Ride It Out

Chapter 1: The Call

The phone rang at 1:47 a.m., and Kelsey Farrell was already awake.

She'd been sitting at her kitchen table in the dark, nursing a mug of chamomile tea that had gone cold an hour ago, watching the way moonlight turned the frost on her windows into something that looked like lace. Sleep had become an adversary she'd stopped fighting most nights. She'd learned to live alongside insomnia the way ranchers learned to live alongside drought—you didn't beat it, you just endured it and kept your mouth shut.

Her phone buzzed against the scarred pine surface, the screen casting a blue rectangle across the ceiling. She didn't recognize the number, but that wasn't unusual. Half the ranchers in Elkhorn County had her cell, and half of those called from landlines that hadn't been updated in her contacts.

"Dr. Farrell." She kept her voice level, professional. The voice on the other end could belong to someone whose prize broodmare was down, whose bull had gone through a fence, whose favorite old gelding was breathing wrong. Every call at this hour was an emergency, and every emergency deserved a steady hand on the other end of the line.

"Doc, it's Travis Buckley." The voice was low, rough, threaded with something that sounded like barely controlled panic. "I've got a horse down. Pawing, rolling, won't stop sweating. I think it's colic."

Kelsey was already on her feet, dumping the cold tea into the sink. "How long?"

"Found him maybe twenty minutes ago. I was doing a last check on the string—"

"Is he still rolling?"

"Off and on. He'll stand for a minute, then goes right back down."

"Keep him up if you can. Walk him. I'm thirty minutes out." She paused, pulling her boots from beside the door with one hand while she cradled the phone against her shoulder. "Which horse?"

"Diesel. The big bay."

She knew the horse. Sixteen-two, twelve years old, built like a draft cross with the temperament of a Labrador retriever. Travis Buckley's lead trail horse, the one he trusted on every trip into the backcountry. She'd vaccinated the animal last spring and floated his teeth in the fall. Good horse. Strong heart.

"I'm on my way."

She hung up without waiting for a response—she never did—and moved through her small cabin with the efficiency of someone who'd been called out in the middle of the night more times than she could count. Coveralls over thermal underwear. Insulated Carhartt jacket. Hair twisted into a knot at the base of her skull. Her veterinary bag was already packed and sitting by the front door, restocked after yesterday's call to the Petersen ranch for a difficult calving.

Outside, the October air hit her like a slap. Her truck—a white Chevy 3500 with a veterinary box mounted on the bed—sat in the gravel drive, already plugged into the block heater. At eight thousand feet in the Colorado high country, you learned to keep your diesel warm or you learned to walk.

The drive to Buckley's place took her south along County Road 14, a two-lane ribbon of cracked asphalt that wound through the valley between Copper Ridge and the dark bulk of the Sawatch Range. There were no streetlights out here, no houses visible from the road—just the occasional gleam of a ranch gate reflector caught in her headlights. She passed the turnoff for the Hendricks place, then the long drive to the Morrison operation, then nothing for six miles but national forest and the silver thread of Willow Creek running parallel to the road.

She knew this country the way she knew the inside of a horse's mouth—by feel, by memory, by the landmarks that didn't change. The lightning-struck ponderosa at mile marker twelve. The culvert where the creek flooded every spring. The leaning fence post that old Bill Hendricks had been meaning to fix for three years.

Four years she'd been out here. Four years since she'd loaded everything she owned into this truck and driven west from Fort Collins with her phone turned off and her professional reputation in ruins. She'd come to the mountains the way wounded animals go to ground—instinctively, without a plan, seeking only distance from the thing that had hurt her.

She'd found distance. She'd found work. She'd found a version of herself she could tolerate, if not exactly love—a woman who was good at her job and bad at everything else, who kept people at the exact range where they could appreciate her competence without ever getting close enough to see the mess underneath.

It was enough. She told herself it was enough.

Travis Buckley's ranch sat at the end of a half-mile dirt drive, tucked into a bench of land where the valley floor met the first rise of the foothills. She'd been here twice before—once for Diesel's teeth, once to examine a mule that had come up lame—and both times she'd been struck by how orderly the place was. Fences tight, barn swept, equipment stored under cover. For a one-man operation, it was remarkably well-maintained.

