Homecoming

I have been having trouble lately, but don't tell anyone, especially the wolves. The whole world has been kind of slanted, and sometimes I slant with it, and sometimes I have to scramble for it to straighten out. Mother has been giving me lots of cookies and extra attention, and has had the vet come out to see me several times, and given me shots. But nothing fixes this.

It is very depressing. I would look to Mother for help, and all she had to offer was cookies.

Then, Mother lead me out to the back field, and Aunt Nancy came along with us. It seemed a strange place for an exam, but sometimes in the past Mother had me trot in hand for the doctor... with so much grass out here, maybe she needed me to demonstrate my eating!

She gave me a shot, which I thought was like normal sedation (which, I must be honest, I really like), but I found myself feeling really woozy instead, like the times when I had surgery.

The next thing I knew, I was dreaming. I don't remember dreaming with my other surgeries, but it must have been a dream because I was drifting above Mother and Aunt Nancy and a very handsome grey horse which I realized looked an awful lot like me. Mother was leaning over the grey horse and I saw she was crying as she ran her hands over his body, and gentle touches around his face.

When I woke up I found myself in a large and beautiful field that stretched as far as I could see, filled with many horses. There was a lovely flowing stream so clear you could see the pebbled bottom. I looked at all the horses around me in the field; some were frolicking, some grazing, some rolling in the grass, while a few dozed quietly in the shade of a large oak tree. To my surprise, I knew many of these horses, and I saw my own father, and other horses I had known but hadn't seen in a very long time, and some I don't remember having met but who I seemed to simply know, if you know what I mean.

Every horse was at their most beautiful. Perfectly muscled, perfect feet, nobody seemed lame or even old. I noticed that my leg, which had been bothering me so, was as perfect as if I was a young horse. I couldn't help but run, leap, and buck, reveling in my strength again! Whatever Aunt Nancy had done to fix my bad joint, she had done a great job. And nothing about the world was crooked. Everything was straight. I took off galloping and galloping and galloping.

I saw that Spirit Horse was galloping along with me, and I stopped glorying in my ability to just run and run, and started looking around... and I remembered then: MOTHER. Spirit Horse, after all, was who had told me to choose Mother... where was she?

I slowed and started looking around me. Really looking. I noticed something odd about some of my companions in the field. While all were in their prime, fit and strong and seemingly perfect, I saw some were not quite perfect. They were missing chunks of their manes. I asked Spirit Horse why.

He merely turned his great head and gazed at a pretty mare across the meadow who was one of the ones missing mane. I saw a human approach her, the mare nickering delightedly, and the human hugged her around her neck. As the human held up her hand, the mane hair clutched in it touched the horse, and the mare was once again perfect. The human swung up onto the mare's back, and they cantered over the rise and out of sight.

I asked Spirit Horse where my human was. Would Mother come for me like that? He nudged my neck, and I realized I, too was missing some mane hair. Not like when Mother chopped all of it off over a few burrs, but a small swath like the mare whose human came for her. I was filled with happiness, because that means Mother will come for me.

So, it has been some time since I have been in this field, and it is wonderful. There aren't any flies or prickly bushes or burrs or rocks that hurt hooves, just grass and fresh water and ancient shade trees and horses. I spend my days grazing and grooming with friends, galloping and loafing by turns. Everyday is a perfect sunny day, although when I think it has been perhaps too sunny, a cloud will blow across the sun, and even a gentle rain shower may pass when I would just have hoped for one. Everything is so nice, I almost don't remember any other life.

From time to time a human comes, but so far it has not been Mother. There are times though, when my mane is blowing in the breeze and I see the piece missing, and I think of Mother. I know I will see her again, since Spirit Horse promised me. So I am filled with happiness.

And after these times, when I have thought of Mother and go back to my grazing, I always find some Mrs. Pastures cookies, nestled in the grass.

Cookies... Yumm!!!

Love: Some Definitions

Love is:

Letting Mother kiss me on the schnozzle even after she has just given me dewormer.

Accepting treats even though Mother has just given me dewormer (BLECH!!).

Never letting Mother know that sticking noxious items in my mouth troubles me. I maintain my placid demeanor. She means well.

Following all directions on the lunge line perfectly even though it is about 40 degrees colder than it was 3 days ago and the wind is up and I feel HIIIIIIIGH. I didn't even pull.

Not sighing (overly loudly) when she finishes up my grooming by deciding to comb through my mane instead of putting me in the feeding stall. Comb? More like tug tug tug. She means well.

Leaving my hay because she was petting me and walked away. Pet me longer, please Mother? And this was good orchard with alfalfa. 

Fortunately, Mother paused and pet me for several more minutes. So pleasant on this autumn-y night. We just stood there in the darkness, petter and pettee.

Put like that, it doesn't sound right at all...

But it is perfect. It is Love.

Loss

 Jeanie, age 32, last year in April 2010

My favored Red Mare, Jeanie, passed away today.

She was bred by a good cow-horse family, bought by the aunts before she was yet two years old, and lived with them over 31 years. Her breeders' son was her farrier for the first twenty plus years of her life. When they decided to breed her, she had two lovely foals by his stallion.

She carried her young owner in the show ring, on the trail, and through life. She willingly shouldered her owner's joys, tears, fears through high school, college, first dates, first jobs. 

She carried many small children with grace and exceptional care. 

She helped a friend with disabilities know the comfort and joy that it is to be found astride a good horse.

Grazing in the garden paddock, April 2010

 She had a choke that was unable to resolve. It was the first and only choke she had. There was no food in the obstruction; the doctors that treated her think it was a tumor, or a tumor combined with a dislodged and swallowed tooth. She was never suffering, just a bit discomforted, but the answer when the obstruction could not be cleared was obvious, although not easy.

