Tag Archives: horse

Spring! (tra la!)

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Yesterday was one of those frustrating days, caused by what we laughingly call April’s ‘sweet Spring showers’.  The day dawned glorious – sun-kissed and promising.  Grass was reassuringly green, daffs were delightfully golden, birds said variations on ‘tweet!’  All was good.

Inspired, I rushed to put the chicks’ run out on the grass so they could feel the sun and eat fallen blossom (for some reason all poultry adores eating blossom, small chicks no exception).  I took Slip’s rug off so he could sunbathe and top up on Vitamin D and I set off on a long walk with Darcy and Indie.

When I was at the further end of the walk, a cold wind arose.  It whistled up some ominous clouds which rapidly blotted out the sun and I accelerated, because I knew what would happen next.  It did happen:  when I was nearly home the sky turned dark purple and it began to hail.  I shot home and moved the chicks back indoors under their infra red lamp.  They were surprised, but rapidly recovered.  Then I whizzed out to the field and put Slip’s rug back on.  He hates hail, so was galloping around the field scattering sheep and swearing under his breath.  I got his rug on as quickly as possible, but he was blaming me for everything throughout, and I can’t say he was cooperative.  Then I rushed home to dry Darcy and Indie who looked as if they had just emerged from a swimming pool.

Then the sun came out and everything steamed.  Steamiest of the lot was Slip, who was now too hot in his rug, and blaming me all over again.  So I took his rug off and, after a dither, put the chicks out again (which, I should mention here, takes 3 journeys every time – one for the run, one for the box of chicks and one for their food and water bowls).  Then I encouraged the dogs outside to dry off in the sun.

And that’s when it started to rain again.

Well, that’s Spring for you, and at least the grass is growing.  We’re off to the Sahara wild-camping next week which is guaranteed to produce a couple of weeks of gladsome warm weather back in the UK: it always does.

Where did it go?

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This weekend, the house was full of enormous men reading maps and talking about Land Rovers.  Our annual adventure to the Sahara is drawing closer, and they were here to discuss routes, and suitable dunes to camp beneath etc.  When it comes to food they like quantity above all else, so the kitchen was full of steaming pots brimming with chilli.

In among everything I tiptoed out to the computer to upload my latest blog, and discovered to my bleak horror that my website had disappeared and in its place was a bland message full of acronyms telling me to download my feeder (I think) and various other incomprehensible messages.

And I realised again the disadvantage of growing up before technology changed the world.  My childhood was spent deep in the country and mainly outdoors.  Television was there for the evenings, I loved Batman and something called Snowy White Horses, but you only watched it for a few minutes and then rushed off and did something real.  There were books in plenty:  we had a huge haunted library which I didn’t like to linger in, but would grab an armful of books ancient and modern from the long, dusty shelves and bear them away to my lair under an old dresser in a disused kitchen.  It all sounds gothic and strange from a distance, but it was entirely normal to me.

Anyway, back to the point of this blog.  If I encounter a sheep on its back, or a horse on three legs or a goose that is walking backwards (all of these have happened in the last month) I have a pretty good idea what to do.  I’d like to think I could sort it, and probably wouldn’t need help.  But confronted by a screen telling me that my website had gone walkabout and it was probably all my fault, and hearing in the distance the large men trying to find where I’d put the apple crumble, I hadn’t a clue how to proceed.

Mikey, my eldest son and IT man, has inherited the adventure gene and is far, far away.  By texting I contacted him (how I love texting, it can reach him in the furthest flung places which often have better reception than I do in these nearly-Cotswold hills) and he made his way to a computer which every town seems to have no matter how improbable.  And he got my website back.  Huzzah!

I suppose I can console myself with the knowledge that I am unrivalled at digging sickly chicks out of their eggs.  But actually (let it be whispered) it would be far more useful to be able to grapple with a vanished website.  Far, far more useful.

Bad Harry gets fatter

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Yesterday I had a spectacularly busy day doing things entirely unrelated to animals.  In the evening we were going to the theatre in Bath (happens once a year) and I had a small window of opportunity to feed the animals before putting on my pretties.

There has been an uneasy relationship between the sheep and Indie ever since he arrived and though now he’s getting his spontaneity under control, the sheep still don’t trust him an inch.  The moment I walked through the gate with Indie trotting soberly at heel, a halo gleaming very obviously over his black and white head, the more impressionable sheep formed into a panicky posse and started to do laps of the field at warp speed.  Indie and me ignored them and headed for the hay barn.

There I found Slip who was doing short sprints in random directions, which is what he does when things aren’t right in his world.  I thought he had been spooked by the sheep.  But no.  He was trying to tell me that Harry had been Bad.