She pulled up to the barn and killed the engine. Light spilled from the open doors, and she could hear a horse's distressed grunting before she was out of the truck.

Travis was in the center aisle, leading Diesel in slow circles. The horse was dark with sweat, his flanks heaving, his head low and swinging. Every few steps he'd try to buckle at the knees, and Travis would haul on the lead rope and drive him forward with a sharp "Hup!"

Kelsey took in the scene in two seconds: the horse's condition, the sawdust scuffed up where he'd been rolling, the water bucket untouched in the corner. Then she looked at Travis.

He was wearing jeans and an unzipped jacket over a bare chest, like he'd thrown on whatever was closest when he'd found the horse. His dark hair was disheveled, his jaw clenched. And he was limping—more than she remembered from her last visit. The pronounced hitch in his right leg was worse when he was tired, she'd noticed, and at two in the morning, hauling on a thousand-pound horse, he wasn't bothering to hide it.

"How many times has he tried to go down?" she asked, already pulling on gloves.

"Four. Maybe five. He's getting worse."

"Manure?"

"Nothing in the last two hours. He ate his evening grain fine, hay was normal. I don't know what—"

"Let me work." She said it without heat, the way she said everything—direct, clipped, leaving no room for argument. Travis shut his mouth and held the horse while she moved in.

She listened to Diesel's gut with her stethoscope, pressing it against all four quadrants of his abdomen. The right dorsal was silent. The left ventral had diminished sounds. She checked his gum color—pale, with a capillary refill time that made her frown—then took his heart rate. Fifty-two. Elevated, but not catastrophic.

"I'm going to tube him," she said, already moving to her truck for the nasogastric tube. "If it's an impaction, we can push fluids and mineral oil and see if we can move it. If there's reflux, we're looking at something more serious and he may need to go to the surgical clinic in Gunnison."

"That's three hours."

"I know how far it is."

She passed the tube with practiced efficiency—up the left nostril, down the esophagus, into the stomach. No reflux. She pumped warm water and mineral oil through the tube while Travis held Diesel's head, murmuring to the horse in a low, steady voice that surprised her. There was a gentleness in it she wouldn't have expected from a man built like Travis Buckley—six-one, broad through the shoulders, with the kind of weathered, angular face that suggested he'd spent most of his life outdoors and a fair portion of it getting hit by things.

She knew who he was, of course. Everyone in the valley did. Travis Buckley, former PBR rider, the kid from Montrose who'd made it to the National Finals three times before a bull called Gravedigger had put him into the dirt in Las Vegas and ended his career in eight seconds. The injury had been televised. She'd never watched the footage, but she'd heard the story from enough locals to piece it together: shattered vertebrae, two surgeries, eighteen months of rehab, and a retirement announcement that had been more eulogy than press release.

Now he ran pack trips into the backcountry. It was the kind of pivot that sounded romantic until you thought about what it actually meant—a man with a damaged spine spending twelve hours a day in the saddle, loading and unloading pack animals, sleeping on the ground in all weather. It wasn't romantic. It was stubborn.

"Okay," she said, withdrawing the tube. "We wait. If he passes manure in the next couple hours, we're in good shape. If not, I'll tube him again at dawn."

Travis nodded. He looked exhausted. The lines around his eyes were deep, and she could see the way he was favoring his right side, leaning against the stall door like it was the only thing holding him up.

"You should sit down," she said.

"I'm fine."

"I didn't ask how you were. I said you should sit down."

His eyes—gray, sharp, irritated—met hers. "You always this bossy with your clients?"

"Only the ones who look like they're about to fall over."

Something flickered across his face. Not quite anger, not quite amusement. He lowered himself onto a hay bale with a controlled exhale that told her exactly how much pain he was in, and she filed that information away the way she filed away everything—silently, precisely, without comment.

