Elaine’s brother Dennis arrives with his girlfriend that Friday evening, the headlights of the car tunneling through a crystal-cold night and stopping near the house at a little past ten. Elaine and her mother have stayed up to meet them, as it’s the first time he’s brought Sarah home. Sarah. Elaine loved the name from the moment Dennis told them about her. In the days leading up to their arrival it was all she could think about; she repeated the name over and over to herself and imagined a woman of intelligence and beauty, a figure sitting alone in a garden, aristocratic features heightened in the evening light.

Elaine presses her head to the window to get a closer look at the car that now sits quiet and dark in the drive, the whole scene obscured by her breath that pulses on the pane in front of her. She wipes the window clean with the heel of her hand and is able to make out a light coming on in the car as a door is opened. The motion of her hand on the window produces a delicate honk that causes her mother to look up from the kitchen table.

“They’re here.” Elaine says, not taking her eyes off the car.

“Come away from the window.” Her mother has prepared a meal of cold cuts and bread for Dennis and Sarah and is now taking the plastic wrap off the food. The house is quiet around them, and feels empty. Elaine’s other brother, Frank, is at a hockey game, and her father is elsewhere in the house, likely asleep. The faint drone of a television filters in from another room.

“Come away from the window,” her mother repeats.

The second car-door opens. There was no way Elaine could turn away. She holds her breath and squints at the car. She would remember later how difficult it was for her to make out Sarah at that moment, how unnaturally long that first glimpse took. Shadows and forms move in the tangle of lights from the porch and from a little bulb inside her brother’s Toyota. It’s a full minute until Elaine can discern Sarah: small-framed, walking behind Dennis, appearing to struggle with an oversized suitcase. When Elaine can no longer follow them from the window, she quickly gets up and prepares herself to meet them as they enter the house. She finds herself standing there, on the landing, facing her mother, who swallows and smiles, a look not of panic but rather of someone resigned to the effort of suppressing panic. They look at each other for a moment and stand in silence, listening to footsteps on the porch.

Elaine sees Sarah through a cloud of condensing air as the door opens. She’s beautiful, standing next to Dennis. Elaine’s mother fusses over the two, urging them to get in out of the cold and making a great scene about closing the door behind them. Elaine hears a stirring in the other room, the sound of recliner being levered into the upright position. Her father is awake.

They’re all introduced by Dennis right there in the hallway, with Sarah—still in her parka, shaking hands and exchanging greetings with Elaine and her mother—like a dignitary stepping off the plane into a new country. Elaine’s mother apologizes for not having taken Sarah’s parka earlier, and Sarah slips out of the huge jacket in a relaxed enough manner to show that she isn’t uncomfortable, but quickly too, as though to show that she appreciates the courtesy she was being shown. Elaine watches Sarah pass her jacket over and thinks that she’s never been so impressed by the grace of such a simple and otherwise unimportant gesture. Elaine’s father appears now beside them, perplexed and smiling through a face that still wears the oblique upholstered creases of a light sleep in a chair. Sarah steps forward and shakes his hand as though she is determined to sell him a tractor that he doesn’t need. He seems caught off guard and grins as he lets go of her hand, bringing new creases onto his face, now a trellis of lines. Elaine feels short of breath, watching her father stand there seemingly unable to respond.

They are shepherded into the kitchen by Elaine’s mother and take seats around the table, where Elaine joins the rest of her family in eating salami and bread and trying not to stare at Sarah.

Polite conversation follows with Dennis helping to ease the tension by genially prompting new topics when silences threaten. Sarah is from Montréal, Dennis says, to which Sarah adds that she comes from Town of Mount Royal, a district in the city. She’s finished a graduate degree in history and has come to Winnipeg to study; the subject of her Ph.D. thesis is Louis Riel and the Northwest Rebellion. She has two brothers, one who lives in Ottawa and another still in Montréal. She isn’t French but she speaks it—fluently, Dennis adds. In between answers she takes small bites of her bread and sips her tea without milk or sugar. Elaine watches Sarah, studying the way her dark hair falls against her shoulders, the ends curling slightly, watching how she spears a sliced pickle with her fork and how it is eaten in three bites. Never one or two, but three delicate bites. Elaine senses that her mother is watching her and her cheeks burn with the heat of a mindful, almost reproaching gaze. She has been warned by her mother that it was impolite to stare at guests, and on most occasions—her mother’s quarterly hosting of the book club or when Frank and his friends passed a beerless and bored Saturday night squatting in their kitchen waiting for a better plan to crystallize—it is never an issue; but with Sarah she is physically unable to look elsewhere.

