The next week the cold spell broke, exposing the dead brown grass of winter lawns. A family of woodpeckers had made a home in the wood siding of my bedroom wall and the babies woke with the sun, demanding to be fed. I woke with them, aching for sleep. For a few days it was warm enough to go without a coat. Willows budded, duped by the early thaw. I threw away the ruined cake. The snow receded in the mountains.

Ruth called to ask if she could bring Lauren to see the horses, and I went out with Cort, staying upwind of the stables, while he caught and saddled a mare for Lauren to ride. The vet had come, and said the foal had frostbitten tendons. Her legs were wrapped up and sore, and she wasn’t walking well; the frostbite had worn the hide on her hocks almost down to the bone. Her mother nosed and nickered at her to stand. Cort let them out of the heated stall, and we watched the foal step gingerly toward her mother, sit down to rest and struggle to her feet again to nurse when her mother came close.

“Will she be able to run?” I asked. She had the long, straight legs of a fast horse, but they folded suddenly beneath her. She had to be in pain.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Is it worth it to keep her alive?”

“Is it worth it?” he said.

I waited for a real answer, but none came. Ruth pulled up the driveway in a blue Skylark with Lauren in the passenger seat, and we didn’t have to finish the conversation. Lauren wore a puffy pink winter coat and flowered corduroy pants. She saw the shivering baby in the corral, and asked her name.

“She doesn’t have one yet,” Cort said. He was keeping the blank registration papers in a kitchen drawer with his keys and spare change. He didn’t even call her “the filly,” he called her “the baby.” She seemed too invalid to be a horse, too fragile to support a proper name. “What do you think it should be?” he asked.

Lauren looked hard at the filly. “I don’t know,” she said. “She looks cold.”

Cort picked up the filly and carried her back into the heated stall, followed by the anxious mare, and closed the gate.

“Are the horses making you sneeze?” Lauren asked me, looking up from the hood of her pink coat.

“I’m all right,” I said. “I just can’t touch them or get too close.”

Lauren frowned, and then she nodded. Cort lifted her left foot into the shortened stirrup, and helped her swing her body over the saddled mare. He gave her the reins and led her into the field.