Bad Harry had somehow managed to lift the gate of the hay barn off its hinges, walk carefully over it and gorge himself on hay.  ‘Gorge’ is the only word that does justice to a big fat hairy horse eating as much as he can fit in the shortest possible time.  He’d cunningly positioned himself so his enormous bottom was blocking the door and Slip couldn’t fit round to reach any of the hay.  And Slip was hungry.

So I pushed Harry out, who was as easy to shift as a well-upholstered block of granite, and lifted the gate back onto its hinges.  And I tried to clear up the mess that used to be a neat pile of precious hay, being carefully eked out until the Spring grass arrives.  And I gave Slip some hay.  And although Harry had eaten so much that he looked like an enormous fluffy pom-pom, he still waddled over and took Slip’s hay.  So I had to bring Slip indoors to eat his hay without Fatso making faces at him.

And then I dimly realised that the sheep were still zooming around the field like racehorses, only now they were accompanied by a black and white pirate who had got bored watching me wrestling with fat horses and decided that as the sheep were the most exciting thing going on, he’d join them and make their life more exciting still.

To cut a long story short, we were just in time for the play which was excellent (‘Noises Off’, very funny).  But the animals were no help at all, none of them.

Harry’s Eye

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Animals are no respecters of book launches.  On book launch morning last week, when my car was loaded with books, posters etc and ready to go, I nipped into the field to check the outdoors animals and get a high five from them.  Apart from Harry, who had a graze above a slightly puffy eye, they were in fine form and wished me well.

When the launch was over, the books sold and I was returning to Planet Earth, I went back out into the field (tickling a friendly sheep’s chin is seriously calming – probably something to do with the lanolin).  And Harry had a grotesquely swollen eye and a red-hot face.

Harry is different to my other animals, who tended to have been born here and had their every whim catered for ever since.  Harry had many years of neglect, when his feet grew long and his coat grew matted.  Then I needed a companion for Slip, and a friend told me about Harry, and after some rather strange negotiations Harry came to live here with Slip and the sheep.  And he’s been a great success – I think of him as an equine anchor to which Slip, an equine helium filled balloon, is tied by a strong cord.  If a tractor rumbles in the lane, Slip will take off like the clappers and Harry will keep eating.  Slip will bob about for a bit then come back to join Harry.

So I value Harry, but whereas I can tell Slip’s every thought (and he has a great many of these) by his ears, eyes, nose etc, Harry’s face is blank.  He has had to look after himself for many years, and he hadn’t got to where he is today by emoting to humans.

My house was filled with friends and helpers longing to chat about the day, but I called the vet.  She came quickly and left me with painkillers plus antibiotic cream for Harry’s eye.  I mixed the pain killers into feed, which he wolfed down (he likes food, does Harry), but when I approached his eye he imitated a giraffe eating a particularly high acacia twig and his face was as far out of my reach as the moon.

Then (the point of this blog) something clicked in his mind.  For the first time ever I saw a Thought drifting across his face:  “small human means me no harm”.  And he dropped his head right down so I could squirt stuff in his eye.  It was very affecting, and showed that two years of treating a horse nicely can make up for a great many years of neglect.

And then I could go back indoors to admire snapshots, polish off left-over cake and discuss the day’s events.  Harry’s eye is healing rapidly, by the way.  But best of all I now feel that I have his trust.

The scarecrows are coming!

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The village has just entered a trying time in its annual cycle for anybody who has a sensitive horse and attempts to ride it around the lanes (me, for example).  Slip is a fab horse and I love him, but he is the most sensitive thing I have ever met.  All summer he has been noticing and horrifying himself with puddle dragons, and shadow dragons, and the seldom met but deeply ferocious leaf dragons (it’s the way they look at you).

So he doesn’t need any help to make the most mundane and ordinary amble around the lanes into a highly exciting, sweaty-palmed, nerve-jangling adventure.  If you watched the Olympic dressage and saw the bit where the horses did the piaffe (I think it’s called the piaffe – the knees in the air, jogging on the spot with attitude one) that’s Slip when he’s noticed the previously unknown pot-hole dragon, and it’s about to pounce.

So it’s with modified rapture that I noticed the annual scarecrow competition getting under way extra early (goodie!)  Every year the village has a scarecrow competition, proceeds to local charities, and it’s good fun.  We’re entering one ourselves.  But the trouble is that they are really scary to Slip – not dragon-in-a-puddle scary but GRACIOUS HEAVENS HAVE YOU SEEN THAT??? LET’S FLEE THE COUNTRY NOW!!! scary.