Earlier in the week Dennis called and warned them on the phone that he and Sarah were only going to stay a couple of days, probably just one, before heading out west for a week of skiing. They had been dating for eight months now, and the family, meaning Elaine’s mother and Elaine, really, had begun to wonder out loud why they had not already met her. Dennis maintained that it would have been too soon to bring her out that summer, as they had only just started to see each other, so a couple of days at Christmas would be just have to do. Two days, maybe just one. All this makes Elaine acutely aware of the clock ticking on the wall; within her a small but certain panic is rising: Sarah will soon be gone, and the house will again be emptied of anything exotic or interesting.

The atmosphere around the table—of nervous, semi-concealed fascination—is abruptly broken when the door slams and Frank comes in, hauling a huge bag of hockey equipment. He pauses dumbly at the door, as though he has wandered into the wrong house to find its strange residents at the kitchen table. Frank nods as Sarah is introduced by Dennis. As he turns away, Elaine’s mother reminds him to leave his equipment bag in the corridor upstairs. There is no response, although the sound of the bag being dropped onto the floor upstairs is heard by all.

Dennis yawns and strokes the area just under his eyebrows. Elaine understands that this is a signal to them that he is tired and that the evening is nearing an end. The dishes are collected and her mother motions to Elaine that she is expected to help to do some washing before they go to bed, a demand that Elaine accepts stoically, as she refuses to be goaded into making a scene. Her earlier attempts at being a gracious host were rebuffed: the offer to help take the suitcases up the stairs was politely refused; it seemed Dennis could manage. Elaine watches Sarah leave before reaching for the dishtowel.

By the time Elaine finishes the drying, she can hear doors close upstairs, a sound with a finality to it, registering the end of an evening. There is a silence, and then voices muffled. No, she’s imagining things. Imagining Sarah and Denis talking. Sarah would sleep in Elaine’s room tonight, and Elaine would roll out a sleeping bag on the living room couch. She hears the tap opening in the upstairs washroom, followed by a familiar rattling of the pipes from somewhere in the ceiling above her. Her mother quietly goes about her kitchen-work, putting the uneaten meat into plastic bags and into the fridge and shovelling the half-eaten pieces of bread into a Tupperware container instead of putting them straight into the garbage.

“The bread wasn’t that fresh,” Elaine says, folding the damp tea-towel on the handle of the stove’s door.

“I bought it today. It was fine,” her mother replies. The lid on the container thaups shut.

Frank comes downstairs, swings open the fridge door and rummages through the cold light doused on the shelves of food, ignored by Elaine and her mother except for her mother’s optimistic act of placing a plate on the table. He carries containers and brown paper-wrapped cold cuts back to the table. A second trip for mustard and a glass of milk. Pausing after construction of a formidable sandwich, he looks over at his mother, who sits reading a novel at the table. She was into the Russians now.

Elaine watches the two of them sitting at the table, pretending to tidy up around the kitchen. She is, as her parents would say, a snoop. But the truth was that people—especially people being quiet, without the obscuring haze of adult talk and gesture—fascinate her. This includes her brother, who she usually considered incommunicative rather than given to quiet reflection. Almost as much as Dennis, Frank lived away from them: hockey, school and his room. Three years older and it was to Elaine as though every part of him had changed, dissolving the gentle boy he was when he was just her age to a person who only boarded there. It is, she suspects, what people do when they grow up. Maybe what they need to do to grow up. Share houses. Stay quiet. Have a sandwich. Frank reaches over and touches the front cover of the novel as his mother reads it, gently lifting up the flap to see the title.

“So are we just like every other family or are we different?” Their mother looks up and smiles at Frank’s question, all to Elaine’s growing incomprehension.

“We can be either,” her mother says with an acknowledging smile. “Sometimes we’re both.”

“Do you know where the sleeping bag is?” Elaine says, hoping to steer the conversation to something that makes sense to her.

“Hall closet, I think,” her mother says.

Elaine looks for the sleeping bag at the back of the closet and finds it buried among the other infrequently used objects clustered in the darkness. A thicket of cross-country ski poles. A single snowshoe. She tugs at the nylon bag several times before it finally gives. When she comes out to the kitchen with the bag Frank has already gone, leaving her mother, reading alone at the table. Elaine has the feeling her mother looks up from her book for a moment when she comes in, but cannot not be sure.

Elaine brushes her teeth in the downstairs washroom and marvels at how such an act can become clumsy and odd; as though tooth brushing wasn’t a physical movement but an event that could only properly occur in a specific place. Downstairs, in the washroom with a toilet and a sink so small as to be suitable only for hand-washing, she feels left-handed. She has put too much toothpaste on the brush and feels a stinging sensation at the corners of her mouth that doesn’t go away until she’s washed the foam completely down the drain. She throws a t-shirt over a pair of sweat pants and washes her mouth out again before leaving.

