Mahogany looks so serene and angelic when she’s asleep.
It’s an illusion. She’s dreaming up new ways to keep our relationship exciting and spontaneous.
Always making sure I never get bored, that’s my girl! ;^)
Horses
Long Day
My old mare Stormy will turn 21 years old in March. In April we will have been together for twenty years. We were bold adventurers and fearless explorers in our younger days, but she’s grown past the age where tearing up and down mountainsides or facing down calves in a cutting pen holds any appeal for her. I’m training a young filly for new adventures, and Stormy has become my daughter’s horse. The quiet life of a child’s trail mount suits her just fine these days.
She is precious to me beyond words, an indelible part of my internal landscape.
This morning as I was getting ready to drive the kids to the bus stop, I saw Stormy lying down in the corral. She loves to take naps on sunny afternoons. Not on cold mornings, on frozen mud. And there was something about the stiff-legged way she lay there that made my heart sink into my stomach.
I went out to her and she got up, but the second I walked away from her she lay back down and started to roll. Classic symptom of colic. Her silvery-white coat was heavily caked with mud and sweat, and by the looks of the ground in the corral she’d been rolling around for some time.
I had to get the kids to the bus, but I ran in, woke up Steve, and told him what Stormy was doing. He came out, got her up again, put a halter on her and started walking her around the pasture. She kept trying to lay down and roll; it was hard to keep her on her feet and moving.
When I got back, I took over walking her while Steve called the local vet. For once old Zaddick didn’t fuss and complain about making a ranch call; he said he’s been getting an unusually large number of colics lately and most of them haven’t ended well. He said he’d be right over, and he was.
He looked rather grim as he checked her out. Her heart rate was alarmingly high, her gums were pale, she was in excruciating pain, and there was deathly silence where the rumblings and gurglings of a healthy gut should be. He shook his head and said it didn’t look good and we shouldn’t get our hopes up for a happy ending. I could barely wrap my mind around the words.
He gave her a sedative and some painkiller, and then gave her the standard mineral oil treatment. If you’ve never seen this procedure, basically it involves running a plastic hose into the horse’s nostril, down her throat and into her stomach. Then a mixture of mineral oil and warm water is pumped in through the tube. If the colic is caused by a simple impaction, this usually gets things moving again. If it’s caused by an intestinal stone or a displacement (‘twisted gut’), then the only answer is surgery, and for a horse Stormy’s age the kindest thing is to just put them down.
Zaddick said the sedative should wear off in twenty minutes or so, and then she could be walked around some more. The painkillers would last longer, a couple hours maybe depending on the situation. By then she should have either had a decent poop or two and feel better, or she would go back to lying down and rolling, in which case we should call him back to give her a humane death.
That was about six hours ago. She’s obviously feeling much better; she hasn’t laid down or rolled since the meds wore off. She has drunk a lot of water, which is good, and she has nibbled halfheartedly at the bran mashes I made for her. She wants to go back in with the other horses. Best of all, when I press my ear to her belly I can hear things gurgling around in there. But…we’re still waiting for that one good poop that will tell us all is well. Until that happens there’s still the possibility of serious problems and a bad ending.
I think she’s going to be okay.
I hope she’s going to be okay.
This has been a very long day.
[Addendum: Right after I posted this, I went out and got her walking around again. And right after that, she made a perfectly lovely poop. HOORAY!!!]
Categories: Death, Family, Horses, Life
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Wild-Eyed Rebel
The Hamilton Museum And Ranch Foundation, a local institution dedicated to documenting Anza’s rich history of cattle ranches and native Cahuilla culture, is always looking for new and creative ways to raise funds. Right now they need a good-sized chunk of change to do some major repairs/renovations on one of their main barn structures there at the museum site. They asked board members for suggestions, and Steve brought up the idea of putting on a big trail ride through the reservation, with dinner and music and the whole shebang. The plan was approved, scheduled for May, and Steve’s been hammering out the details ever since.
One of the things that needs to be done is to actually clear a trail through scenic parts of the reservation near the museum. We keep trying to do this, but the weather keeps forcing us to reschedule. It’s no fun blazing trails in the rain and snow and howling wind. We’d planned to try today, but it looked like we were going to get rained out yet again.
And then this morning dawned gloriously sunny and mild. The trailblazing expedition was on! Steve and I scraped the mud off of our wooly horses and loaded them into the trailer. The third member of our party, a fellow named Tom, met us there at the museum.
Mahogany was very keyed-up right from the start. She didn’t want to be caught, didn’t want to be groomed, didn’t want to be handled. I don’t know if it was the weather or if she’s in season or what. At least she loaded up in the trailer without a fuss.
When we got to the museum I saddled and bridled her while she danced around impatiently like an unbroken colt. Finally, we all headed out. She jigged and shied and generally made a nuisance of herself the whole time. The ground was muddy and soft, and she didn’t like the way her hooves sank deep with every step. Now and then she’d try to bolt, and I’d pull her head around and make her do tiny circles until she was ready to walk again.