Our villagers are nothing if not imaginative when it comes to designing what they hope will be the winning entry.  We get very few boring old bird frighteners.  Our scarecrows climb up ladders, lean out of windows and (regrettably) we even had one mooning over a wall last year (it’s amazing what you can do with a couple of melons).  And Slip is terrified by every single one of them.  The competition doesn’t take place until mid-September, so I’m usually safe till late August.  But this year, guess what?  We came around a corner, all unknowing, and there was the first scarecrow in situ.  And it was a cyclist.  But it wasn’t moving.  Because it was a scarecrow.  And Slip went AAAAARRRGGGHHH!

I got him past it eventually.  But I know, and Slip knows, that it’s the first of many.  So either (a) I’ve got to give him a holiday in his field until late September.  Or (b) go out and face them, man-to-man.  Horse-to-scarecrow.  It’s going to be (b).  I’m getting psyched up already, “come on Slip, scarecrows are our friends”.  Yeah right, if you see a bright orange horse in North Wiltshire over the next month, and it’s travelling at the speed of light, that’ll be Slip, post-scarecrow.  I just hope I’ll be there too, still clinging on!

Hay!

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We live in an intensely rural community, and nothing brings this home more than the present spell of fine weather.  As week followed week of drenching, cold rain everybody was beginning to worry about hay.  You’ve got to have hay if you’ve got horses and sheep.  Those with cows can give them silage, and some horses do well with haylage, but for the smallholder there is nothing to replace the comfort of having a hay barn packed with old fashioned small bales of meadow hay, as a preparation for the winter.  And nobody could make hay with the weather that lasted from April through to a week ago.  There was lots of lush grass, certainly, but our pastures were lakes, and there was no sunshine to make hay with.

Then the sun came out and it’s been manic ever since.  The fields dried within a day, and then every tractor in the parish was revved up and took to the roads.  Frank drives a very old vintage tractor, and takes things steadily.  Occasionally he has to go onto the bigger roads to reach an outlying field, and then he picks up an instant tail of steaming mad commuters who find his habit of driving in the middle of the road at 10mph while wearing a tweed cap almost impossible to bear.

At the other end of the scale, Maurice has a stable of vast, gleaming tractors that roar about the place at warp speed dragging mighty implements behind them.  Commuters find him much easier to be stuck behind, but it’s not so great if you are riding a sensitive horse and hear one of Maurice’s monsters approaching.  All you can do is pray you’ll reach a gateway that you can dive into before it comes bellowing around the corner and frightens your horse (Slip) into spasms.  Even the geese don’t chase Maurice’s tractors, and that’s saying something.

But now our hay barn is full of beautiful bales of meadow hay – baled sunshine to keep the stock happy in the depths of the winter.  It’s a fab feeling, and makes arms like chewed spaghetti and legs covered in stubble rash after heaving around bales seem well worth while.

By the way, whippet puppy is now conceived.  Getting more exciting all the time.  And Dolly the frizzle chick has come down from the ark and is now making full use of the hen run’s amenities.  I must just now find a way of stopping Wenceslas showing a more than paternal interest in her.  She is a very pretty hen, but she is not for him.

A stroll through the village

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My horse Slip is very dear to me, but like many of his sensitive disposition he has Issues.  He has issues with burdock leaves:  too large and could easily have dragons concealed beneath them.  He has issues with wheelie bins:  same reasons as burdock leaves.  He has issues with donkeys (“have you SEEN the ears?!”)  And above all he has issues with being ridden on his own.  In company with another horse to share dragon watch duties, he is delightful to ride.  On his own he is all revolving eyeballs and wobbly knees.

Today I rode with a friend who lives about half a mile away.  After an excellent hack we parted company at her field and Slip and me had to do what I think of as the Trembling Walk of Terror – the short ride back through the village.  And my goodness it lived up to its name today.

First up was Frank wheeling a wheelbarrow.  That was bad enough in itself, because his wheelbarrow squeaks (if you think about it) (and Slip does) in exactly the way a dragon would squeak if it was crouched to spring.  But to add to the horror, Frank’s wheelbarrow contained a pile of hedgetrimmings and a little furry dog.  Slip hyperventilated and covered the next quarter of a mile in ten-yard leaps.

Then we were at The Field With The Llama, and Slip finds llamas even worse than donkeys – it’s not just the ears, it’s the neck.  This brought us straight on to Audrey’s house.  Audrey works at her garden constantly in company with her downtrodden gardener.  I clocked Audrey, doing something complicated with bamboos at the far end of the garden, but I didn’t see until too late that her gardener was clipping the hedge.  Hearing hoofbeats he popped his head over the top to say hello – and became to Slip a torso-less head, still miraculously talking but obviously a zombie.  So we set off like a rocket and did the next stretch of village at warp speed.

We were nearly home when we met my geese swaggering up the road.  My fault, I’d left the gate open and they had gone in search of cars to chase.  No cars, but a hysterical horse, which was just as much fun – we covered the last few yards with three geese pounding along behind us hissing their heads off and trying to catch Slip’s bright orange tail.

