You need to keep doing exactly what you are doing and let the word find you." Mari accepted the assessment the way she accepted most things people told her. She wrote it in the ledger that night verbatim as a hypothesis to be tested rather than a prediction to be believed.
By the fall of 1975, she had seven horses of her own and had sold four foals to buyers in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Three of them to people who had come to her through Francis and one to a family in Winona County who had heard about her from a farrier who traveled the region. Every sale had been to a working home. Every animal had left her farm halter broken, standing for a farrier loading in a trailer without protest.
And in the case of the three-year-olds, started under saddle by Mari herself in the round pen behind the shop. By the spring of 1977, she had 12 horses and had begun keeping a written list of people who had asked about future foals. The list started with eight names. By August, it was 14.
She did not call it a waiting list. She called it a folder. She kept it in the ledger on a page marked simply names.
The trouble came in April of 1978. It came on a Tuesday morning in the form of a state agriculture inspector's car pulling up her drive at 9:15 with the dew still visible on the north side of the barn roof. Mari was in the barn wrapping a hoof abscess on the older sorrel whose name was Delphine and who tolerated the treatment because she had known Mari for six years. Mari heard the car before she saw it.
She heard the specific sound a state car made on gravel, which was different from the sound a neighbor's truck made or a delivery van or her brother's station wagon. It was the sound of a vehicle whose driver had no reason to hurry and no reason to hesitate. She finished wrapping Delphine's hoof set, the pus pan on the tack room shelf, wiped her hands on a rag, and walked out into the yard. The man who got out of the car was in his early 50s, wearing a suit under a windbreaker and carrying a clipboard in a small leather case.
He introduced himself as Thaddius Ellsworth from the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture Livestock Health Division out of the regional office in Eau Claire. He said his office had received a formal complaint alleging that Mari was feeding contaminated cull produce to her horses in unsanitary storage conditions and that this practice was suspected to be causing intermittent illness in the herd. He said the complaint had been anonymous. He said his office had a statutory obligation to investigate any complaint alleging animal welfare concerns regardless of source.
He said he was sorry to be arriving without notice, but that surprise inspections were also a matter of statute. Mari looked at him for a long moment. She did not raise her voice. She did not offer him coffee.
She said only that he was welcome to see anything he wanted to see, that she would walk him through the operation in the order he preferred, and that she had records available for whatever period he wished to review. Thaddius Ellsworth had inspected 63 livestock operations in the previous 12 months. He had a routine. He asked to see the feed storage first.
Mari walked him to the root cellar under the farmhouse, opened the outside bulkhead door, and led him down the six concrete steps into the cold, dry space that Raymond had built the year after the war. That stopped on the third step from the bottom. He looked at the ventilation shaft cut through the north wall. He looked at the temperature gauge on the far wall, which read 37 degrees.
He looked at the pallets of stacked burlap bags along both long walls. Each pallet labeled in Mari's small handwriting with the source cannery, the date received, and the estimated remaining volume. He wrote something on the clipboard. He asked to see the horses.
Mari walked him through the barn stall by stall. Twelve horses were groomed within the last week, their hooves picked out that morning, their water buckets full and clean. Thaddius checked the coats. He checked the eyes.
He asked to see hoof condition on three at random. Mari brought each one out and picked up the requested foot without prompting. Thaddius wrote more on the clipboard. He asked to see the feed records.
Mari brought him to the kitchen table. She opened the ledger to the current calendar year and set it in front of him. She poured coffee into two mugs, set one at his elbow, and stepped back to the counter. She did not hover.
That read for 22 minutes. He turned pages back to 1976. He turned them back to 1974. He read the entries.
He read the feed cost calculations. He read the source cannery notations with their contact names and telephone numbers written in the margins. He read the notation in Mari's hand from November of 1976 where she had documented a batch of Crawford County beets that had shown signs of rot on delivery and had been rejected and returned to Everett Langren the same afternoon rather than fed to the horses. He read her monthly weight tracking on each animal.
He looked up. He asked whether he could see the feed prep area. Mari took him to the shop. She showed him the rebuilt washer, still in operation, still running on the modified chute she had bent from Raymond's leftover sheet steel seven years earlier.
She showed him the sink where she rinsed the roots before bagging. She showed him the bag storage. She showed him the shelf where she kept the veterinary reference materials, including the county extension office's soil survey and the University of Wisconsin's bulletin on winter feeding of horses, both of which she had annotated in her own hand. Thaddius closed the clipboard.
He looked at Mari across the shop floor with an expression that had rearranged itself over the course of the previous 90 minutes from professional caution into something quieter and more attentive. He asked whether she had a few minutes for a conversation that was not part of the official inspection. She did. He was going to write a clean report.
There was no basis for the complaint. His office would send her a formal letter to that effect within 30 days. His tone shifted closer now, less procedural. But this complaint is the third one I have personally handled in the past four years, involving small horse operations run by women in this region.
The first two were also groundless. Someone is filing these complaints for reasons that have nothing to do with animal welfare. I do not have the authority to investigate the source of an anonymous complaint, but I will tell you, Mrs. Thorson that if you were to file a written statement with our office describing any pattern of harassment you have observed from a specific individual or business that statement would become part of the file.
Any subsequent complaint from a related source would be handled with that context in mind. Mari watched him for a long moment. She was aware standing in her father's shop of the weight of the notebook in her coat pocket and of the entries that had accumulated in it over seven years. Merl Blackwood, sport coat, October 1971.
Merl Blackwood, Co-op, October 1971. Merl Blackwood, Sinclair Station, December 1971. Merl Blackwood, Phone Tree to Own Alaska and West Salem, October 1971. And the entries from later.