Tom, who used to make a living training horses, commented that I was being too easy on her. “Next time she does that, don’t just pull her head around,” he advised. “When you pull that left rein, dig your left spur into her, hard! Let her know you mean business. She’s taking advantage of your good nature.”
Mahogany is very sensitive to spur pressure; I’ve never used them on her with any great force. But Tom is a veteran trainer, and if he thought Mahogany was taking advantage of my unwillingness to treat her roughly, then maybe a bit of tough love was in order. The next time she bolted I pulled her head around to the left and slammed my left spur into her ribs.
She pretty much levitated to the right, and with her head pulled around to the left she was unable to regain her balance or her footing when she landed back on the soft, wet sand. Down she came, with me underneath her.
She lurched to her feet, looking around wildly. Steve started to go after her, but she ducked away. “Don’t chase her,” I gulped from where I was taking inventory of my damage. “Let her calm down.”
Turns out my advice was worth about as much as Tom’s. Mahogany gathered her wits, then up went her head and her tail and off she went, in the direction of where the horse trailer was parked. Everyone groaned.
To my own surprise, I had taken no damage at all. My shoulder and head had hit the ground pretty hard, and Mahogany had pinned my leg, but the soft sand was very forgiving and nothing was broken or even bruised. We all headed back to the trailer, me and Steve riding double on Marshall, all of us talking about how unusual it is for a horse to leave other horses behind and take off alone in unfamiliar territory. It’s downright unhorselike.
And then, the final blow: Mahogany galloped right past the trailer and kept on going in the direction of home! This was just plain nuts. She was a good seven or eight miles from home, with several trafficky paved roads between her and her destination. Now the situation wasn’t just inconvenient, it was scary. Anything could happen — she could hit by a car, or damage her hooves running full-speed barefoot down a paved road, or even just put her head down to graze and get a leg tangled in her reins. All sorts or scenarios ending in my beautiful filly being killed or permanently crippled were playing through my head as we finally reached the trailer ourselves.
Tom had ridden to the museum, so he stayed on his horse and followed Mahogany’s tracks. Steve and I loaded Marshall into the trailer and drove back to the road in an attempt to cut her off before she hit asphalt. Mind you, she was going in a straight line across country, and we had to go the long way around in the truck, but we should have had a pretty good chance of catching her.
Tom followed her tracks until they came to a barbed-wire fence. She had leaped over it. No sane rider would ask his horse to jump barbed wire, so Tom turned aside and found a different way to go around.
When Steve and I got to where she should be coming out on the road, there she was. She had beaten us there by some time, but fortunately a nice couple had managed to catch her as she tore through their yard, and they’d held her there waiting for someone to show up and claim her. She was drenched, not a dry hair on her, and spectacularly wound up, but completely unscathed. We managed to get her bridle off, her halter on, and her into the trailer, and then went in search of Tom.
Needless to say, the trailblazing expedition was rescheduled for next weekend — weather permitting.
Never a dull moment around here. Ah, the joys of country life.
Categories: Horses, Life, trail rides
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The Hideout
Many years ago, back in my single days, I spent four years working in a machine shop. The pay was decent, but for an outdoorsy sort like me it was a horrible way to make a living. I came home every afternoon soaked with toxic solvents, my ears ringing from ten hours of close-range exposure to deafening noise levels, my back and arms and eyes aching from the endless repetitive motion of feeding stock into the machines at one end and making sure the tiny parts that came out the other end were all within tolerances so tight they had to be checked constantly with a micrometer. As often as not I also came home angry, for reasons that are probably common to many workplaces and way too tiresome to go into on this blog.
Every weekend I cleared my head and unknotted my muscles and my spirit by riding my horse (it was Stormy then, in her exuberant youth) out to the PC Trail and then dismounting and hiking along it for several hours.
(Sidenote for non-Westerners — the PC Trail has nothing to do with Political Correctness or Personal Computers; it’s actually the Pacific Crest Trail, and it runs all the way from Mexico to Canada along the coastal mountain ridges of California, Oregon and Washington. It runs right through Anza, and it’s a wonderfully quiet place to ride or hike.)
At one point my little section of the trail crosses a small creek. Back in 1993 we had some spectacular floods, and that little creek turned into a raging river that carved a deep ravine with sheer cliffsides from what used to be a shallow creekbed. The first time I saw that ravine after the flood, it was littered with cottonwood trees that had been uprooted and washed downstream by the force of the water. Two determined trees had held their ground, and beneath their spreading branches the newly-hewn ravine seemed to me a place of wild beauty and quiet shelter. I felt drawn to it.
It wasn’t easy to get a horse down into the part of the ravine that had captured my interest. It involved sliding down the least steep part of the wall, and hoping Stormy didn’t break her legs on all the loose rocks on the way down. Once at the bottom, though, it was flat and grassy and Stormy could graze beside the little creek while I relaxed in the hammock I’d soon packed in. One of the surviving trees was so old and massive that I could actually tie one end of my hammock to one of its branches and the other end to another branch of the same tree, and hang comfortably up there in its shady heights. I kept a book there too, hidden away in a tiny little cave in one of the ravine’s cliffsides. I whiled away many a Saturday afternoon down there, reading my book and enjoying the breezy shelter of my cottonwood tree. I thought of it as my “hideout,” my once-a-week refuge from the soul-withering stresses of what used to be my life.