Slip’s recovered now, but he says he’s never, ever again leaving his field without an armed escort.  And I am in complete agreement.

I’m back!!!

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Well I’m home.  If anyone’s still there, and has had the patience to wait for my return, a big and heartfelt hello to you!

I left a sort of rural paradise, all blossom and happy warm animals and now everything is awash.  The contrast is particularly marked because I was in the Sahara desert for most of our three weeks away, where there is dust, and camels, and hotness.  And now there is greenness, and coldness, and dampness.  Even so I felt like rolling in the soggy green grass when we drove into the drive, just in pure joy to be home (but I didn’t because a surer path to instant pneumonia couldn’t be imagined, also it would be silly).

My mind is still full of orange sand, nomad goat herders and camels (why do I like camels so much?  They always radiate disapproval.)  But my eyes are seeing something very different – blossom, and waterlogged bluebells, and the stream is running for the first time in two years.  It looks very nice, just ridiculously wet.

The animals have taken my return in different ways.  Porous the gander has spent a happy three weeks being unforgivably rude to lovely Sarah, who only wanted to feed him and shut him safely in at night.  He made her run away several times, and once she had to squat on top of a wall for some time before he got bored and wandered off.  A small, bad part of me would have just loved to have seen that.  But he was really thrilled to see me back, and waggled his tail, and burbled away and tried to pretend that he is really a very nice goose, just misunderstood.

Duffy the peacock is going through a difficult time and doesn’t care.  If he was a teenager he’d be immured in his bedroom, ordering black sheets for his bed and playing Deep Purple.

Chick has grown enormously (I still can’t name him/her, because I don’t yet know if we are talking eggs or crowing).  I left this sweet little yellow cottonwool ball and today he/she looks like a vulture with bad attitude.  He/she has a sort of sneer that only a chick beak can manage.  Fluffy (his/her yummy mummy) thinks it’s a great chick though, and it looks as if it will be a frizzle which is great news.

The dogs are uncomplicatedly happy to have their people home, and Scarab the cat celebrated by doing his Thing (once seen, never forgotten).  He runs up the orchard, takes a flying leap at an apple tree and gets half way up before gravity takes over.  He then slides slowly back down, looking worriedly over his shoulder then pretends he meant to do it like that in the first place.  Scarab is a cat with the fuller figure, and his Thing really is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen (though I’m respectful of his dignity and don’t laugh where he can hear me).

The horses and sheep are still a bit wet and distant, Slip in particular appears to have gone feral, though Sarah has been tending to his needs every day.  I’ll report back when I’ve had a proper feedback session with them.  In fact this is probably enough for today, I must go and do some more washing (and where do I dry it?)

 

Harry #2

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Harry is having a trying time.  He has always looked primeval, the sort of horse that was drawn by Stone Age man on cave walls along with aurochs, mammoths etc.  In the current cold conditions he is completely at home –  he knows what to do.  It probably reminds some primal part of his brain about the dear old days in the last Ice Age.  So (see last blog) he can smash ice with his feet, and he can also paw at a patch of frozen snow until it clears and turns magically into the grass beneath.  His problem is Slip.  Slip is needy up to his eyebrows, and hasn’t a clue how to be primeval.  But he really, really wants to be Harry’s special friend.  So when Harry, after a great deal of effort, uncovers a patch of newly revealed grass, Slip (just to show how close he is to Harry) delicately eats it.  And if Harry tries to relieve his feelings by biting Slip, that doesn’t work either because Slip wears a super-heavyweight rug, and Harry just gets a mouthful of technofibre.  It is all most frustrating.

Harry the Ice Warrior

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Harry the Horse is Slip’s little friend – nothing is demanded of him other than that he be a calming influence for Slip.  Slip is sensitive while Harry is more or less a chesterfield sofa in equine form.  The plus side of Harry is that he is very, very stable.  Nothing upsets him – not hedge cutters, or fireworks, or Eric-the-gravedigger’s awful old Reliant Robin that backfires as it drives past the horses’ field.  Any of those would send Slip into the stratosphere if it wasn’t for Harry’s calming influence.  The minus side is that Harry is a bear of little brain, who will walk through a fence because he had forgotten it was there.  This morning though he had a moment of pure genius which I’m longing to share.  I was heaving hay about so that everybody got some, and being a bit slow of breaking the very thick ice that had formed overnight on the water trough.  Harry felt thirsty and went and stood by the trough, waiting for me.  Then a thought came to him – you could see it coming – and he stood well back and brought one front hoof down like a jackhammer onto the ice.  Which didn’t stand a chance.  So he could have a lovely refreshing drink and – this is the best bit – it was all his own idea!