Some mornings, before darkness gives way to light and a cold wind howls across the pasture and presses against the barn like a giant hand, I wonder what in the hell I'm doing working on a horse farm.

A week earlier, the jet stream had ferried a wall of Canadian air down the eastern edge of the Allegheny Mountains, and the mercury hadn't crawled out of the single digits ever since. I yanked a second sweatshirt over my head and walked into the kitchen.

The barn's crossbeams and joists creaked and groaned like a Spanish galleon on the open seas while familiar sounds filtered up through the floorboards. Rustling straw, the hollow thump of a hoof knocking against a wooden plank, a bucket rattling.

I opened the drawer next to the kitchen sink. Buried among a Phillips screwdriver, a past due Gas and Electric bill and a stack of old bank statements, rubber bands, paper clips, and everything else that cluttered the junk drawer, I found a dirty manila envelope with the flap crimped shut. I turned it over in my palm. My boss had printed Stephen in bold black letters on one side along with the horse's name and detailed instructions that I knew by heart. Inside, were tubes of ophthalmic ointment that couldn't be left in a cold barn. I tucked the envelope in my pocket and shrugged into my coat.

Fronds of ice feathered across the inside of the windowpanes like a crystal-growing experiment gone wrong. They might have been pretty if they didn't mean I'd be freezing my ass off in a minute or two. I scratched at the frost with my fingernails, then squinted through the glass. The thermometer read two below zero.

There were a half dozen better ways to spend my time at three o'clock in the morning, and this wasn't one of them. But corneal ulcers had to be treated aggressively, because a horse that can't see, can't jump. And at Foxdale Farm, jumping's the name of the game. Hunters, jumpers, three-day eventers. Only the dressage horses kept their feet on the ground.