“Horses make a landscape look beautiful.” – Alice Walker
My dad kept some Arabian horses for a time, when I was young. Time come when there only two left. We did not ride like we thought we would, and neither did my father. My grandfather had been born to set a horse, and had cowboyed on the McIntyre ranch, the biggest ranch in the world by acreage at the time, no mind what some half-wit Texan might tell you. Too many of those Texans are all hat and no cattle, as they say there, and they run on about things they don’t know shit about. But we had become men that were not horsemen, if not as bad as some Texans.
The two horses, brother and sister, lived on eight acres of pasture and hay that my dad drove in and I stacked, proud to be of the strength and frame to do it, and water at first hauled from a transfer station south of town in a big water tank in the back of a Ford ¾-ton to their trough and then eventually from a hose when the irrigation district built a line that run under my dad’s property. In winters we had a water heater in the trough but on the coldest days we’d still have to cut through a top layer of ice so that they could drink.
One day my dad looked out and saw what he thought was a dog chasing the filly. He walked out, waving his hands and yelling, like to drive the dog off, but when he got close, he saw it wasn’t a dog at all. It was a foal. The female horse had foaled. The poor little foal, sorrel-coated and wheat-maned with unsteady sticks for legs, was the result of an incestuous relationship between the two horses in the field, the brother and sister. He was desperate to nurse but she wasn’t having any of it. She walked away from him every time and he could not latch.
My dad, who felt he’d been made a fool by the horses, was not happy. He’d thought the male too young to sire, but later admitted he didn’t know why he thought that.
My mother, to this day, thinks the horses should have known better than to do what they did.
We had but a three-sided shelter for the horses, enough for them living in the pasture, but it was deemed necessary to stall the foal in with its recalcitrant mother in the hopes that she’d nurse him. A friend of my dad’s had a really good barn, and he said to bring ‘em on over, so we did, and put them in a stall together. They called the veterinarian, a strong-handed cowboy of a man named Lund who’d roped and rodeoed and who knew all there was to know about horses, cows, bison – even musk-ox – anything with hooves, really, and the fencing needed for all of those animals, and he came out.
He’d brought something of a paste he called Relaquin and tried to get the mare to take it using a large syringe to inject it into her mouth. He said it was a sedative, and might calm her down enough to let the foal nurse. She wouldn’t have it from him at all and he was unsuccessful in every attempt.
I tell you what, he said, you keep trying. I have to go. I have someone bringing in a dog who’s gone and got himself a face full of porcupine quills. It’ll take a few hours. I have to sedate the dog, cut the quills in half, then plier ‘em on out. But you keep on trying. You can mix the Relaquin paste with molasses and see if she’ll take it from your hand. It should help. If it don’t, you’re going to need a nurse mare or you’re going to need to hand-raise that foal. You call me tomorrow morning if that’s the case, I’ll bring out some formula and get you started.
My dad’s friend’s wife come on down an hour or so later and mixed the paste in with molasses in the palm of her hand, a great brown gob of it, and eased on up to the mare to try to get her to take it and sure enough, she did. A second handful two hours later and the mare let the foal nurse and it all turned out alright. She nursed him up fine after that, every day, without the paste or the molasses. Dad called up Doc Lund in the morning and told him of it and Doc said he was glad to hear it, and to call him anytime if he was needed. He was a good veterinarian, a jeans-and-boots kind of man, and his love of animals was rooted in respect. Years later when they buried him, they’d had the coffin made from wood taken from an old granary. He’d said he didn’t want to be buried in anything manufactured in some factory. By that time those old wooden granaries – the kind they used to paint red – they were getting hard to find, but they did find enough to bury him as he wished. I do not know who built the coffin from that wood, but I do know that it was done.
Dad had the male, the brother and the sire, gelded before he brought the mare and foal back. My mother thought this appropriate.
The sorrel, the foal, my dad sold a couple of years later to a man named Alan who wanted an Arab and didn’t fuss over the circumstances of the conception like my mom did. The price was right and his daughter wanted a horse and it was a horse. It wasn’t a year past that before that same sorrel was dead, killed by a lightning strike from one of the hundred storms that pass along the prairie in the short, hot summers we have here, either on the north side of the river or the south, never crossing the running water, storms of indigo skies and white hailstones but never much for rain and all of the horses in the fields running away quickly from west to east chasing the tomorrow from the today.
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(Photo: Aurélio Vinícius/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
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