The mare nurses a baby that isn’t hers. She’s been brought down from the bluffs for this purpose: to feed an orphan, to care for it like it is her own. For days she has been given estrogen shots, fed domperidone paste out of a tube. All to trick her system into doing something it does when there is another life growing inside. Her teats drop, her bag begins to fill. She is ready to give herself to another.
The foal has learned to drink out of a bucket. He was orphaned early, within a few hours, his mother’s gut twisting, killing her slowly and then quickly. He never knew her, didn’t receive the life-saving antibodies, the colostrum—at least, not enough. He doesn’t miss her when her body grows cold out in the rain. He knows his bucket and the people that fill it and the thick shavings lining the floor of his stall.
The girl who fills the bucket prays, though she is not the praying kind. She prays that the mare comes into milk, that she accepts the baby, that the two can become one, a pair. She prays not because she has been getting up every three hours for a week to fill the bucket with a milk substitute, though she is tired. Her body is used to never being satisfied. No, she prays because she wants the foal to have a mother.
The girl’s mother is gone. She didn’t die like the foal’s mother, not that the girl knows. But she disappeared all the same.
The mare nurses a baby that isn’t hers. The foal has learned to drink out of a bucket, but it learns how to suckle a teat, falls seamlessly into a new pair, a new family. The girl who fills the bucket prays. Not that her mother will come home, but for a new family, a new mother, one that will come down from the bluffs and wrap the girl in her arms and tell her that it’s her body playing a trick, this new life she can feel growing inside.