Opal Dreaming (5 page)

When he reached Opal and Chelpie, he slipped a loop around the filly's neck, tied it off and then did the same for the white mare. He took the wirecutters and began to fumble around under the water.

‘He's got the rope over her neck. She's going to be okay, Jess,' said Shara. ‘We've just got to pull her out now.'

Jess couldn't speak. She stood watching, her hands over her mouth, until her father made his way back to them, then ran in up to her knees to help him out of the water.

‘I've cut the wire, but there are still bits of it tangled around her legs,' he panted. ‘I couldn't get very close to her feet, she was kicking too much.'

‘Dodger can pull them out and we'll get the wire off them later,' Jess said, taking the rope from him. ‘Are you okay?'

Craig nodded, still breathless. ‘Get Dodger.'

Jess brought Dodger over by a hank of his mane and turned him with his tail to the water. Craig helped her to tie the rope around his neck. Then, taking him by the mane, Jess urged Dodger to pull.

He picked up the slack, then came to a halt as he felt the weight against his shoulders.

‘It's okay, Dodger. You have to pull,' said Jess, tugging at his mane. The old horse stepped into the weight and stopped again.

Craig moved back to his rump and put a hand around his tail, giving him a push and making clicking noises. ‘Come on, old fella!'

Dodger took a few more steps, his feet slipping in the mud.

‘That's it, Dodger, that's it,' said Jess. He kept pulling and she looked back to see Chelpie moving towards them through the water. The filly's head began to slip off her neck. ‘Pull, Dodger, pull,' she yelled. She jumped up onto his back and kicked him in the ribs. ‘Pull, Dodger,' she yelled. ‘
Pull!
'

Dodger strained at the rope, with everyone calling encouragement, until Chelpie's bony white body emerged from the river. She trudged through the last few shallow metres with Opal dragging limply beside her.

Craig pulled a knife from his pocket and cut the rope from both horses. Marnie appeared from the dark paddock, screamed loudly and rushed at Chelpie. The white horse snorted and disappeared into the blackness.

Meanwhile, Opal lay with her head on the ground, making horrid gurgling noises. With a splutter, she cleared her lungs. Two strands of wire were still twisted cruelly around her hind legs.

‘Stand back and let her mum smell her,' said Jess, leading Marnie to her foal.

Opal made tiny moaning noises while her mother nuzzled her.

Jess looked at her filly in despair. ‘I'll try to hold her head while you cut the wire, Dad,' she said. ‘Shara, can you keep Marnie nearby to help her stay calm?'

The next ten minutes were awful. Jess lay across the filly's neck and sobbed while Craig tried to cut through the wire without hurting her. But when he had finished, his hands were sticky with blood.

‘How badly is she hurt?' Jess asked her father.

‘It's hard to tell,' said Craig. ‘We'll have to get her up to the shed and hose her legs off so we can look at them properly. She'll need a vet to look at her in the morning. That's if he can get through the floodwaters.'

He opened the hatch at the back of the four-wheel drive and they all strained to heave the filly into the back. Jess sat at her head while Shara sat on the tailgate and led the mare behind them.

Under proper lighting in the shed, Craig hosed off Opal's legs and found several deep wounds that needed stitching, but all they could do was slosh some salt water over them and keep them clean. They broke open bales of straw and made a makeshift stable. Opal lay limply, her head outstretched.

Jess sat on the haystack staring at her.

‘There's nothing more you can do, honey,' said Caroline gently. ‘Come back up to the house and come to bed. You'll be more use to her in the morning if you've had some sleep.'

‘I can't leave her, Mum.'

‘Her mother is there with her. She'll be more relaxed without people around her.'

‘I promised I'd ring Lawson if anything happened. He's going to freak.'

‘It wasn't anyone's fault. He won't be angry. Anyway, Marnie is fine. It's the filly that got hurt.'

‘Do you think I should ring him now?'

Caroline looked at her watch. ‘It will be daylight in a couple of hours. You can ring him then. No point everyone losing sleep.'

While the rest of the house fell back to quietness, Jess sat peering out the lounge-room window. A thin stream of light shone from the shed. She pictured Opal lying listlessly in the straw, her legs torn and her lungs full of muddy water. ‘Surely I'm not going to lose another one,' she whispered to herself. ‘That would just be too unfair.'

5

THREE DAYS LATER,
Jess stood with John Duggin, Shara and Craig outside the yard. Only now had the floodwaters gone down enough for the vet to be able to get through. It was the worst flood the gully had seen for a decade.

John had given Jess instructions over the phone, but every time she tried to get near Opal's legs to clean the wounds, the filly bared her teeth and charged at her. She hadn't eaten and her flanks were sucked in against her hips, leaving caverns of hunger down each side. Now she stood in the makeshift stable with her nose screwed into a permanent scowl and her head cocked awkwardly to one side.

John stood with his legs apart, arms folded, and a serious look on his face while the girls waited eagerly for his diagnosis. ‘The leg's not too bad. It probably should've been stitched, but we should be able to get that right with some antibiotics and a bit of iodine.' He paused. ‘I'm more worried about that head injury.'

‘Head injury?' said Shara, who had delayed going back to boarding school to support Jess and to learn as much as possible from John.

‘See the way she's holding her head to the side?' John tilted his own head as he studied the filly. ‘That's not right.'

‘I thought she was doing that because of the pain,' said Jess.

‘It's pain, but it's from her head, not from her leg. Did you say you dragged her out with a rope?'

‘Yes.'

‘Around her neck?'