The kitchen was empty. A light left on over the stove. Her mother was now likely upstairs, still engrossed in the Russians, indulging in that life outside her own. Elaine has occasionally sat in on the reading club, watched her mother steer the discussions and politely reprimand those who had not read the agreed-upon number of chapters and for whom the gathering was just another social event. Elaine avoids not just the discussions but reading the books, and while she tells herself that it just isn’t her thing, she is uncertain why she can’t be bothered to read. After all, it wasn’t as though she lacked opportunity or an example. Her mother has heaps of books. She can always be identified as the one with a novel open in front of her; but it is only recently that Elaine notices this, or rather is annoyed by the familiar sight of her mother reading. Frank calls it her ‘sneeze guard’, this shield of literature that their mother erects. But what is most bewildering to Elaine is that her mother’s constant reading should bother her more than if she watched television or spent an equal amount of time out of the house. Her father didn’t seem to mind, or if he did he was too busy with the changes around the farm to pull on another loose thread of potential disharmony.

Even if there are no signs of them fighting—few crossed words passed between them at all—Elaine finds it increasingly hard to understand the secret behind her parents’ compatibility. It’s implausible to her that her parents ever actually managed to dis- cover each other, much less decided that that discovery was the one on which they would base their future happiness. Elaine knows only the barest details of how they met: her mother, fresh from downtown Estevan, Saskatchewan, adjusting to life away at university—did her every movement seem strange in the foreign country of a dorm room?—meets her father at a dance put on by the Agricultural Students Association. Did she have a book that night? Did she put it down to accept his offer to dance, to see him again, to become his wife? How does Elaine’s dad present the altered plans to his fiancée when his own father dies the next summer, a hundred head of cattle already keening for the old man? Elaine imagines that he gave her a choice: stay at school, or come with me. She likes to think it was his honesty and straightforwardness that would make him propose like that, that it wasn’t meant to be the ultimatum that it sounds like.

So: farm wife instead of teacher. Nothing more said of it. Her mother accepts her new role with the same equanimity as she does Dennis’ arrival the following spring or the thinly disguised contempt of her mother-in-law (the last detail a slightly slurred admission told in confidence to Elaine by her Aunt Sylvia after Grandma had died and Sylvia herself had drained the better part of a flask of something to gird herself through the funeral). Although Elaine doesn’t like to think of it, she can’t help but imagine that her mother wanted another life, perhaps just the one she was about to embark on when her father stepped in with his proposal. Teaching somewhere; an inner city school or maybe a school overseas, someplace doing volunteer work. Elaine thinks of all the possible lives awaiting to be unfolded in front of her mother at that moment, and how they were closed up so quickly in succession, as though summer had ended and the winds would only become colder. Elaine imagines how such regret could feel, like the dull pain of waiting for a meal, and it scares her to think that they are all a reminder of that regret, and that a book must be held up like a shield to obscure it. That a book can somehow accomplish this.

The sleeping bag smells of basement walls and lack of use, and despite keeping her socks on Elaine is chilled as she straightens her legs into it. The bag is insult enough, but she particularly resents having to sleep in the living room; more than having to leave the comfort of her room, the living room was not designed for sleep: orange tinted lights from outside pour in and light up the ceiling. But it’s more than just a night of tossing. She’s always the one called upon to move whenever it’s necessary, as long as she can remember it’s been this way. Sarah was only the latest of a long line of relatives and guests to make her unroll the sleeping bag. She didn’t mind it much though, for Sarah, although she would have liked to share her room with her, glad to give her the bed and say goodnight in that way that brings the night to a true end. Instead, she lay staring at the cross-hatched ceiling, waiting. Listening.

Elaine orients herself and imagines the point above her where Dennis’ room is and the path he will have to take to get to Sarah. He would wait an hour, maybe longer, until he was sure the house was sleeping, and then a door would open and the sound of footsteps would shift along the hall above her. They would speak to each other in the dark. They would hold each other. Elaine wonders what they would say. She thinks that he must have already told her about the farm, but if he hasn’t, that such a moment, there in the dark, would be a suitable time.

Even now, two years after her father finished converting the farm, it was something they all still had difficulty explaining to strangers; and as much as Elaine wanted Sarah to stay a full week, there was a part of her that would have been happy to wave goodbye to her as soon as possible. Outsiders didn’t understand, and explai- ning what type of farm it had become and reasons that demanded the change embarrassed Elaine.

It had been a decision made three summers ago, after her father met with various people at the Credit Union in Brandon and had been given as much of an ultimatum as anyone could receive. There was no longer any money in cattle. The market had collapsed and if he did not come up with a plan, a plan that did not involve simply refinancing their current money-losing operation, foreclosure would ensue. Elaine remembered the grave look that her father wore that winter as he conferred with her mother and her Uncle Steven in Winnipeg. All of the children could sense the tension; even Dennis, who would come home once a month from university, was concerned by the silence at the dinner table.

