A Good Horse: Book Two of the Horses of Oak Valley Ranch by Jane Smiley

Author:Jane Smiley [Smiley, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Horses, Juvenile Fiction, Animals
ISBN: 9780375894152
Google: _WXORUDYHIMC
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2010-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

The next day, Mom let me sleep. And I did sleep—I looked at the clock when I woke up, and it read twenty after six. I thought I would look at the clock again, just to be sure, and it read half past ten, and the room was light, and I didn’t have any sense of time having passed. When I sat up, I remembered Black George and the jumping and Jane Slater, and when I was in the bathroom, I remembered driving the cows up the hill in the moonlight, and then I remembered the dog. It wasn’t until I was looking in my closet that I remembered that it was Monday and I had missed the school bus.

Mom came in from outside when I was getting the cereal down from the pantry, and she had a big smile on her face. She said, “Oh, you woke up! You must have been exhausted. I went in your room at seven, and you were so dead to the world, I just couldn’t wake you.”

I said, “What did Daddy say?”

“Not a word.” She pointed to the ribbons and the trophy, which one of them had set up on the sideboard. “He knows you did a good job. Yesterday and last night.”

But she was still smiling. Then I happened to look out the kitchen door. There was a dog on the porch. There was the dog on the porch. I said, “Mom! Who is that?”

And she said, “Oh, you mean Rusty?”

“Rusty!”

She laughed.

The dog pricked his ears.

“How do you know his name is Rusty?”

“I think the real question is, how does she know her name is Rusty.”

“How does she know?”

Mom shrugged. Then we went out on the porch.

Rusty was sitting over to the side, by one of the posts, looking out toward the barn. She did not rush to us when we opened the door but brushed her tail from side to side, and then, when Mom said, “Hey, Rusty,” she stood up and walked over to us and sat down in front of us. Then she looked up at Mom and lifted her left paw. Mom took it.

I said, “She knows tricks?”

“She seems like a well-trained dog.”

“She always looked so wild out there, like a wolf or something. I thought she was a he.”

“Well, I’m thinking she’s half German shepherd and maybe half Australian shepherd. She does have a wolfy look.”

I said, “That’s what I thought last night, when he—I mean she—started running after the cow and the calf. I thought she was going to attack them.”

“Oh, I never once thought Rusty would do that.”

Now I turned and stared at Mom. I said, “Have you known Rusty for a while, Mom?”

She gave me a big grin. “About four months now.”

“That’s since July.”

“Yeah, that’s about when she appeared.”

“I thought we saw her the first time down at the crick a month or so ago.”

“Well, she was following us.”

“What does Daddy think?”

“After last night, your father said Rusty could live in the barn and be an outside dog.

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