one?” Mr. Quinn pinches something small and black, and then drops it on the ground where Dr. Mac can see it.

“Hard to tell. Could be. Don’t touch it,” she warns. “It will blister your hand just like the insides of the horses. We’ll analyze it.”

“What can we do?” Linda asks.

“The horses in the pasture haven’t eaten any of the new hay, have they?”

Jared and Linda both shake their heads.

“Good,” Dr. Mac says. “Let’s get some fresh hay here—from a different grower—as soon as possible. You’ll need to notify whoever sold you this batch about what we found. And every stall has to be swept clean, every speck of hay removed.”

“What’s the antidote?” asks Mr. Quinn. “How do we treat them?”

I look at Dr. Mac.

“There is none,” she says. “The best we can do is to keep their fluids up. We’ll give them pain medication and antibiotics for infection.”

“That’s it?” Mr. Quinn asks. “That’s all we can do?”

“We could transport Starfire to the equine hospital,” Dr. Mac suggests. “There they can monitor his calcium, magnesium, and protein levels, which we can’t do here. If his calcium gets out of whack, he could have a heart attack.”