That autumn, their father’s announcement of his decision was met with confusion and consternation. None of them had ever heard of pmu farming and their father, realizing the importance of familial solidarity in the venture, dutifully told them what pregnant mare’s urine contained—and how it would save their farm.

It was in this manner, informal lectures around the dinner table, that Elaine and her brothers were introduced to the principles of equine endocrinology. Their father explained that the placenta of the pregnant mare produced great quantities of hormones, of estrogen, specifically, and that this could be collected and used in medicines. The hormone and the urine in which it was found were valuable because the medications they led to were tremendously beneficial. It was a good thing for people, he said, as if trying to convince them that the plan was really a humanitarian effort. Regardless, he continued, it was what they would do. There was silence. They were no longer cattle ranchers. They would collect urine.

The remaining stock was sold off and the barns were brought down or refitted with equipment that none of them had ever seen before. Any objections they had were made secondary to the effort of making it work and saving the farm. While they had always had horses around, now they had to get used to the thought of them as the working livestock, shuffling in their stalls, scooped-shaped collecting devices strapped under each animal, all connected through a system of PVC pipes to a series of forty gallon plastic collecting drums. The drums stood at the near end of each line of stalls, each one a squat totem. Elaine’s father busied himself with overseeing the plans and financing and had his hand in every detail of the conversion. The stalls were fitted with a system of black plastic pipes that drained into the nearest collecting drum. The drums were then emptied into a central receptacle at day’s end. The system was cleaned nightly, first with water, then with a cleaning solution to stop bacteria from spoiling the hormones in the urine. Then they had to flush out the pipes with water. It was vital that the daily cleaning be coordinated and done quickly, as it was the only time the horses were unhooked from their collection scoops. All members of the family would congregate in the main horse barn and run through the precision-timed maneuvers. Water flush/ lift scoop/ shake/ acetic acid/ lift scoop/ shake/ water flush/ lift scoop/ shake. Next horse.

Whenever spillage occurred to a horse they were tending their father would look at them like they were throwing a pocketful of change onto the floor. “One less year at the college for you, Elaine Rose,” he said once, before understanding how far that sort of comment went.

As foreign as it seemed, through the months of that first autumn they all became accustomed to the rituals that a pmu farm demanded. To all the world their father had regained any confidence he may have lost, but in spite of this Elaine noticed that he was quieter now, more prone to just standing in the barn and staring at the horses.

Outside, Elaine hears the barking of one of the dogs. A short burst of three or four guttural shouts followed by silence and then another two that close the outburst like a door slamming shut. She gets up and pads over to the window, staring out into the orange outdoor lights, seeing steam rise from the silhouette of one of their shepherds. The dog stands still in the distance for a moment before another wreath of vapour appears and dissolves around it. Then the animal turns and lopes, head held down, back into its pen, its gait and posture at that moment looking more wolf than dog.

Elaine returns to the bag to find it has gone cold in the minutes she’s been away, damp-towel heavy as though it had no memory of human warmth. It seems to her willfully cold and uncomfortable.

When she hears the noise she thinks it’s her imagination, the sound of her shivering amplified through the quiet house. Another sound follows, the old bones of the house shifting under the weight of a carefully placed footstep. Had she been upstairs Elaine was sure she could have heard the hinges of Dennis’ door whisper. He was awake, on his feet. Moving. The sounds continue, traversing the ceiling above Elaine, periodic and deliberate, moving to where Sarah lay.

There would be intimate words, as soft as the footsteps that brought him. He might tell her he loved her. Or whisper something dirty. It’s likely that her parents spoke like this, under the covers, that they, like the rest of the world, conducted their truest business in voices that did not carry. It was all part of that dark mystery forever in another place: words between adults, imagined like now or detected beyond walls or sifting through heating ducts. From her bedroom Elaine could occasionally hear her parents speak as they sat in the kitchen. At these times she listened avidly; the relaxed tone of their adult voices, unaware of surveillance, was as exotic as any topic that could be discussed around a country kitchen table. But when the financial difficulties of the farm deepened Elaine began to strain for the words themselves, wrapped in the gauze of her parents’ voices now seeming purposefully, deceptively flat. On their words rested their future. And so it was an odd relief when her father finally told them all what was going to happen.

Elaine imagined that Dennis was talking to Sarah about them, gently assuring her that he wasn’t a hillbilly like his folks, that their visit should be thought of as a field trip. He might even joke about pmu farming, talking about the success of the conversion and how his father was a new breed of farmer, all so as to avoid talking about how close they came to losing the farm and what they had to go through to keep it.

