forty-two minutes

july 15, 2026

The call came in at 11:18. Cass was at her table with a bowl of soup she had already stopped eating and a case journal she had been meaning to close since Sunday. The clinic phone forwarded to her cell after ten at night. She picked up on the second ring.

“Cass. It’s Rick Torres out on Fisher Road. Willa’s down. She won’t get up.”

Cass put the pen down. “How long.”

“Since about ten. Maybe before. I came out to feed and she was rolling. I got her up once and she went right back down.”

“Sweating?”

“Yes.”

“Kicking at her belly?”

“Yeah. She quit that. She’s flat out now.”

“Rick, I need you to walk her if you can. Don’t let her roll. I’m on my way. I’m forty minutes out.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have someone with you.”

“Sara’s out. I called her.”

“Okay. Walk her. I’m coming.”

She hung up. She was already moving. Boots by the door, keys off the hook, coat that was still cold from the barn earlier. She started the truck to warm the diesel and went back inside for the kit.

The kit was already packed for a colic call because they were always packed for a colic call. She checked it anyway. Nasogastric tube. Stomach pump. Pail. Lube. Two liters of mineral oil. Banamine, xylazine, detomidine. Twenty liters of Plasmalyte in a jug she kept in the truck-warmer. Fourteen-gauge catheter, a fresh set of extension tubing. The stethoscope she wore around her neck without thinking about it. Rectal sleeves. She added a second bottle of Banamine because she had used one on the Petersen gelding on Monday and had not replaced it. She would have replaced it in the morning. It was in the morning now, almost.

She wrote 23:24 in the callbook on the seat and pulled out of the drive.

Fisher Road was forty-two minutes at legal speed. She was not going to drive legal speed. The county sheriff knew the truck and knew what a vet-truck at that hour on the two-lane meant. She drove seventy where the road allowed it and slowed for the two blind curves at Baker’s Creek because the deer were bad this year. Her hands were on the wheel at ten and two the way her father had taught her when she was fifteen. Her father had been a large-animal vet in the next county over and had died the year before she finished school. She thought about him for six seconds and then stopped and thought about the mare.

Colic in a fourteen-year-old quarter horse, down for over an hour, flat out. The differential ran itself. Gas colic, most common, usually resolves. Impaction, next most common, usually resolves with fluid and time. Enteritis. Sand. Displacement, less common, harder. Torsion, worst, surgical, hours-to-live short. Rick’s description was not enough to sort them. She would know in twenty minutes what she was looking at, and by then she would already have started the work of it.

She thought about the Davis referral. Three and a half hours to the teaching hospital. The trailer ride itself was a stress the mare might not survive if she was in the wrong quadrant of the differential. The Torres trailer would already be hitched. Rick was the kind of man who hitched trailers. What the call was going to cost him she would think about tomorrow.

She passed the sign for the Fisher Road turnoff at 23:52. Twenty-eight minutes on the road. She had cut it. She swung wide into the drive at 23:57 and Rick was standing at the gate with a maglite, which he did not shine at her because he knew better. He waved her toward the near barn.

She parked ten feet from the barn door and left the truck running for the heat.

Willa was on her side in the aisle. A bay quarter horse mare with a small star and a soft eye that was not soft now. Her breathing was fast and shallow. Her flanks were dark with sweat. She had not tried to get up in the last ten minutes. Rick had put a lead rope on her but was not pulling on it.

Cass knelt at the mare’s head. “Hi, girl.” She put her palm on the jaw and the mare did not respond. She got the stethoscope onto the left flank first, then the right, and heard almost nothing. No gut sounds at all on the right. Faint tinny pings on the left, the kind that meant gas. She lifted the lip and pressed her thumb against the gum above the incisor and counted. Four seconds. The gum came back purple, not pink.

“How long has she been like this,” she said to Rick, meaning flat.

“Twenty minutes. Maybe. She went down and I couldn’t get her up.”

“Okay.” She stood. “I need to tube her. Can you get her head up for me.”

Rick came around and knelt and put his hands under the mare’s jaw and lifted. Willa did not fight him. Cass ran the tube down and it went easy, which was information, and she got the pump on and started the reflux draw. Fluid came back immediately. Green, sour, more than she wanted to see. She let it run into the pail. Two liters. Three. It kept coming. She stopped counting at five and clamped off and pulled the tube.

“Cass.”

“Rick. She’s got a lot of fluid backed up. That’s not good news. It means something downstream isn’t moving.”

“Displacement.”

“Or worse. I’d have to get in there to say.”

She sleeved up and got in. The mare tolerated it, which was itself information. Cass worked her hand forward slowly and past the pelvic brim and felt for the loops. She found the cecum where it should not have been, distended and tight, and behind it a taut band that should not have been taut. She stayed with her hand where it was for a full thirty seconds because she wanted to be sure. When she came out she stripped the sleeve and turned it inside out and dropped it in the pail and looked at Rick.

“Right dorsal displacement. Possibly torsion behind it. The cecum is up where the colon should be. She’s not going to pass this on medicine.”

Rick did not say anything for a moment. He was still holding the mare’s jaw.

“Davis is three and a half hours if we leave right now,” Cass said. “The trailer ride will be very hard on her. She might not survive it. If she does she has maybe a forty percent chance in surgery. It’s ten thousand dollars if she lives and eight if she doesn’t.”

“Okay.”

“The other option is I do it here. She won’t feel it. She’s already checked out.”

Rick looked at the mare and then at Cass and then at the mare again. His hand was still under the mare’s jaw and he did not move it.

“How sure are you,” he said. “On the displacement.”

“Sure.”

“Okay.” He stopped. “Do it here.”

Cass nodded once. She went to the truck and got the bottle of pentobarbital and a hundred-cc syringe and a fresh needle. She drew it full. She came back and knelt on the mare’s near side and shaved a patch over the jugular and got the vein on the first stick, which was the small mercy the night was going to give her. She looked at Rick.

“You don’t have to stay.”

“I’m staying.”

She pushed the plunger. She kept her thumb on the pulse in the jaw with her other hand. The mare’s breathing changed inside of ten seconds and stopped inside of thirty. Cass held the pulse for another forty seconds after that until there was nothing under her thumb. She looked at her watch. 00:14.

She stayed a minute. Rick stayed longer than she did. He put his hand on the mare’s neck and left it there. He did not say anything and Cass did not ask him to.

She got up and walked to the truck and started packing the kit back. Tube. Pump. Pail rinsed at the spigot outside the barn. Sleeve bagged. Bottle capped and returned to the cold box. She wrote the time and the diagnosis and the drug and the dose in the callbook. She wrote client present under drug and dose because it mattered later that he had been.

Rick came out of the barn at 00:31. “I’ll call the renderer in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll pay whatever the bill is. Send it.”

“I will.”

He stood next to her for a moment at the truck. She thought he might say something else. He did not. He put his hand on her shoulder once and squeezed and turned and went back to the barn to sit with his mare.

Cass got in the truck. She sat with her hands on the wheel for a full minute before she turned the key. The clinic was forty-two minutes back. She would be home a little after one thirty. The soup would still be on the table. The case journal would still be open to the Petersen gelding, the entry finished, waiting to be closed. She would close it in the morning. She started the truck and turned around in the yard and drove back the way she had come.