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was not about to dismount, got to her feet, came to the door, and pushed out into the night.
    “Anything yet?” he asked.
    She shook her head.
    “The doctor come?”
    She shook her head again.
    He wheeled the horse around and was gone. For several moments the nurse stood straining for a glimpse of him, pink sweater draped over her shoulders, arms wrapped around herself against the piercing cold. Everything was swallowed up in darkness but the tattoo of hooves. She turned and went inside.
    Back at the barn Kelsey pulled the bridle, blanket, and saddle off the mare and flung them on a four-year-old gelding, leaving the winded horse where she stood. Once again unseen dogs gave tongue, their wavering voices lifting along the streets. He rode hard into the countryside, the taste of a cold dark wind in his mouth.
    The story was a favourite of the nurse’s for a long time. “Three times he rode up to the hospital and asked after his wife and then rode away again. Different horse every time. Looked drunker every time too. They usually are. Last time it was just after the sun came up, around eight in the morning that I told him she had finally delivered a boy. You know what he said? Said, ‘Tell the wife I’ll be up to see her as soon as I can. I got some horses to look after.’ Imagine. And that woman came near dying too. It was a near thing if she’d lost any more blood.”
    Joseph’s mother always said to him. “You, you little bastard, you wore out three horses and one woman getting born. It’s got to be a record.”

    Wolf Calf of the Blackfoot first received horse medicine. It was given to him in a dream by a favourite horse which he had always treated respectfully and kindly. This horse appeared to him and said, “Father, I am grateful for your kindness to me. Now I give you the sacred dance of the horses which will be your secret. I give you the power to heal horses and to heal people. In times of trouble I will always be near you.”
    Horse Medicine Men could accomplish miracles. Not only could they cure sick horses and sick people, they could influence the outcome of races, causing horses to leave the course, buck, or refuse to run. Pursued by enemies, they would rub horse medicine on a quirt, point it at the pursuer and drop the quirt in the path of the foe’s horse, causing the animal to falter
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    All Horse Medicine Men recognized taboos. Rib bones and shin bones were not to be broken in the lodge of a Horse Medicine Man. No child should ride a wooden stick horse in a lodge in the presence of a Horse Medicine Man. If he did, misfortune and bad luck would befall that child
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    Before a vet arrived in the district, if a horse was sick or badly injured, its owner summoned Rupert Kelsey. Usually his father took Joseph along on these visits, although the boy wished he wouldn’t. When Joseph was four a stud bit him on the shoulder. His mother told him that he had screamed bloody blue murder, screamed like a stuck pig. The purple, apple-green bruise lasted for weeks and if he hadn’t been wearing a heavy parka, which had blunted the horse’s teeth, the damage could have been a lot more severe. Years later Joseph would suppose that the sudden crushing pain, the breath hot on his neck and face, the mad glare of the eyes must have been the root of what, in a son of his father’s, was an unnatural, shameful fear of horses. But he couldn’t be sure. He had no memory of the incident. Envying his father’s courage, he did all he could to conceal and dissemble his cowardice.
    Once, when Joseph was eleven, a woman telephoned his father with horse trouble. Her husband was away from home working on the rigs and his horse had hurt itself. The woman said she was afraid her husband would blame her for what had happened to the horse, accuse her of carelessness and neglect as he had a habit of doing whenever anything went wrong. This man was infamous for his hot, ungovernable temper. Hiswife had been seen in the grocery store,