Once the decision had been made there came a succession of visitors. Contractors arrived with the plans for a new barn and stall system, within weeks the foundation had been laid and the skeleton of their new lives was erecting itself, armoured in gleaming corrugated metal. Men from the Credit Union came by and stared in silence at the activity, probably despairing for their own futures that rode on such a plan that must have seemed increasingly more ludicrous. Piss. Horse piss.

After most of the construction was complete, a car arrived from the city. Two drug-company people—an older man who clapped her father on the shoulder when they shook hands and a younger woman in a crisp, grey business suit—politely toed their way through the pastureland and nodded as they were shown the set-up. Later, they sat down at the kitchen table, opened their briefcases and delivered volumes of information to her father about the storage of urine and how payment would be made. Elaine watched her mother’s attention glance over the man for a moment before settling on the young woman. It was at that time when they were converting the farm that Elaine first became curious about what her mother thought about things, aware that her mother had opinions that did not relate in any way to Elaine or her brothers or father, but were simply private. Now, Elaine wondered what her mother made of the young woman sitting at her table and joking with her husband; what she thought of the flawless hair and makeup, the ease and glamour of a life unburdened by children or farmers or the prospect of collecting horse urine. The briefcase closed, hands were shaken and a shoulder clapped again. Their car was gone.

On the farm, debt, even bad debt, doesn’t carry the shame it does in the city. It isn’t the same contagious illness, failure wanting quarantine and hushed silences as you creep by the debtor’s doorway. In the country, people drop by and commiserate, while still silently searching you or your farm for traces of difference, of what separates your situation from theirs. It’s always done with camaraderie, as everyone realizes that the weather or futures options traded in Chicago and Toronto can turn on anybody and bring the auctioneer to the door in no time. On the other hand, changing your farm, selling the stock and veering off into some bizarre biological venture: that will get the town talking.

“Piss farmer,” Elaine heard as she walked to any empty table in the school cafeteria one afternoon in the October after the conversion. No sooner had the first trickle of urine run through the pipes than word had gotten out. Maybe it was the son of one of the contractors or a neighbour. It didn’t matter. People knew. Weeks of suspicious looks and a half-hearted effort at shunning began. For Elaine, it was a good excuse not to attend school dances. A break from the tribal pressures of pretending to want to hang out with boys she didn’t like. But what fascinated Elaine was the initial uniformity of shock and disapproval from the community; it was after all, a rural municipality with its share of rumoured or proven drunks, wife-beaters, and miscellaneous broken homes: none of which provoked anywhere near a comparable solidarity of indignation. She was also surprised at how defiant it all made her feel. It girded her. Well, we’re piss farmers then, she thought. They were pioneers and would face the same hostility as the first farmer to use a combine or a mechanical milker, the same snickering, dumb faces pleased as punch to be outraged at something.

Dr. Saunders arrived a day or two after the livestock to inspect the operation and the horses. As was his habit, he stopped in to see Elaine’s mother first for a chat and a cup of coffee prior to heading to the barn and making sense of their new endeavour. Saunders had been firmly against the conversion, and had told Elaine’s father to his face. He said that there wouldn’t be much of a future in animal estrogens, that plant and synthetic estrogens would arrive in ten years and make an operation like this obsolete. He also said that he had heard of barns in the States that had made similar conversions only to face protests from animal rights groups, the usual circus of picket signs and threats. Even, a couple of barns had been burned to the ground. Elaine’s father, stung by the openly expressed misgivings of a man whose competence and opinion he trusted completely, said that if city people had the same concern about his farm going under and his family not eating, he could take them a little more seriously. Elaine remembered him adding that having a conscience was like using horse shit for manure, if it wasn’t applied evenly, then it was just horse shit.

After saying his piece, Elaine’s father waved his hand as if to dispel the angry words that seemed to fill the space between them. He paused for a moment and then as though acknowledging Saunders’ reservations and wanting to show him he that he had thought about these issues too, told him about their plan to raise the foals and house them in the existing barn. Would that please the city people? Saunders was silent, which frustrated Elaine’s father even more. Are you still gonna be my vet on this thing? he asked, to which Saunders nodded that he was.

Whatever reservations they had about the financial wisdom of such a move were soon forgotten; in the first two years they had turned the farm around, erasing any residual debt and for the first time in anyone’s memory, putting money in the bank. But failure would have been easier on all of them. Their plan could have been dismissed as an act of desperation, an exotic pre-bankruptcy flame- out. As it was, they were seen as visionaries, advocating an over- throw of the known and respectable. They couldn’t have drawn more attention, or less initial support, had they set their own barn on fire.