At 33, she still had a shine to her coat, mischief in her eye, and sprightliness in her trot and even an occasional canter.

She has known nothing but love. 

 What a good mare. 

 What a good life.

Goodbye, friend.

Evolution: Part 1

I am born, and I am wild. No human can touch me. They can't even come close.

Years pass and I grow in height and length and breadth and strength. I am wild and no human can touch me.

There are times we are driven through catch pens. My body is surrendered but not my will. The humans touch me, and I shudder. I grow wilder so the humans can't touch me.

They drive us in for branding, but I am wily and clever and do not get captured. I am unbranded, I am wild, and no human will touch me.

At times, in passing as they feed hay, one gets a hand on me before I skitter away. I should be more watchful, it is dangerous to be lax. I must stay wild, why do the humans touch me?

One day I see a human that is different. What exactly is different, I can not decide. But all the horses walk up to her, and she pets them. Why does she want to? Why do they let her?

I walk nearer, and slide up alongside in my time. She pets and she scratches me, pleasant yet... why?  Do I stay wild, or do I let the humans touch me?

She strokes and she scratches and shows all is fine. She is kind and it's not like I can't stay wild.

Time passes, and I only miss her touch when I see her again. Wild is lonely at times.

A literary sort of day

Mother wanted me to put up one of her favorite poems on here. She gave me some cookies, so I said OK.

It is a circle of life sort of poem, if there are any sensitive sorts out there.

Names of Horses

DONALD HALL

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding 
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul 
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, 
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields, 
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine 
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres, 
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack, 
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn, 
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning. 

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load 
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns. 
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the window sill 
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave, 
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground - old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

Bif back in:  I have my own opinion of this poem. I was raised on a large ranch with hundreds of other horses. I have seen horses shot, and I have seen the vet make them sleep. I have seen them sicken and then die, with no one to care for them. I think these horses worked hard and the humans worked hard, and both cared for the other, and it is all we could ask.

I don't have to work at all, but I am special. 

Or Mother's special. I hear they have a special automobile for that. Maybe she'll get one. Then she can fill it with cookies!!

Welcome to my world

I am Boyfriend. This is my chance to tell how I came to be, and how I am still here.

Boyfriend is what Mother calls me, but most people find that too embarrassing, so you can call me Bif. When I say Mother, I mean my human, but that is how she refers to herself, "Mother", so I go along with it. No one is brave enough to point out to Mother the inappropriateness of naming a horse Boyfriend and then that that same horse should view her as mother. That is at least two kinds of wrong. Maybe three. Math isn't my strong suit. Rest assured though, our relationship is 100% agape.*

I have, over the two years of our lives together, taken to using her technological devices. In the beginning, I didn't understand that she could use that tiny black flippy plastic box to communicate to other humans. Horses don't need those. We talk with our minds. Why complicate things? I knew she wasn't speaking to me (well, it took a few funny incidents, I admit), but I didn't understand that some other human far away in the world was physically hearing her, and that is why Mother was talking. Since then, I call people, they call me, I send and receive emails. She mutters about the cost of Wi-Fi down at the barn and how I must keep the keyboard under my mats and that is why I sometimes paw them up. Silly human, I don't need a keyboard. I mean, really, that is just silly. My hooves are too big for the keys and my tongue isn't nearly as limber as that. No, I use the power of my mind to express my wishes, and they are put into print. And I am trying to reach Jay's hay under the wall.

Hey, it's no weirder than radio waves. Besides, the willing suspension of disbelief is crucial to a well rounded sense of humor.

Why, you may ask, am I special? It is not my grasp of technology... lots of horses write blogs. I am special because... well, in part because I am holey. Or at least in some ways that's how my specialness is revealed to people.

Every horse has a hole in it. My holes just happen to be physical. Literally. I had a hole in my head when I first met Mother. And after that was all over, she found out about the hole in my leg, stifle to be precise. And after she fixed that, well, let's just say you can't fix that. They took out the hole (sounds kind of paradoxical, doesn't it?), but I'll get more holes. I am very holey.

But if you ask Mother, she'll say I am special because I chose her. I had the chance, lots of chances actually, to pick a human before, but none were quite right. And it is foolish to wait around for the right one, in some respects, because if you take too long you can be sent away from the choosing fields. I was already six, long after most of my brothers and cousins of my birth year had picked their humans (or just been picked by the humans, which is rather brave and a touch foolhardy on those humans' parts). The story of my choosing my human will wait. I must tell you the secret, though, that is me. And while Aunt Nancy says I am the luckiest unlucky horse in the world, I know it isn't luck...

I am special because I am Horse. Spirit horse told me to pick the human I did, because I could learn to be with humans and be able to still be Horse. And despite my holeyness, I am still here. I am all that is strength and beauty and cooperation. And sometimes fear. I am impatient, peaceful, master, prey. I am Horse.

They say horses are noble. They look at my beautiful arched neck, my graceful head (I am not being vain, just stating facts), and say how lovely and noble Horse is. I have a secret for you, though. No matter how Horse we are... Really, I just want a Mrs. Pasture's horse cookie. Mother gives me a kiss on the schnozzle every night before she leaves and then gives me a cookie. She gives me "one for the road", sometimes, too. I just love those things!!!!

Yummm, cookies...
Bif



*Agape: Unconditional, self-sacrificing, thoughtful love. The highest and purest form of love, one that surpasses all other types of affection. Roughly paraphrased, thanks Wikipedia.