The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans Page B

Someone handed him a dry jacket and for the first time since he was in the river he realized how cold he was.
    Koopman and the driver hitched the ends of the sling to the hoist chains and then stood back with the others as Pilgrim was slowly lifted into the air and swung like a carcass onto the trailer. Logan climbed up there with two paramedics and they manhandled the horse's limbs so that eventually he lay as before on his side. Koopman passed the vet's things up to him while others spread blankets over the horse.
    Logan gave another shot of steroids and took out a new bag of Plasmalyte. He suddenly felt very tired. He figured the chances of the horse being alive by the time they got to his clinic were odds on against.
    'We'll call ahead,' Koopman said. 'So they'll know when to expect you.'
    'Thanks.'
    'All set now?'
    'I guess so.'
    Koopman slapped the rear end of the pickup that was hitched to the trailer and yelled for the driver to move out. It started slowly up the slope.
    'Good luck,' Koopman called after them but Logan didn't seem to hear. The young deputy looked vaguely disappointed. It was all over and everyone was going home. There was a zipping sound behind him and he turned to look. The hunter was putting his rifle back in its bag.
    'Thanks for your help,' Koopman said. The hunter nodded, swung the bag over his shoulder and walked away.

    Robert woke with a jolt and for a moment thought he was in his office. The screen of his computer had gone berserk, quivering green lines racing each other across ranges of jagged peaks. Oh no, he thought, a virus. Rampaging through his files on the Dunford Securities case. Then he saw the bed with its covers neatly tented over what remained of his daughter's leg and he remembered where he was.
    He looked at his watch. It was nearly five a.m. The room was dark except for where the angle-lamp behind the bed cast a cocoon of soft light over Grace's head and her naked shoulders. Her eyes were closed and her face serene as if she didn't mind at all the snaking coils of plastic tube that had invaded her body. There was a tube into her mouth from the respirator and another up her nose and down into her stomach through which she could be fed. More tubes looped down from the bottles and bags that hung above the bed and they met in a tangled fury at her neck, as if fighting to be first into the valve slotted into her jugular. The valve was masked by flesh-colored tape, as were the electrodes on her temples and chest and the hole they had cut above one of her young breasts to insert a fiber-optic tube into her heart.
    Without a riding hat, the doctors said, the girl might well be dead. When her head hit the road, the hat had cracked but not the skull. A second scan however had found some diffused bleeding in the brain so they had drilled a tiny hole in her skull and inserted something that was now monitoring the pressure inside. The respirator, they said, would help stop the swelling in the brain. Its rhythmic whoosh, like the waves of a mechanical sea breaking on shingle, was what had lulled Robert into sleep. He had been holding her hand and it lay palm up where he had unwittingly discarded it. He took it again in both of his and felt the falsely reassuring warmth of her.
    He leaned forward and gently pressed down a piece of tape that had come unstuck from one of the catheters in her arm. He looked up at the battery of machines each of whose precise purpose Robert had insisted on having them explain. Now, without having to move, he carried out a systematic check, scanned each screen, valve and fluid level to make sure nothing had happened while he slept. He knew it was all computerized and alarms would sound at the central monitoring desk around the corner if anything went wrong, but he had to see for himself. Satisfied now, still holding Grace's hand, he settled back in his seat. Annie was sleeping in a little room they had provided down the corridor. She had wanted him to wake her at