The PMU operation became so successful that other cattlemen in the area who had been having trouble soon began to visit their farm, just to see their father’s set-up and ask a few questions. The tours were conducted at dusk, the questions posed in hushed tones. Elaine would see the pickups leave as she cleaned out the stalls. Once, a van-load of Hutterites stopped by, the children staying in the vehicle and staring out like alarmed astronauts as Elaine’s father took some of their men inside the barn to show them what he had done. A second operation opened on an adjoining farm a year later, and her father had played a role in helping to organize it. There was no need to be competitive, he said, there was more than enough horse pee for everyone.

And now they had foals. Everywhere there were horses. The most sensitive part of the discussions about the farm had been what they would do with the foals. Her father described what was done on other farms; foals were often sacrificed at birth, since raising them to a stage where they could be sold and transported was another cost, in feeding and shelter, that could eat up whatever margin they hoped for. But seeing his children squirming in their seats at the idea, he soon realized that this would have inflated a difficult situation with emotion and recrimination; it would split them at a time when their support was most needed. Her father recognized the pragmatism in the act, and so it was an expense they would have to absorb.

Elaine saw Dr. Saunders often that first summer as he visited the farm to oversee the inseminations and check on the health of their inaugural group of mares. She had always had the habit of accompanying him during his visits, which he encouraged as he found her company enjoyable and felt the girl disposed to intelligently discussing the health of the animals. The summer that they converted the farm he offered Elaine the chance to come on calls with him, and so it was that they founded their friendship, on the weekends, traveling the highways and rural roads of the Assiniboine Valley. He would introduce Elaine as his assistant and she would shake the hand of the stoic, perplexed farmer as she carried the examination gear from the truck to where the problem lay. She asked Saunders questions about the illnesses that certain species were prone to, why pigs seemed to all get sick at the same time, and whether animals could think, to which he replied that he felt animals were capable of a considerable, although not quite human, intelligence. When Elaine asked him what he meant by this he told her that he wasn’t certain himself, that it was just a feeling he had.

There were times when Elaine felt it too. Not intelligence, not like Saunders had explained it, but she had felt the consciousness of animals around her. She would stand up to take a break from mucking out the stalls and find the horses’ silent gaze on her. Neither she nor the animals were used to them being stalled for so long and Elaine felt a grievance in the eyes of the horses. Saunders nodded when she told him this—she suspected that he quietly shared the horse’s complaint.

After a few weeks with Dr. Saunders, Elaine had already seen and helped in most of the routine tasks that made up a country vet’s day. She picked up the details of the job quickly and knew how to handle Saunders, respectful of the silences in the truck on their way to calls and knowing what was expected of her when time for the consulting came.

She had learned to set up the intravenous for administering euthanasia, getting the solution ready as Saunders explained the inevitable to the farmer. She would assist him in minor surgery or with treatments, handing him instruments and taking an occasional thrill in being able to anticipate the tool that he would need next. And Saunders would do the same for her: stepping in to steady Elaine, thinking that she was going to faint as they circled around to inspect a laceration and caught sight of the deep sirloined gash on one of Mel Purvis’ dairy cows. She kept her feet, and was proud of it, but admitted that she uttered a minor curse at the sight of the wound where a rail had torn open the flank of the incredibly oblivious animal. Saunders sensed it though: not just her alarm but the stiff necked pride at trying not to show it. She thought he appreciated the effort.

“You know cows Elaine, you know how they get in scrapes,” he said, bracing his shoulder and head against the cow’s flank to steady it for suturing.

“Yeah.”

“She’s okay.”

“Yeah.”

The cow made a shuddering movement, as though merely irritated at the efforts to close the wound. Saunders was down to the last skin sutures and waved Elaine closer. He held up the curved suturing needle for her to take and motioned that he was going to step in front of the animal to keep it still.

“Okay now, grab aholt.”

The truth is that Elaine had come to forget most everything about cows in the two years since they sold off the herd. She felt ashamed that it could all fade on her so quickly, so easily replaced by different animals and another way of life that until recently had seemed like such a scheme. But on visits with Saunders the cows came back to her: the slow grinding and gulleting of feed, the smell climbing up into her nostrils, steeping her clothes, the big-eyed docility that let you sew up a gash without anesthetic. She didn’t tell Saunders but she didn’t miss the cows a bit.

In the time that Elaine spent with Saunders she observed how quietly he went about the routine of his work and wondered why, although there was never a time that she had not known him, she was not aware of more of the details of his personal life. Saunders lived alone in a two-storey brick house by the water treatment plant near town and was a public figure as visible as the bank manager or the mayor and yet was a mystery that people seemed satisfied to allow to remain unsolved. Nothing personal was given away by Saunders. She knew his name was Phillip: an intimacy not allowed by him but gleaned by Elaine from his University of Saskatchewan diploma that hung on the office wall above the filing cabinets. From the dates on the diploma he was plausibly five to ten years younger than her father. Elaine assumed he wasn’t local, as she had never experienced a local who didn’t have an acknowledged public history that accompanied them like a shadow. She didn’t know where he was born or if he had had any family. In the house where he had his office she saw no traces of the paths of other people. At one time Elaine imagined an estranged wife or even children, all of them victims of an insoluble domestic drama, making the best of it by living in another city. The sadness of a broken home would have been more than made up for by the knowledge that Saunders was at least capable of one great romantic, if sadly doomed, love. But there was no proof of any other person in Saunders’ life, not the photo of a parent or a sibling, no snapshots from anyplace she didn’t already recognize.

