The Midnight Stallion

I

"I shouldn't be out here," Holly muttered to herself as she walked through the dark, wet forest. She had been in her bed, peacefully sleeping, when she heard noises coming from what she and her friends called Spiral Mountain. She thought nothing of it at first, but the noises got louder, and eventually, she couldn't take it anymore. Without waking her father, she grabbed a flashlight from the storage room and snuck out of the house. Her father would be furious if he caught her, but that didn't matter to Holly. She needed to find out what had happened.

As she neared the base of the mountain, the noises stopped, but she kept going. Suddenly, She saw something black on the ground and barely stopped in time before tripping over it. Thinking it was just a rock, she was about to kick it out of the way when she saw it flinch.

"What the...?" she asked herself. She shined the flashlight at it. It flinched again. She realized that it was a foal. But was a foal doing here? Then, inspecting it again, she saw that it had scratch marks that seemed to come from tree branches. It must have fallen from the mountain, she thought to herself. She knew she had to help it. She put her coat over the young stallion and quickly ran back to the house through the pouring rain. Almost ripping the door off of its hinges, she burst into her father's room, where he awoke startled. "Who..."

"Dad, it's me," she said quickly.

"What are you doing, it's nearly midnight-". Then he noticed my clothes. "Were you out again? How many times do I have to tell you, it's dangerous at night! There's a mountain lion out somewhere, and-"

"Dad, there's an injured foal by Spiral Mountain," I told him what I had seen. Without saying a word, he grabbed his coat and a wheelbarrow and followed me to where I had found it, still struggling to live.

We managed to lift him into the wheelbarrow and back to the house. We brought him to the stable that we had used for our old horse, Lightning, who had passed away last year.

"What do we do now?" I asked my dad.

"Go to sleep for now," he told me. " I'll call the vet tomorrow morning." 

As I walked back to the house with my dad, I couldn't stop thinking about that poor foal. I was hoping that his mother would be okay, and he had just been separated from her in the storm, the more I thought about it, the more I prepared for the worst.