Koa shouldered the shovel. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll get you back to the house.”
I searched for the mare and her foal. The mare was up now, dancing in a tight circle, favoring one of her hind legs. The foal lay flat, its neck stretched out, forelegs splayed. Its mouth gaped open, bony flank rising and falling rapidly.
“She’s hurt,” I said. “And the foal. It bit the foal, too.”
Koa stood there for a moment, his head bowed.
“You’re not going to leave them, are you?” I asked.
He brushed past me and tossed the shovel in the back of the Jeep. “We have to.”
I didn’t move. “What do you mean?”
“Herd management. Natural selection has to take its course.” He swung into the driver’s seat, but I couldn’t see his face. Couldn’t see if he hated the thought of leaving the foal like I did.
“So we’re just supposed to let them die?”
“It was a rattlesnake, so the foal, for sure. The mare, hopefully not.”
“The snake looked small. Maybe it was a baby.”
“Young ones are just as venomous, sometimes more. When they bite, they dump all their venom at once. They don’t know any better.” His eyes flicked to mine, held the gaze, then slid away.
I looked back at the pair. The mare was a few feet away, pawing the sand, twisting around in an effort to find her wounded leg. She seemed to have completely forgotten about her newborn.
Koa started up the Jeep but I found myself propelled forward. I knelt beside the foal and began stroking its neck—his neck?—with uncertain fingers. The poor thing was gasping for breath.
“His nose is swelling,” I called over my shoulder. “He can’t breathe.”
Without so much as a thought as to what I was doing and how I intended to do it, I scooped the foal into my arms and stood. My legs trembled, and I staggered, ragged bits of the birth sac dangling from my arms. Koa stared at me in disbelief.
“I’m taking him back to the house,” I gasped. “I don’t give a damn about Doro’s herd-management policy.”
I took a few ungainly steps—lurches, really, that only zigzagged in place. The foal felt like a slippery, warm anvil in my arms; its bony legs dangled, kicking me periodically. I managed a few steps down the path and stopped, winded.
“Fucking hell,” Koa said and heaved himself out of the Jeep. He strode to me and grabbed the foal, depositing him with ease into the bed of the Jeep, on top of a pile of tarps. In a couple of brief swipes, he pulled the birth debris off the newborn foal, then turned and scowled at me. But his eyes had gone soft. So unexpectedly soft that I nearly melted into a puddle of combined lust and gratitude.
“Get in,” he said.
The next thing I knew, we were flying through the forest, whipping around trees and chunking over puddles. After a few minutes, he wheeled up to one of those tiny tumbledown shacks we’d passed on my first day here—one of the former slave cabins. Except this one appeared to be in fairly livable shape, with a set of crumbled brick steps and a wobbly-looking stone chimney. The front yard was scattered with oyster shells, and a neat row of boots and shoes lined the steps.
Koa booted open the door and carried the foal inside. I followed and looked around cautiously. It was a simple structure—one main room with a huge fireplace, a kitchenette, a ratty-looking floral sofa. A door that probably led to a bedroom. All along the fireplace mantel were shards of pottery, red and white and brown. A few had intricate markings on them. I stood awkwardly in the doorway as Koa lowered the foal onto a rag rug in the center of the room.
“Don’t you have a bed?” I asked as he threw open the door on a huge, rickety linen press.
He snorted. “I’m not putting a horse on my bed.”
He began pulling supplies from the top shelf. Bags and vials and bandages. He dumped it all beside the foal, slapping a pair of heavy-duty shears in my hand.
“Side of the house, find the hose. Cut about a foot.”
I stared at the scissors for a moment. He put a hand on my arm.
“Meg?” he said gently. “Go.”
When I returned, he’d rigged up an IV over a metal lawn chair for the foal. He snipped the length of hose I handed him in half and threaded one into each nostril, taping them down with duct tape.
“The main thing you have to worry about is keeping their breathing unobstructed. The hose will keep her nostrils from swelling shut completely. Keep the airways clear.”
“You can’t give her antivenom?” I asked.
“We could. But we try to save it for humans. Believe me, if you need it, you’ll thank me for not giving it to her.” He sat back on his heels and brushed away the lock of hair that had fallen across his eyes.
“Looks like you’ve done this before,” I said.
He started cleaning up, tossing ripped packages and empty bottles into the trash. He went to wash his hands at the sink, then turned. His eyes were soft again. And so brown, it was almost unbearable to look at him.
“You can’t talk about this,” he said. “You can’t tell anyone she’s here.”
“She?”
“It’s a girl. A filly.”
I smiled. “Oh. Okay.”
“Not to anyone.”
“Okay,” I said, slightly irritated that I’d let him distract me. “I won’t.”
“We have to let nature take the weakest ones, or the herd will grow too large. They’ll eat everything, destroy the environment. That’s when the guys in the suits swoop in and start culling the herd themselves.”
“I get it.”
I looked down at the foal. She was breathing easier now, and didn’t seem to be bothered at all by the needle bandaged to her neck. Her ears flipped forward and back like two antennae, and she kept nosing at the rug.
“She’s got to be hungry,” I said. “Are we going to try to find her mother?”
I felt Koa move behind me. I could smell him, actually. He seemed to carry the scent of the island around with him: sun and salt and some other smell under all that. Something sweet. Maybe it was jasmine, the blooming vine I’d seen climbing most of the buildings and even some trees. I’d never met a man who smelled like flowers. It was not a bad thing. On the contrary, it was good. And somewhat disconcerting.
He crouched beside me, pried the foal’s lips open, and stuck a huge bottle into her mouth. She immediately started sucking with gusto.
I gave him a reproachful look. “So you’ve never done this before?”
“I didn’t say that. These wild mares are notoriously bad mothers. They abandon their foals all the time.”
I studied him. A smear of blood bisected his cheek, right along the cheekbone. “Aw. You do have a heart.”
“The old fuckers can gallop off into the sea, go Virginia Woolf, for all I care. They’re mean as hell and don’t do anything but eat everything in sight and shit all over the beach.”
“And you’re telling me you just happened to be passing through that spot in the woods at the exact moment when that mare was giving birth? It was pure luck?”
He didn’t answer.
“Well, either you were following the mare or . . .”