Greener Pastures - Alyssa Brugman [25]
'But if you sell Blue then you won't have a horse at all,' Erin said. 'You can borrow Bandit whenever you want. We can always double.' She looked sad for her friend. 'I know it's not quite the same.'
'You think I should do it?' Shelby asked.
The bell rang for the first class and the two girls swung their bags over their backs. All the students herded in through the doors. Erin stared straight ahead.
'If you move we'll say that we'll write, and talk on Messenger, and we will for a little while, but then we'll stop. I know because I don't talk to any of my friends from my old primary school, even though I swore I would. The saddest thing is that I don't even miss them now. I would hate to not miss you, Shel.'
They stopped outside the classroom. The computer teacher arrived and unlocked the door to let them in.
'It's not forever; I'll be coming back. Maybe we will write and –'
'We won't, though,' Erin interrupted. Her eyes were misting up.
Shelby sighed. Just as she had anticipated, Erin had managed to turn this conversation around and make it about herself.
Across the room Lydia was pulling out a chair. Shelby suddenly remembered about the founder. 'Save me a seat,' Shelby said.
Erin picked a computer behind Ethan and put her bag on the seat next to her.
'Did you manage to get the vet out to your pony?' Shelby asked.
Lydia shook her head.
'How is he doing?'
'Worse than ever!' her new friend said. 'He lay down almost the whole weekend. And he was sweating. I asked my dad yesterday, but he said the vet charges more to come out on a weekend.'
'When the people gave him to you, are you sure they said foundation? Could it have been founder?'
'It might have been. Why?'
Shelby logged on to the computer, keyed in the address for Google, and then typed 'founder' in the search field. 'I've heard about this thing called founder and I was wondering maybe if that's what he has. Here. What does this one say?' Shelby murmured, squinting at the page as it loaded.
As she read she realised that many of the words were familiar to her. She'd heard other people at the stables using those terms, or she'd read about them in books without quite knowing what they meant.
Lydia craned forward and read for a while. 'It looks like a whole bunch of medical words.'
'Well, it says it's called laminitis – inflammation of the laminae. Do you know what that is?'
Lydia shook her head.
'When you clean out your horse's foot you see a yellowy kind of line around the edge. Sometimes it's called the white line. There's a white line too, but that's called the water line.' Shelby shrugged. 'I know. It's confusing, isn't it? Anyway, the yellow line is the laminae. It holds the wall of the hoof to the inside.' Shelby read the page again. 'So it looks like the laminae gets inflamed, and then it stops doing its job. It says here that "the structures inside the hoof capsule aren't held in place".'
Lydia stared at the screen. Shelby wasn't sure she understood.
'OK everyone, eyes forward,' the computer teacher said.
Shelby whispered to Lydia, 'If the inside of the hoof isn't stuck onto the wall around the outside of the hoof, then the bones of the horse start coming down – and if you don't treat it they can come out through the bottom of the hoof. See there in the picture. That horse's pedal bone is coming out through its sole. Look, it says here, "can be fatal".'
The teacher clapped his hands together. 'All right. I've put today's project on the server, so you can log in now.'
All the students started talking to one another as they switched on the computers, or rummaged through their bags.
Shelby typed 'laminitis' into the search field and clicked on the 'search images' button. She flicked through the images – twisted, deformed feet, X-rays of pedal bones shaped like arrows pressing down through the underside of the hoof, horses in agony as their skeleton literally sank through the soles of their feet. Shelby hadn't known when she'd entered the search term how awful the photos would