A Hundred Horses by Sarah Lean Page A

Now!”
     
    Maggie, the pig, was lying on her side on a thick bed of straw, grunting and panting. She’d already had two babies, mini pink and gold and black piglets wriggling in the straw.
    “I’m glad they found you,” Aunt Liv said. “I thought you might like to see this.”
    Well, I did. And I didn’t.
    I decided I felt happier staying at the head end and watched Aunt Liv as she rubbed with a towel each piglet that was born. Then she passed them to Alfie and Alfie passed them to Gem and Gem held them out to me. And I thought about holding them, but I was too scared I might do something wrong, so she laid them with Maggie, telling her what she had named each of them—Grunty and Bunty and Humpty, all their names rhyming. Aunt Liv spoke to Maggie gently each time she grunted, called her a good old girl.
    We were there for ages. It was dark except for the lantern that Alfie hung on a hook above us. It made a warm yellow circle around Maggie and her staggering piglets. And then I started to see that they were actually beautiful but tiny and helpless until they lay with their mother. And you could just watch them all together, and everything got more and more beautiful, right there in the golden straw.
    I sensed something before I realized what was happening. In Aunt Liv’s anxious hands. The way she moved away from us, out of the light, turning her body to hide what she held.
    “Oh, no,” she said softly.
    Maggie had suddenly gone quiet, panting hard.
    “Alfie, you and Gem run up to the house and call the vet. Take the flashlight. Now, please,” Aunt Liv urged. “Nell, would you take this from me?”
    The straw rustled under my knees as I knelt down and Aunt Liv handed me a bundle.
    “I’m sorry to do this to you, Nell, but I need to help Maggie out right now,” Aunt Liv said, and turned away. “I think it’s too late, but try rubbing it.”
    She felt around Maggie, talked quietly to her, saying, “Come on, there’s a good girl. Don’t give up now.”
    I couldn’t move, terrified of the tiny weight in my hands, of the loose little body wrapped in the towel.
    “Nell,” Aunt Liv said, “just try.”
    I rubbed, scared and trembling. The piglet rolled silently between my palms. There was a piece of straw stuck to its glistening skin. It shouldn’t have been there, but I couldn’t touch it, and I couldn’t make it go away.
    Suddenly I felt someone kneeling beside me in the shadows. Angel! She took the piglet and swung it headfirst toward the ground. I reached out, thinking she was hurting it when it was already dead. She put her hand out, pushed me away. She stepped back from me, laid the piglet along her leg, and scooped her fingers in its mouth. Silently and quickly her hands moved. She swung it again, blew into its nose, turned it over, and rubbed.
    She wrapped the towel back around it, laid it on my lap, and vanished into the dark.
    Alfie and Gem ran back in. “Mr. Thomas is coming,” Alfie puffed. “He’ll be here in a minute.”
    “Thank you, Alfie. But I think Maggie’s going to be all right, aren’t you, girl? Look, the next one’s on its way.”
    Aunt Liv looked over her shoulder at me, shook her hair away from her face.
    “Nell?”
    She reached out to take the piglet back from me. I unwrapped the towel and held it out to her. The piglet quivered; tiny black eyes looked up.
    “Look,” I whispered. “It’s alive.”
    “Oh, well done, Nell,” Aunt Liv breathed.
    Gem hugged me and kissed the piglet.
    “It’s the magic, Nell,” she whispered. “It’s the hundredth horse magic. It’s here, and it’s making you magic too!”
    My mouth opened, but I couldn’t say what had happened. Angel had come and made a miracle, and nobody had seen it except me.
    I suddenly had a strange feeling. Isn’t that what real angels did? Watched over and protected us just at the time between life and death.

Twenty
    E arly morning I raced around to the farm to see Angel. Maybe she really was an