And then I met Steve and eventually stopped working at the machine shop and got married and had kids and years and years went by without a visit to my old hideout. Before yesterday I hadn’t been down there once since Elizabeth was born. But yesterday the weather was gorgeous and a family ride sounded like just the thing, and for once we were all old enough and well-mounted enough to go all the way down to that ravine. So we packed a lunch and saddled up!
The trail was a bit rougher than I remembered it, but all the horses did great. Mahogany is still very green, so I was really pleased with how well she handled herself. I was able to get some great pics from her back.
When we reached my “hideout,” all the horses slid down into the ravine with no fuss. Stormy remembered the place well — I just pulled off her saddle and bridle and she got busy grazing. Mahogany and Beau were tied to trees, and Steve held Marshall to let him graze.
The dogs had a blast splashing around in the creek, Luke and Elizabeth climbed all over the rocks and trees, and I soaked up some sunshine.
It was great to be back in the old hideout, and even better to be sharing it with loved ones this time instead of trying to escape reality there. I’m glad we went.
When it was time to head back we rode up to where the trail crosses the creek. The weeds were as tall as a horse’s back there, thanks to all the rain this winter.
The only horse that made a fuss about crossing the water was Mahogany. We eventually got her through it, but it took a while.
All in all it was a great day though. Mahogany gained a ton of trail experience, and the kids can’t wait to go back. I think we’ll be doing more of that from now on.
Categories: Family, Horses, kids, Life, trail rides
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New Horse For Luke
My seven-year-old son Luke is the only member of the family who has never embraced the equestrian lifestyle. This is partly because he has a natural inclination toward gadgets and machinery rather than horses, and partly because his ponies (we’ve tried several for him) tend to quickly pick up on his unassertive “passenger” riding style, and take full advantage of it. After being run off with a few too many times he’d gotten to the point where he didn’t want anything to do with riding at all.
Well, this is a cattle ranch: everyone has to be useful here. And neither Steve nor I was willing to accept that Luke would never experience the fun of helping to bring in the herd, or sorting cows and calves in a branding pen.
So about a week and a half ago Steve came home and announced that he’d found the perfect horse for Luke. “He’s just a loaner, but he’ll help Luke build his confidence up. He’s push-button safe.”
“A horse?” I asked. “Not a pony?”
Steve pointed out that a good horse is better than a bad pony.
I thought about that, and then said if Luke was game I was. So a few days later we all went to check out this paragon of obedience.
The instant we laid eyes on him, Luke and I started having second thoughts. This was a very *big* horse — bigger than any of the ones in our own string at home.
“He’s too big,” Luke declared, backpedaling a bit.
I tended to agree. I mean, it’s one thing to take a tumble off a 12-hand pony. A fall off this monster could break bones!
“Give him a try,” Steve urged. So we saddled up Gigantor (actually his name’s Beau), and Luke rode him around the yard, shaking like a leaf and whimpering the whole time. Luke I mean; Beau was fine. Maybe a little on the sluggish side, but that’s not such a bad thing for a kid who’s been soured by too many bolting ponies.
“He’s too big,” Luke repeated after the test drive.
“It’s totally up to you,” I told him. “We can take Beau home for you to ride, or you can go on riding Trinket.” Trinket is his current pony, a cute little thing with a scarily unpredictable streak.
He thought about it for a long moment, apparently weighing Beau’s lumbering compliance against Trinket’s perky stubbornness, and then mumbled, “I’ll take Beau.”
So we brought Beau home, gave him a few days to settle in, and then the four of us went on a family trail ride. Luke started out terrified, trembling, protesting loudly to all and sundry that he’d never wanted to learn to ride in the first place and lamenting about the unfairness of life in general. But by the end of the ride Beau’s laid-back obedience had lulled him out of his fear, and he even seemed to have gotten used to the size of his new mount. Steve and I agreed that we should do family rides every Sunday for as long as the nice weather holds out, to work on Luke’s riding.
Yesterday, to my amazement, Luke prompted us to start getting ready for our weekly ride. “Come on,” he pressed, “I thought we were going to ride on Sundays!”
Wow.
Since Luke was feeling more comfortable, and the weather was gorgeous, we went for a much longer ride this time. Beau and Luke (believe it or not, the Dukes of Hazard joke never occurred to me until I started writing this post) got along beautifully, and Luke even voluntarily trotted up at the front of the group for a while! Woohoo!
What a difference the right mount makes! We’re hoping this will be a turning point in Luke’s feelings about riding.
And many thanks to Ted and Bentley for the kind loan of their horse. :^)
We’ll have that boy ridin’ herd before he knows it!
Categories: Family, Horses, Life, Ranching
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An Invincible Summer 