Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

Rebecca would heat up some milk for them, even as a child. She would mix up the powder, go out, and she would sit with the newborns for hours, morning and night. She would rear them and they would bleat for her and she would name them many names and most would die. Those who survived eventually went back to their flock, but there were some who remembered her always. There were some who ran over at the sound of the shaking bucket, ahead of the rest, a spring in their steps, a head bent for stroking and a bite of a carrot or two. There were those who were never sent for slaughter, not on purpose.

There were three overarching barns and a house at Well Farm, a mess of byres and anonymous corridors in between. These halls were full of plastic boxes. Some held objects that could have been memories, had they been protected from the winds that seeped through the old bricks in winter, from the flies that swarmed the living and the dead. There were old journals and diaries, some from when the farmer had been young, when Albert Cole had dreamt of being a fireman, or a doctor, or any number of things. Some belonged to his daughter, a collection of miscellaneous cards representing birthdays, Valentine’s, Christmas as seen through the eyes of Rebecca’s five-year-old self. And some objects, no one would know where they came from.

These were the things that made land more than just land. There were places that were the only places Rebecca had ever called home.

There was the ditch she’d played in as a kid, accompanied by the dogs and her toys.

There was the broken swing in the garden, put up for one glorious summer, out near her mother’s office.

There was the front garden where she’d tried growing her own plants, until that garden had been destroyed.

There was the second barn where one day, fourteen years old, she had gone to feed the sheep.

It had been so cold. It had been March, and it had snowed every day of the month, a full two feet accumulating over the fields just as they’d been preparing for lambing. They had brought as many of the sheep inside as they could, stuffing three barns with the entire flock and allowing the rest to spill over into a run they had set up outside, with temporary steel fences and gates erected to keep them within. At night, all of them were squeezed inside. Snow was not really a problem in the outside run – the heat of the sheep, the small amount of protection provided by the looming barns between them, it stopped much of the snow from settling. But deaths were inevitable in that cold, as were spontaneous abortions. The flock thinned.

Her mother had never had another child. There was no brother or sister.

One morning, Rebecca had come outside expecting the outer barn doors to have been opened already. She was going to smash up the buckets full of ice water. She was going to throw down feed into the troughs. She was going to stay outside for a while. She didn’t want to be in the house.

The barn doors were not open. It was still a little dark. Inside, a small world of annexed structures, of old, collapsing halls, stood housed within a rusted metal shell.

Her father stood at the edge of the byre within, quietly watching the sheep on the other side of the gate. He turned and put a finger to his lips when Rebecca approached. He looked enchanted.

She came up beside him and leant on the metal gate. It took her a few moments to see it.

Between the clustered sheep – a hundred or more squeezed against each other, all hemmed into a pen – there was something else. Just a bit taller.

The sheep around it kept trying to move away, uncomfortable with its presence. The creature stood frozen, staring right back at the humans all the way across the barn.

It was a fawn, twin swellings on its head where one day antlers might spring.

‘Won’t be more than about six months old,’ her father whispered.

‘What . . .’ She paused, her voice kept low. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Its mum can’t be far away. If she’s still around.’

A block of snow slid off a panel near Rebecca’s head. She did not jump, though she did shudder.

‘What are we—’

‘Already asked that. Don’t repeat yourself, Becca.’

‘You . . .’

‘What?’ He turned, his eyebrows slightly raised. ‘You what?’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she mumbled. ‘That’s why I asked it again.’

He turned back to the deer, grimacing. ‘How’d it get in here, you think?’

Rebecca paused, looking first at the deer, then the barn door.

‘Did we shut it in? Did it get in when we were closing up?’

Her father shook his head without looking at her.

‘Was it already there? Maybe it had hidden round the—’

‘No,’ her father said.

There was a long silence then. Frustrated, peering back and forth in every direction around the barn, Rebecca turned away from the metal. She walked back through the byre towards the house, but paused before the exit, looking either side at possible entry points. She turned towards the main outer door – the same one through which she had entered. A flimsy wooden door she had been supposed to lock the night before. Which she was sure she had locked.

She turned back to her father.

He was staring at her.

‘It came in just like we did?’ She walked back over to the gate. ‘It came in through the door.’

He nodded.

‘But . . . why? It would have had to jump over the gate into the crush. Why squeeze in with all the sheep? Why not just stay in the byre? And why wasn’t it afraid?’

She looked ahead at the deer. It had calmed down a bit, though it kept staring at them, even so.

‘It was cold and lonely,’ her father said. ‘That’s reason enough to do most things.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘It can’t