"Don't you dare move," Marlene said, kneeling in the mud next to him.
"Wasn't planning on it."
The feeling came back into his leg after about a minute, starting with a tingle and ending with a whole lot of hurt. The old hip, the one the doctors in Cheyenne had put back together in 1983, had taken the fall. It always took the fall.
Marlene and Mark got him up between them. Clay stood there, leaning on the fence, breathing slow.
Then he started to laugh.
Mark stared at him. "What could possibly be funny?"
"She didn't kick me," Clay said. "She ran into something she couldn't see."
The next afternoon, with an ice pack strapped to his hip under his jeans, Clay showed them.
He stood outside the fence on Juniper's right side and slowly raised his hat. The mare turned her head and watched it, curious.
Then he walked around to her left side, slowly, and raised his hat again. Higher. He waved it.
Juniper kept grazing. She never looked up.
Clay stepped closer, still quiet, and let the brim of his hat brush her left shoulder.
She jumped a foot in the air and spun away, snorting.
Mark Delaney said a word that dentists probably don't say in front of their patients.
Doc Ellen Park came out that evening with a penlight. She looked in Juniper's right eye for a few seconds. She looked in the left one for a long time.
"Moon blindness," she said finally. "Recurrent uveitis. It's been going on a while. She's got almost no sight left in this eye." She clicked off the light. "Every time somebody walks up quiet on her left, she doesn't know they're there until they touch her. Then she does what any horse would do."
"The seller's video," Mark said slowly. "Every shot was from the right side."
Nobody said anything to that.
"So what do I do?" Mark asked. "Is she done?"
"Lots of one-eyed horses live long, happy lives," Doc Park said. "Some of them still run barrels. But the people around her have to change, not her."
Mark looked at the hauler's number on his phone.
Then he looked at Clay.
"Till Saturday," Clay said. "And not me. Her."
He pointed at Kaylee.
It turned out Kaylee had been doing it right all along. She just didn't know why.
She walked on the right side because the barn door was there. She hummed because she was nervous around big animals and humming made her feel better. Without knowing it, she had been telling Juniper exactly where she was every second.
Now Clay taught her the rest. Always speak before you touch her. If you have to go to her left side, keep talking, keep a hand on her the whole way around so she can feel where you are. Never come up on her blind side quiet.
Then Kaylee taught her father. Mark was a slow learner. He forgot to talk. Juniper reminded him, twice, by jumping sideways. By Thursday he was humming too. Badly.
On Friday, Clay brought out three old barrels from his truck and set them up in the Delaney pasture.
"Barrel horse," he said. "Let's see if she remembers."
Kaylee had never run a pattern. Clay walked her through it at a walk, then a trot. Every time they came around a barrel on the left, Kaylee talked to Juniper the whole way.
The mare remembered.
The hauler showed up Saturday morning at eight. He was a big man in a canvas coat with a long stock trailer, and he looked like he had picked up a lot of horses nobody wanted.
Mark Delaney walked down to meet him with his wallet out.
"Sorry," Mark said. "Wasted trip. I'll pay you for your time."
The hauler looked past him at the pasture.
A light snow was falling. Out in the field, a twelve-year-old girl in a too-big barn coat was running a sorrel mare around three rusty barrels. Not fast. Not pretty yet. But the mare's ears were forward, and the girl was talking to her the whole way around.
On the fence, Clay Hollister leaned on the top rail next to Marlene, his bad hip propped on an overturned bucket.
"Thought you said that horse was mean," the hauler said.
"I was wrong," Mark said.
Kaylee brought Juniper back to the barn at a walk, cooling her out. She walked on the mare's right side, humming.
She didn't have to think about it anymore.