They waited. Kelsey leaned against the opposite wall and watched Diesel, who had stopped sweating and was standing with his head up, looking marginally more comfortable. The barn was warm from the heat lamps Travis had rigged over the wash rack, and it smelled like hay and horse and the sharp mineral tang of the oil she'd tubed into Diesel's gut.

"I've got a trip leaving day after tomorrow," Travis said after a while. His voice was flat, like he was stating a fact rather than making conversation. "Five days in the Collegiate Peaks. Client's paying top dollar. I need Diesel."

"You can't have him."

"Doc—"

"If this is an impaction—and I think it is—he needs at least three to four weeks of rest and monitored refeeding. No work. No trail. No pack weight." She looked at him steadily. "I'm not negotiating."

Travis rubbed a hand over his face. "I don't have another lead horse. Not one that can handle that terrain."

"Then you postpone the trip."

"I can't postpone the trip. The client is Lloyd Underwood. You know that name?"

She didn't.

"He owns half the commercial real estate in Denver. He's paying me fifteen thousand dollars for five days, and he's the kind of client who sends referrals that keep my business alive through the winter. If I cancel on him two days out, I don't just lose the money. I lose the reputation."

Kelsey said nothing. It wasn't her problem. She was a veterinarian, not a business consultant. Her job was to keep the horse alive and healthy, and she'd done that.

But she found herself thinking, against her better judgment, about the horse in her own pasture.

Sundog was a fourteen-year-old buckskin quarter horse she'd bought her first year in the valley from a retired outfitter who was liquidating his string. He was bombproof on trails, sure-footed in rough country, and had the kind of calm, steady temperament that made him worth twice what she'd paid. She'd bought him with vague intentions of riding on her days off, but days off were rare and getting rarer, and Sundog spent most of his time eating grass and getting fat in her five-acre pasture.

He could do the job. She knew that. The question was whether she was willing to let someone else handle him for five days in the backcountry.

The answer came immediately: no. Absolutely not.

But there was another option. One she didn't like, but one that existed.

"I have a horse," she said.

Travis looked up.

"Buckskin gelding. Fourteen-two, sound, experienced on trails. He could fill in for Diesel."

"You'd lease him to me?"

"On one condition." She crossed her arms. "I come with him."

Travis stared at her. "You want to come on the trip."

"I want to manage my horse. I don't lease him out to anyone. He goes, I go."

"This isn't a trail ride, Doc. It's a professional operation. I've got a client who's paying for a specific experience—"

"Then tell him you've got an extra guide. Tell him I'm the camp medic. Tell him whatever you want. But Sundog doesn't go into the backcountry without me."

Travis was quiet for a long moment. She could see him calculating—the cost of canceling versus the cost of bringing along a woman he barely knew, a woman who was already looking at his bad leg with the kind of detached clinical assessment that made him want to throw something.

"I don't need a babysitter," he said.

"Good. I'm not offering to be one."

Another silence. Then Diesel dropped his head and produced a long, rumbling flatulence that broke the tension in the barn like a gunshot. Both of them looked at the horse. Diesel shifted his weight and began nosing at his hay net.

"That's a good sign," Kelsey said.

Travis almost smiled. Almost. "Fine," he said. "You can come. But you follow my lead on the trail, you handle your own horse, and you don't interfere with the client experience."

"Agreed."

"And you don't—" He hesitated, then set his jaw. "You don't comment on how I do my job. Physically or otherwise."

She met his eyes. She understood what he was asking, and she understood what it cost him to ask it. "Agreed," she said again.

They shook on it in the barn aisle at three-thirty in the morning, with Diesel finally eating hay behind them and the first suggestion of dawn turning the sky above the mountains from black to the deepest possible blue.

Kelsey drove home in the dark, her headlights cutting through a world that was still and cold and empty. She thought about what she'd just agreed to. Five days in the backcountry with a man she didn't know, a client she didn't care about, and a horse she loved more than she was willing to admit.

Five days above the treeline, where there was nowhere to hide.

She pulled into her driveway, killed the engine, and sat in the silence for a long time. Then she went inside, set her alarm for six, and lay down on her bed fully clothed.

For the first time in weeks, she fell asleep immediately.