CANTON – A backcountry horse ride on a warm autumn afternoon suddenly turned bloody and scary for three riders Wednesday when one of them was kicked in the leg by a horse two miles into the woods on Jewett Hill at Forest Pond.

Assistant fire Chief Mark Blanchette said Sherry McLafferty of Turner, who is in her 40s, suffered a fractured lower left leg and a gaping wound, and had to be carried about a mile on a litter by Canton firefighters to their waiting all-terrain vehicle.

She was driven out of the woods to Meadow View Road, and loaded into a Med-Care Ambulance, which took her to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.

A nursing supervisor contacted Wednesday night said she could neither confirm nor deny that McLafferty was a patient.

Blanchette said the accident happened at Forest Pond sometime before 2 p.m. That’s when they were sent to help Med-Care medic Dave Florin and crewman Jason Chartier with the rescue after a cell phone call for help.

Michael Gammon of North Livermore said all three experienced horseriders left from Gammon’s son’s home in North Livermore at 11:30 a.m. riding on the old Hathaway Hill Road to view fall foliage. They were leaving the east shore of Forest Pond going uphill when the accident happened at about 2 p.m. Donna Briggs of Jay was walking her horse when it kicked a shoed leg back, striking the shin of Sherry McLafferty, who was astride her horse.

McLafferty rode another 50 yards, then stopped.

After stopping the bleeding and wrapping the wound, stabilizing McLafferty, and calling for help on a cell phone, Gammon rode off to meet rescuers and lead them in while Briggs stayed with McLafferty and kept her warm.

McLafferty’s husband, Clay, and George Shaw co-own K & K Excavation Inc. of Turner; Briggs and her husband, Daniel, co-own Youly’s Family Restaurant, also in Turner. A secretary at K & K confirmed by phone on Wednesday that the two women were out riding when the accident happened.

“One of my firefighters said the horses were real skittish, so something must have been in the area. It might have been a moose or a bear,” Blanchette said, explaining why the horse reacted like it did, by kicking out.

To lessen the distance for rescuers, McLafferty bravely tried to ride her horse out.

The riders then stopped to await rescue.

“She had a big open wound where you could see the bone, but it had not popped up through the skin. Michael stopped the bleeding by applying pressure to it and wrapped it up. He did a damn good job. He had the bleeding under control when we got there. She was all white and screaming and sick, because of the pain,” Blanchette said.

“Thank God she had somebody with her,” fire Lt. Jim Dyment said.

Oxford County Sheriff’s Sgt. Timothy Holland guided rescuers in to the ATV trail, the start of which was just over 2 miles in on Meadow View Road off Route 140.

Med-Care Director Dean Milligan also helped, relaying by radio orders for pain control medicine from the CMMC emergency room.

It was the first equestrian rescue for Canton firefighters and the first time they used their Gator, a John Deere ATV six-wheeler. Fire Chief Wayne Dube bought it for $6,000 using federal grant money after the flood of 2003, Blanchette said.

“We carried her three-quarters of a mile by hand down a rocky ATV trail, because it was too rough to strap her to the Gator,” Blanchette said.

Terrain also caused problems once they loaded the litter bearing McLafferty onto the back of the ATV. Blanchette, Florin and Chartier held the litter on the ATV while Blanchette’s daughter, Briann Blanchette, also a Canton firefighter, drove it.

“It was kind of hairy in a couple of spots, because we were heavy in the back. The front end lifted off the ground a couple of times, and there were a couple of moments where I thought we were going over backward. But we got out OK, so it was worth buying, I guess,” Mark Blanchette said.