In the time they spent in the clinic between calls, she would take the opportunity to look through his textbooks, trying to memorize the names of the instruments or the technical terms for procedures that were so much a part of his daily speech. In the section of his library on horses she ran across a book on equine obstetrics and found herself unable to put it down. Had she had the nerve she would have asked his permission to bring the book home just to study the illustrations in the quiet of her bedroom. What had all her life seemed natural was now shown as a process fraught with peril at every step. The mechanics of muscles contracting, the physics of moving a large animal through a larger animal, that leap into light and oxygen and gravity. It was wonderful and it frightened her; it made her think of all the things that could go wrong, made her fearful of having children herself. From then on when she looked at the mares in the barn after that she tried not to imagine the buzzing sound from inside them, the terrible industry of life.

In the weeks after starting as Saunders’ assistant, Elaine began to daydream about him, imagining what it would be like to have him as her father. Perhaps it was the timing: she had started spending time with him just as her father had sold off all the cows and seemed preoccupied with the beginnings of their new venture. Or it could have been the vacuum of family in Saunders’ life into which she was drawn. But despite being uncomfortable at the thought—for lack of loyalty to her father, or, for that matter, to herself—it became clear to Elaine that Saunders and her mother were each the solitary sort of person who would have been ideally suited to each other. She could not stop the images of them together from assembling in her thoughts. Her mother would read his journals and tell him about what looked to her untrained eye to be the big advances; he would help her through her correspondence courses. There might be travel for both of them and more than just the company of a novel for her mother. The thought of all this, and that the two of them might be thinking it too, not acting on it but acknowledging it like some sort of secret, depressed Elaine. She wondered what Saunders and her mother talked about when he went into the house before coming to the barn on a call. He was always professional on calls when she went with him, never a word that could be misconstrued, never joking with the farm women. But things were often said out of earshot. Bigger secrets had been kept.

Her mother and Saunders, perfectly happy together. A world that got along quite nicely without her. It was while in these thoughts that increments of sleep settled on Elaine, obscuring the waking world, draining light. Her sleep was shallow and later when she recalled the night she could not remember having dreamt. If there had been other noises above her, she hadn’t been aware of them.

Elaine awakens to the sound of her father putting on his boots at the front door. She hears a boot slap and a groan. He’s hurrying. He looks up from his bootlaces to Elaine who has stumbled off the couch with the sleeping bag gathered around her shoulders like a poncho. The weather has changed overnight: snow is squalling and when her father opens the door ice crystals and cold air sweep inside.

“Some foals are gone. Did you lock up?”

“Yeah,” Elaine mumbles, the haze of sleep tamping down the word until it sounds to her own ear uncertain or evasive. She rubs her eyes and squints, as if to convince her father that she has just woken up.

“Mom’s in the barn so get Frank or Dennis,” he says. Standing in the door, he is a silhouette bitten at the edges by the whiteness of the outside: “Get in the truck and go along the eastern trunk road. I’ll go up the western fence.”

Elaine dresses and goes upstairs looking for Frank. When she finds his bed empty she looks for his hockey bag and finding that missing as well, remembers that he is at the rink. From her room she hears Dennis’ voice, constrained and deliberate, making some sort of point that requires more force than a whisper. She pauses in the hallway, hoping to hear Sarah’s voice, laughing back at him, and defusing the situation. She hears nothing and waits outside the room before speaking.

“Dennis?”

A longer pause follows. The door opens and Dennis pokes his head out. A ridiculous smile is stretched over his face that makes him ugly to Elaine.

“Dad said a few foals are gone. Could you drive me along the eastern trunk road to look for them?”

“But we’re getting ready to go.” Dennis says, looking back into the room as though mustering support. Elaine peers into the room and sees Sarah sitting on her bed, face flushed. Elaine wants to take a step back, but doesn’t.

“Dad’s out already but we can take the truck.”

“We really have to get going. It’s already past eight.”

Sarah stands up. She shakes her head and says calmly, “Christ, Dennis, we can help. It’s your family.”

Elaine thinks she is going to vomit during the drive to the eastern trunk road. She’s closest to the passenger door, wedged in with Dennis and Sarah. The road is difficult to follow in the blowing snow and Dennis curses as he shifts the pickup, steering the truck with a series of dramatic corrections. The rest is silence, just the mysterious, palpable threat that adults—even Sarah—possess.