‘It was the only way,' said Jess. ‘She would have drowned otherwise.'

‘With another horse right near her, you say? Could she have been kicked in the head, do you think?'

‘Yes, easily,' said Jess. ‘She was thrashing around and kept going under the water.'

‘Could it be an ear infection?' Shara asked.

‘It could be,' John replied, ‘but I really need to examine her properly to be sure.'

‘I can't get anywhere near her,' said Jess. ‘She's never been handled before.'

John looked thoughtful. ‘We might have to get her onto a truck and bring her down to the surgery. I'm sorry, but she's a real mess and she's going to need a lot of care for a couple of weeks. I don't think you'll be able to manage her on your own if she's not halter broke.'

‘We'll have to take the mare too, then, won't we?' Jess said.

‘It would probably be a good idea.'

Jess groaned. ‘Lawson's going to freak. He wants to take Marnie droving next week. We'd planned to be weaning Opal now.'

‘It seems a bit cruel to wean her while she's so sick,' said John. ‘Opal really doesn't need any added stress at the moment.'

Craig stepped in. ‘I'll give Lawson a ring and ask if he minds letting the mare go with Opal, at least for a few days. He might lend us his truck too.' He set off towards the house.

Jess slumped against the wall, feeling totally deflated. She had been busting to show John Duggin her new filly, but not like this.

John gave her arm a gentle rub. ‘She's going to be fine, Jess. There's no way we'll lose this one, promise.'

‘Thanks, John,' she said. ‘You don't know how much I needed to hear that!' She used her shirt to wipe away the tears. John was the best vet in the whole world. If he promised that Opal would get better, she believed him. He had never promised her that with Diamond.

‘Where's the other horse you wanted me to see?'

‘Over in the yards,' said Jess, leading him to where Chelpie stood looking lethargic and hungry. ‘You know Katrina Pettilow's horse, Chelpie?'

As John walked around the shed to the yards he stopped in his tracks. ‘Is that her?' His face didn't give a lot away, but Jess knew that anyone who had seen this horse in her glory days would be utterly shocked at her appearance now. ‘How did she get here?' he asked.

‘She keeps breaking out of her stable and escaping to the river flats. It's because she's so hungry, I reckon.'

‘Katrina locks her up and forgets to feed her,' added Shara. ‘She's been here since the night of the flood.'

John stepped through the lower rails of the yards and walked up to Chelpie with a hand out. She screwed up her nose at him, then resumed staring into space. The vet raised a hand to her neck and ran it over her shoulder. Muttering something under his breath that Jess didn't catch, John moved to her head. He pulled her eyelids down and inspected them, and opened her mouth to press at her gums.

‘She looks pretty bad, don't you think?'

John looked Chelpie all over, then nodded. ‘Yeah, she's not a happy horse.'

Craig came back down from the house. ‘Lawson said we can go to his place and pick up the truck now. He's just finishing off a job, then he's going to come over and check on the mare.'

‘That's settled then,' said John. ‘I'll see you at the surgery in a couple of hours.'

‘What about Chelpie?' asked Jess.

‘I'll make some phone calls,' said John.

At the clinic, the filly was heavily sedated and settled in a large stable. It had taken both Craig and John to restrain her. She still thrashed about so wildly that John gave her a needle to knock her out, saving them all from trauma and bruises.

John let Jess and Shara assist as he tended to Opal's leg wounds and injected a cocktail of drugs into a dripline, then squeezed and poked and pulled at her head. He looked into her mouth and put his gloved fingers into her ears. ‘I can't find anything obvious. With any luck it's just an ear infection from the floodwater and the antibiotics will fix it.' He removed the drip and face cover. ‘She'll wake up in half an hour or so.'

While Shara followed John up the stable aisle, pestering him with questions about antibiotics and anaesthetics, Jess sat beside the unconscious foal and stroked her neck gently. As she ran her hand over Opal's thick, soft foal fur, she realised that it was the first time she had ever patted her. She ran her hand between the filly's ears and rubbed her forehead. ‘You're going to be okay, little sweetie,' she whispered. ‘You're my once-in-a-lifetime horse, and I'm going to look after you no matter what, okay?'

Jess ran her hand over Opal's shoulder and traced her fingers slowly around the three white markings, just like she used to do with Diamond. ‘We're going to be the best of buddies, Opal.'

Lawson agreed to leave Marnie there for a few days to keep the foal settled, but he was firm that the mare would then be going droving. The six-week trip had been organised for months and he'd be needing his good horse if he was to go. Jess knew there was no way Lawson would miss out on this trip for the sake of a scrawny, chance-bred foal. It was his way of saying goodbye to Harry. Ryan had already headed off and was organising permits and camping gear, but Lawson and Luke needed to finish up work with several of their clients before they left.

As Jess and Shara jumped up into Lawson's truck to leave the vet's, another car pulled into the surgery carpark. It towed a white float with the letters RSPCA on the side of it. In the back of the float, Jess could make out the knobbly spine of a white horse. She gasped. ‘It's Chelpie!'

‘Oh my God, Katrina's going to
spew!
' Shara stared at Jess, scandalised.

‘Get ready for some nasty phone calls,' said Craig.

Jess chuckled. ‘We're going to need a new private number!' She strained around in her seat and looked out the window. A woman was opening the front door to the float. She quickly jumped back as a white nose lunged at her, baring an angry set of teeth.

‘Yep, that's Chelpie, all right,' said Shara.

‘Wow, Chelpie taken by the RSPCA . . .' Jess could hardly believe it.

‘Talk about falling from grace,' said Craig.