Colt Read Online Free PDF Page A

longer felt somehow outside of his life looking in. He just—was. Liverwurst was Liverwurst, and Colt was Colt.
    Behind him he could hear cutesy-pie little Julie giggling on her pony. Jay Gee and Neely were singing off-key somewhere up ahead, and the women on each side of him were conversing about Mexican food, and it was all good, all part of tall green shade and hoof clop, and Colt’s life felt big enough to include it all. Big as forest and cool pine sky.
    And lake. There was a lake up ahead.
    The trail dipped down toward it, and there was no need to worry, no need even to think, just shift weight in the saddle and give Liverwurst a little more rein and let him manage the slope, nodding all the while as if he understood. Colt noticed without fear that his side walkers no longer bothered to hold on to the handles of his safety belt. When the trail narrowed and grew even steeper the women dropped behind, first one and then the other, while the aides who had to stay beside their handicapped riders struggled through brush and poison ivy.
    I’m riding on my own .…
    And he was looking down a sheer drop into deep water on one side, and on the other side he was looking up a steep hillside pierced with pines so tall they seemed to topple, they would all fall into the lake—he would fall. But even as he thought it, somehow he knew he would not. He and Liverwurst could manage this situation. Something warm and strong and vital seemed to flow up to him out of his horse, maybe out of the earth itself through the horse’s solid striding hooves.
    Right down to his bones Colt knew two things:
    I am alive .
    I am a horseback rider .
    The trail climbed the sheer lakeside slope to the hilltop, where there was a clearing. Mrs. Reynolds and one of the helpers set Colt down on the ground, where he ate watermelon as messily as Liverwurst had ever eaten anything (and fed the rind to his horse), and Mrs. Berry made a speech thanking Mrs. Reynolds for the use of Deep Meadows Farm and her horses and ponies. It was July, time for the volunteers to go off on their vacations. It was the last day of the summer’s horseback riding program.
    Back on Liverwurst again, holding the reins with sticky hands, going home, even with the daylight fading under the dark pines Colt still did not feel afraid. Not of horses or wildcats or the wedding. Not of anything.
    The feeling lasted clear through his night’s sleep and through the next day until the wedding rehearsal.
    Colt did not particularly embarrass himself or anyone else at the wedding. He wore protection so that he would not have to worry about his wayward personal functions. He did not stumble as he walked up the aisle with his mother (noticing that getting around on crutches did not seem as tiring as it used to) and stood beside her with his braces rumpling his one good suit. Standing, he used his left crutch only, slipping his hand out of the cuff of the right one so that he could hand her the ring when it was time. He noticed how pretty she looked. He noticed that he himself felt fine. He did not drop the ring. True, when he lifted his hand to give it to his mother, his right crutch clattered to the floor, but nobody giggled. Brad wasn’t bothered; he just looked over and smiled at Colt. It took a lot, apparently, to upset Brad. Even getting married to Audrey Vittorio didn’t seem to bother him too much. Lauri, who was holding Audrey’s flowers, gave Colt a scornful look as she picked up the crutch and handed it back to him, but girls always looked scornful, Colt had found. And Rosie, who was Brad’s best man, did not seem to notice anything. There was a sort of patient anxious-eyed Liverwurst look about Rosie.
    Colt kept on feeling fine right through the reception. And when he had a chance, when people weren’t talking to him, he sat and thought.
    He dreamed, rather. Of things he had seen at Deep Meadows Farm. Of horses sailing up fields at a