He couldn't exactly care for that horse, nor either did he think the witch-eyed horse cared much for him. Sometimes Medicine Ed would swear that horse knew more than a horse could know. When he walked Pelter, like now, in a beady fog in the morning dark of November, with they two breaths fuming like dragons and winter coming on, he tried to eyeball the horse out the side of his eye to learn what was what, and what do he see but the horse eyeballing him back. They eyeballed each other to find out how the other one was getting along, the feet, the legs, the back. They eyeballed to find out what the other one was eyeballing. They eyeballed to check if anymany little signs be present who will be the first to go.
Whenever Medicine Ed sneaked off to his Winnebago to warm him some soup in a pan, that horse eyeball him. You could hear him studying: Now what is that evil old cunjure fixing to do? If he go to that medicine, if he think either of us time is short and he commence to mixing that goofer, why, I'm going to get him first. Often when Medicine Ed be laying on his side in the straw, unrolling bandage or packing the horse's foot with clay and helpless as a baby under the horse's back end, he could hear him thinking that: I can last long as the old man can last, lessen he try to beat me to the door.
So far it was an even match and Medicine Ed wouldn't put it past the horse to get over on him when he was feeling poorly, just like he did the horse. When the young fool's woman still taken care of Pelter, he improved or at least he come to himself, for a while, for the joy of living. Now the animal stick it out for sheer commonness and mischief, and maybe to hang on longer than Medicine Ed. (It use to vex him so when they cut the fool. One time he seen her let the horse taken her whole head up in his teeth by the frizzly pigtails. He chewed on them like hay until she dig them out of his mouth with her fingers. Now was that right acting?)
He tried not to hold it against the frizzly girl that his friend Two-Tie had used her to help him out this life. After all, when Two-Tie disappeared for good, he had Medicine Ed's markers in his pocket. Now she showed up at the Mound sometimes on a Sadday night and looked down on him and Pelter in the walking ring. He could recognize Two-Tie in them fuzzy tilted-up eyebrows, and all he can see is Mr. Two-Tie lying on his face in a railroad culvert somewhere, or under a heap of stones in the deep woods, or sliding down a mountainside with the tin cans and old stoves and deer parts that people dump over the side of the road. Might could be they never find him, and all Medicine Ed can think is, she don't even know he died for her sake or who he was. It's a tie in the blood, and yet and still it's no remembrance, no one to mourn or either grieve for him.
Now that she was gone and out of his bidness, he had to give this much to the frizzly hair girl, she must have did something right with all that modern science she use to make it up as she go along. Damn if Medicine Ed be caught petting and nursering an animal like that, but he had taken sometimes to rubbing Pelter up with cloths after he worked, like a young horse. Couldn't hurt, and they had the time. The horse gone good for fifteen hundred, and sometimes when they walking the shedrow like now and eyeballing each other like now, he was careful to remember into the horse that the Mound has claimers at 1250 too. It's still another place left for them two to go, even if it is down.