~ Lessons in horse sense ~

I share this today because Kate loves horses as much as I do.
Peace ~

I have spent three days trying to accomplish what normally takes less than two hours. Ordinarily, I have a thought in my head, I have an idea, a phrase or a sentence, I sit down with it, hand it over to my Muse and, before a hundred and twenty minutes have passed, something approaching a column has been written. That’s how it works ordinarily. This week, as though to illustrate to me that I am not on the road to mastering the principles of my craft (moreover, that I may have wandered completely off the map), all of my sitting down and handing over has come to nothing. I have spent hour after tedious hour playing with words, coaxing them, manhandling them, trying to turn them into something resembling a cohesive expression of thought. They have fought me every step of the way. I have no less than five arrested attempts to prove it.

It’s curious how every day, from the very moment we are born, we are presented with opportunities to learn lessons and life skills. In today’s fruitless battle with words, I had forgotten one of my greatest lessons. In fact, this one has been absent from my mind for a long time...perhaps this literary frustration was just the event needed to remind me of what I knew as a child.

When I was nine and ten years old, my horse Pebbles (no, I didn’t choose that name but because she had learned to answer to it, I kept it...rather, she kept it) and I spent every possible waking moment together. To my everlasting delight (also, I expect, to shut me up), my father had traded our VW van to a local farmer for a miserable, cranky, neglected old nag, prone to biting, kicking and balking. Somehow, the total adoration of the child that was me loved her back to kindness.

In 1973, a VW van could buy a horse, but not the saddle that went with it, so I rode bareback. I did have a bridle (purchased from the Co-op in the next town with my bottle-picking money), but tended not to use it once Pebbles had become more docile—I had once slipped the bridle over my own head and taken the bit in my own mouth and decided that, because it was disagreeable to me, it must be disagreeable for my horse as well. I would clip a lead (or sometimes just tie a bit of twine) to her halter, haul myself up on her sun-hot back and be gone. “Stay where I can see you,” my mother would say and, because we lived on the prairie, I could wander miles from home and still be seen.

Because I trusted her, the day Pebbles stopped short in the empty field behind our house, and refused to budge, I knew something was truly wrong. What I discovered was a coil of barbed wire hidden in the long prairie grass. The wire had curled up and around her legs, was pressing against her belly and was tangled in her tail. Pebbles and I were trapped in a barbed wire snare. I called for help, but who is there to hear in the middle of an August afternoon in a town of only 82 souls? Everyone with any sense was over at Wood’s Garage sipping Cokes in the shade (that would be the kids old enough to drive—all three of them) or down at Eldon’s Meat Market smoking pipes and drinking coffee (that would be the men) or over at Helen’s General Store smoking cigarettes and drinking tea (that would be the women) The kids (including the teenagers, there were only 14 of us in town—and six of them were from the same family!) were headed home for snacks of Freshie and Rice Krispie squares, just like I had been. With no aid forthcoming, the only thing for me to do was to slide off Pebbles’ back into the barbed wire nest, bare legs, yellow thongs and all, and go for help. So I did, first explaining to Pebbles how important it was that she remain perfectly still so as to avoid slicing open her pretty legs. She blinked her long, black lashes as though in understanding.

There were no adults about our house—as I say, they were at Eldon’s or Helen’s...or maybe even Wood’s – so I found the biggest pair of wire cutters on the property and headed back to extricate my entangled horse who, I discovered, had not moved so much as a hair. It had not occurred to me to change from shorts to jeans, nor had it occurred to me to trade my thongs for runners, so before five minutes were up, I was covered in scratches, cuts and pokes. As I struggled with the wire, Pebbles kept careful watch. When at last I freed her left front leg, she lifted it gingerly and stood, balanced on three legs, until I had cleared a safe space for her to set it down again. We worked like this for over an hour, ten year old me bleeding from dozens of minor wounds, fourteen year old Pebbles watching intently, helping as best she could and occasionally licking a particularly sore cut on my leg. By the time I had cleared away the last of the wire and freed my horse, my hands were blistered and cut, my back was sunburned where my shirt and shorts had not met, and I was bleeding from my shoulders to my fingertips and from my thighs to my toes. I couldn’t heave myself onto her back, so Pebbles and I walked home through the long grass, avoiding the thistles and gopher holes. The whole interminable way, the horse that had once nipped at everyone just for the sheer pleasure of it, rested her head on my shoulder and licked my arm. I carried pail after pail of cool water out to her for drinking and pail after pail of Dettol water out for washing her legs. I couldn’t actually see any cuts, but I figured it was the right thing to do. Besides, she had earned a wash and a rubdown.

When the adults came home, it was my turn to be washed with Dettol water. My mother bandaged the deepest gouges on my legs and wrapped my hands in gauze before I walked (wearing jeans and runners) back through the field with my father to gather up all of the barbed wire for safe and proper disposal.

I don’t know what happened to Pebbles. We moved the following winter and she was sold for $35 to a farm family with three children. I hope they were good to her. I hope they loved her as much as I did. As much as I still do. I hope she loved them in return. My father told me he had looked for her once, many years ago, when I was again keeping horses and would have had a place for her, but she was gone.

Over the past three days, I have tried too hard to write what I had to say. I didn’t stop to realise that, sometimes what I have to say and what needs to be said are not the same thing. I had forgotten the lessons I learned that scorching, summer afternoon on the prairie—lessons of trust and tenacity, lessons of patience, lessons of gratitude and of love.

The last line of one of the books I loved best when I ran barefoot on the prairie seems particularly appropriate today...even if I must misquote by changing the horse’s gender. “If there’s a hoss heaven, please God, rest her soul.”

Yeah.

Amen to that.