The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans Read Free Book Online

ways, it was to her father that the girl first turned. And Annie was by now resigned to the notion that here history was inexorably repeating. She herself had been her father’s child, her mother unwilling or unable to see beyond the pool of golden light encircling Annie’s brother. Now Annie, with no such excuse, felt herself propelled by pitiless genes to replicate the pattern with Grace.
    The train slowed in a long curve and came to a halt in Hudson and she sat still and looked out toward the restored verandah of the platform, with its cast-iron pillars. There was a man standing exactly where Robert normally waited and he stepped forward and held out his arms to a woman with two small children who had just climbed down from the train. Annie watched him hug each of them in turn, then shepherd them toward the parking lot. The boy insisted on trying to carry the heaviest bag and the man laughed and let him. Annie looked away and was glad when the train started to move out again. In twenty-five minutes she would be in Albany.
       They picked up Pilgrim’s tracks farther back along the road. There were spots of blood still red in the snow among the hoofprints. It was the hunter who saw them first and he followed them, leading Logan and Koopman down through the trees toward the river.
    Harry Logan knew the horse they were looking for, though not as well as the one whose mangled carcass he had just watched them cut from the wreckage of the jackknifed trailer. Gulliver was one of a number ofhorses he looked after up at Mrs. Dyer’s place but the Macleans used another local vet instead. Logan had noticed the flashy new Morgan a couple of times in the stable. From the blood it was trailing, he knew it must be badly hurt. He still felt shaken by what he had seen and wished he could have got here earlier to put Gulliver out of his misery. But then he might have had to watch them taking Judith’s body away and that would have been tough. She was such a nice kid. It was bad enough seeing the Maclean girl whom he hardly knew.
    The rushing noise of the river was getting loud and now he caught sight of it down there through the trees. The hunter had stopped and was waiting for them. Logan stumbled on a dead branch and nearly fell and the hunter looked at him with scarcely veiled contempt. Macho little shit, thought Logan. He had taken an instant dislike to the guy as he did to all hunters. He wished he’d told him to put his goddamn rifle back in the car.
    The water was running fast, breaking over rocks and surging around a silver birch that had toppled from the bank. The three men stood looking down at where the tracks disappeared by the water.
    “Must have tried crossing over or something,” said Koopman, trying to be helpful. But the hunter shook his head. The opposite bank was steep and there were no tracks going up it.
    They walked along the bank, nobody speaking. Then the hunter stopped and put his hand out for them to do the same.
    “There,” he said, in a low voice, nodding up ahead.
    They were about twenty yards from the old railroad bridge. Logan peered, shielding his eyes against the sun. He couldn’t see a thing. Then there was a movement under the bridge and at last Logan saw him. The horsewas on the far side, in the shadows, looking right at them. His face was wet and there was a steady dark dripping from his chest into the water. There seemed to be something stuck to his front, just below the base of the neck, though from here Logan couldn’t make out what it was. Every so often the horse jerked his head down and to the side and blew out a strand of pink froth that floated quickly away downstream and dissolved. The hunter swung the gun bag off his shoulder and started unzipping it.
    “Sorry pal, they’re out of season,” Logan said, casual as he could, pushing past. The hunter didn’t even look up, just pulled the rifle out, a sleek Winchester .308 with a telescopic sight as fat as a bottle. Koopman looked