Month: July 2021

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Seven things I know about horses

Range

After we moved to the woods, we unpacked musty dreams from the bottoms of trunks. 

Perspective

When I met him, my first horse Jack lived at someone else’s place.  To the owner, sipping rare tequila on his gazebo, it was the set of Dallas; to me, poking around in my earliest horse capers, it was the OK Corral; to Jack, at the bottom of the herd hierarchy in the dusty yard, it was a low-rent apartment.

Compassion

The horse can feel a fly land on him in a windstorm.  Once I put someone else’s saddle on Jack.  He was reluctant to move but I made him.  Part-way through our ride, he gave an all-over shudder like a wet dog.  When I took the saddle off, we ran fingers along his spine and he flinched, scooping his belly toward the ground.  I felt like a traitor.

Acceptance

I bought a little colt, just weaned from his mother. He immediately tried to nurse on Jack.  Jack’s eyes bugged out, but he let the baby hunt.

Leadership

Jack and I were collecting cattle from open country.  We got separated from the other riders and horses.  Jack did not believe I had control of the situation, so he called and called, sending to the 360-degree horizon for a better companion. 

Trust

Jack had a few owners before me.  One rejected him at age three.  One rode him once a year for three years.  Jack fled from his last owner so hard he broke his own halter rope and went tumbling over backwards.  Jack showed the vet the whites of his eyes.  I rode Jack for thirteen years, in arenas, on trails, through obstacle courses, to round up cattle.  Jack was very selective in his friends, but he let me scratch him between his ears.

Generosity

I fell off my young colt and broke my arm. For the first time, I had fear with the horses. Choking fear, nauseous fear. Seeing people riding horses on TV made my throat close up. I crept over to Jack in the dawn before work, crawled on his gentle old back, and rode him one-armed at a walk through the high grass. He gave me no guff and ignored my tears.

Heartbreak

Jack died. I nursed him into his old age, bringing him hot mash every night to bank against his skinny frame. But he died in blood and foam and seizure. We don’t know why, but somehow his skull was pierced in the night. The vet, not my usual beloved vet who just had to be away, said “You can shoot him or I can euthanize him.” After the injection, I cut his tail and had a bracelet made of his hair.       

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In my estivation…..

Estivation: prolonged torpor or dormancy of an animal during a hot or dry period.

I’m one of these strange creatures whose lowest point of the year is high summer. Yet it turns out I’m not that strange after all! I’m just an estivator, like my cousins the snails and hedgehogs and tortoises and lemurs!

It’s not just the hot part of a given summer day when I enter a torpor. It starts right ahead of the summer solstice and lasts into the early part of September. Even on relatively cool summer days, or during the lovely mountain summer mornings and evenings, each of my attendant parts — physical, mental, emotional — is draggy and slow and heavy. Motivation is a distant memory.

Summer is supposed to be the season of growth and expansion. Outdoor sports and long, busy, social days. I try. I drag my estivating carcass through camping trips and barbecues and outdoor festivities. But mostly I want to follow my friends’ examples:

  • When it gets above 86 degrees, hedgehogs estivate by lowering their metabolism, curling up in a ball, spines outward, and hibernating for weeks
  • Desert tortoises estivate in the relative cool of their burrows, where they can go for a year without drinking when their metabolisms are slow
  • The fat-tailed dwarf lemur is a champion among mammalian estivators — they go down for up to seven months, punctuated by “interbout arousals,” which sound like fun
  • Snails retreat into their shells to estivate when it’s too hot and dry for their taste
  • Salamanders, earthworms and lungfish add a neat twist — they cover themselves in a thick layer of mucosal slime for protection during their estivations

Every summer I long to curl up in a prickly ball and ignore everything. It could be “reverse” seasonal affective disorder, where misfits get depressed in the summer instead of the winter. Or maybe my body just has other, seasonal plans.

Wake me up on September 15.