Elaine opens her window enough to let in pulses of cold air and snow. Under any other circumstance she would be preoccupied by her embarrassment about the state of the old truck, its ragged bench seat, its gun-rack along the rear window that seems straight out of a skit about cousins marrying each other. She has called Dr. Saunders’ office before they left, but got his machine and hung up. Even now she could not think of what she would have said had he answered, but nonetheless would have wanted to know that he was there, maybe wanted him to know where she was going.

An area of a mile or two along the eastern trunk road was where they typically found strays, seeking shelter in a poplar grove close to the end fence. She had been out this way before when they had cattle, found several head scratching their rumps on the endposts that marked the limits of their property.

Dennis now seems invigorated, deputized by the weather storming around him. He grunts a little as he jerks the steering wheel to keep out of the ditch. Once the truck has been reined in, he accelerates, pushing them down the tumbling white, obscured road. Sarah says nothing, arms folded across her chest. Holding herself still, containing herself, Elaine thinks. From this view of Sarah, Elaine turns and stares straight ahead into a thousand collisions of snow against windshield, not reassured by the periodic calm of the wiper blade’s wake.

There isn’t even a gasp among them when they hit the horse. Elaine thinks she sees a flash of the animal—an apparition of colour, indistinct as a brown blanket being flung at them—lasting a second before disappearing into the blizzard again. What she recalls is the sound of metal dimpling in, a hollow thudding of something absorbing force. A noise repeating itself in her head as though to convince her of its occurrence. Dennis two-foots the brake pedal, leaning the two passengers forward, so they must brace themselves on the dashboard. As the truck stops Sarah puts her hands to her face but says nothing. Elaine can hear Sarah breathing deeply, thinking it is a sound moving towards a sob, and feels breathless on the seat beside the woman.

Elaine pulls back the handle and elbows the door open. Outside the cab, she’s immersed in weather, wind and snow slapping against the exposed skin of her neck. She shivers in relief; the cold shaking sense into her, telling her that she’s on her own two feet and freed from the cab where Dennis and Sarah still sit in silence. Sarah looks stricken to Elaine, still upset but now past crying. Standing there, with the door open and not a word among them, Elaine is surprised not to feel sad as well, surprised that she can watch Sarah and regard it all as an observation without feeling the sorrow herself.

She waits for Dennis to do something, to reach back and take a rifle from the gun rack, but he sits motionless. She can’t remember thinking about anything as she reaches over him. There is only the feeling of standing on the roadside with the weight of the rifle in her left hand. She opens the glove compartment of the truck and takes the box of shells.

“Elaine, stay in the car,” she hears Dennis say as she closes the door.

She can see where the foal lays in the ditch. Off to the side she can make out a series of elliptical bites taken out of the snow by a hoof or a head as the animal cartwheeled down the incline. The position of the animal and the distance it lies from the road tell her all she needs to know. Elaine applies pressure to the butt of the shotgun with her underarm. The sound and feel the gun dislocating into its two-hinged component parts satisfies her, makes her think of an elbow flexing to apply itself.

The barrel of the shotgun abruptly swings down and its metal edge catches her right shin. She winces, less at the pain than at how her haste has led to a breach of gun safety. Complete control of the firearm, she repeats to herself as blandly as any Catechism, is the foundation of safe operation.

Elaine looks through the truck’s window while she takes a couple of shells out of the case. She trembles, feeling her heart shouting out in her chest, announcing itself to her arms, hands, useless fingers. But her hand imposes itself on the mutiny, steadies and guides a shell into the gun barrel. Its twin is dropped into her pocket.

She turns and with each step down the ditch the snow becomes deeper, demanding a progressively longer moment for adjusting her balance before she can extricate her trailing foot. The shotgun is another variable, carried in her right hand, held higher than she would normally carry it because of the snow and the loaded chamber. Elaine gives herself one of her father’s headshakes at not deciding to load the gun at the bottom of the gully. Halfway down the ditch she understands the full weight of this effort, the energy required to suppress every kind of fear. She feels the desperation of wanting to cry only marginally less than wanting to be free of tears. The difference between the two the thinnest of margins, a small air bubble under the overturned world into which she can lift her mouth to breathe. Up to her thighs in snow, she sees the animal as though she were already above it, nostrils funneling in last breaths, eyes filling with what she can see but cannot understand. That animal pain. She can already anticipate the kick of the shotgun against her shoulder, its echo abbreviated by the squalling snow. Under her a sudden crimson star. All of this is clear and not for a moment coloured with sadness or fear or anger, Elaine realizes, as she reaches the animal to find it already dead.