There are people out there who can't fathom a life without horses. I'm not one of them...
If I had my way, we would keep horses around for two reasons only: dog food and Westerns.
I survived a previous marriage to a horse person, but only barely. She trained, boarded, and bred horses on our little patch of land on the other side of town, and despite my best efforts to stay completely out of contact with equine critters I was often required to get hands-on experience with them.
Being in the business of boarding horses means you allow other horse people to access your land, use your barn, come and go at all hours of the day and night, and basically give up any pretense of a private life forever. Horse people have more money than sense, and the ones who didn't have money had even less sense, so it worked out to the same formula. It didn't matter if you were on the toilet, in the shower, in the middle of coitus, hammering shingles on your roof, or trying to mow your lawn, if horse people think you need to know about an issue with their little darling, well, by god, you're gonna hear about it right then and there.
We had assholes knocking on our door (or just walking in without knocking) at all hours, and the phone was constantly ringing in between their visits. We were on a first name basis with every large animal doctor in our part of the state, because to own horses is to subsidize a vet's kid's college education. Horses get hurt or sick more often than a hypochondriac in combat. Our vet bills were often higher than the mortage.
The charm of owning a horse business can't be overstated. In the winter the horses' water troughs would freeze up, so someone would have to go to the barn lot with a heavy metal tamp bar and bust up the ice for them. This meant getting into the field with the horses, turning your back on them while pounding away at the ice with a frozen and slippery bar that weighed about as much as the actual horses you were trying to help. Oh so much fun!
Now, maybe all horses aren't like the ones we owned and boarded for others. Maybe some horses are polite, and patient, and very careful not to step on or bite their human handlers... but I never came in contact with that kind of horse during my ten years in Equestrian Purgatory. The horses WE kept were sadistic, dangerous, and all too eager to maim anyone who didn't just love the very smell of their sweaty asses, which pretty much narrowed the field down to me and me alone.
On one particularly hot summer day I was tasked with building a gate between the barn lot and a field that held about ten rowdy horses. I was smart enough to build the gate at a separate location on the farm and then moved it into place at the gate opening. I had the horses moved to a different lot while I worked to hang the gates, two swinging gates that met in the middle.
I'm no carpenter. I'm not even a passable excuse for "handy." If I build something, it's not likely to look anything like the envisioned product at the start of the project... but it'll get the job done, one way or another. However, on this occasion I had constructed a thing of beauty. The two gates I built were perfect. They came together perfectly level, with only an eight of an inch separating them in the middle when closed. The gate hooks matched up exactly right, and for the first time in my life I had built something I could justifiably be proud of... Those gates were damn nice, even by horse-people standards.
After hanging the gates and collecting a wagon full of tools to drag back up to the workshop, my X released the horses back into the field and went on her merry way to find some other project that desperately needed my attention on the other side of the barn. I was standing on the hill overlooking the barn lot as the horses came running around the side of the barn in full stampede mode (the only way they ever travelled, as far as I could tell.) Just as I was beginning to admire my handiwork from a distance, one of the horses leaned over the two gates at the very center where they connected, and attempted to reach a blade of grass just out of reach on the other side of the gate.
I could hear wood splintering and cracking. This son of a bitch was breaking a gate I had only just finished... and was doing so to get at grass five feet on the wrong side of a gate while standing knee deep in grass... I lost it. For the next ten seconds I was certifiably insane. I yelled at this three-quarter ton sack of oats to get off the gate, but the one thing I knew from past experience was that horses don't speak Squatlo. I would have had more success yelling at the barn itself... this horse wasn't giving up until it had broken the gates and gotten to that blade of grass. So...
So I reached down on the ground and found a rock the size of a baseball. I was standing at least forty yards away from this stupid bastard when I threw it, and my intention (swear to god) was to merely bounce the rock in that general direction in the faint hope of startling Stewball into backing off of my damned gate. Well, the rock bounced as planned, and on its second hop struck this horse dead between the eyes. The sound of the impact was a lot like the sound of thumping a ripe watermelon. Nice and solid...
Immediately this horse did a one legged pirouette and began to stagger away from the gate. Every other step he would swat at his lowered head with a front leg, as if to chase away a swarm of bees or something. Ever see the movie Cat Ballou? Remember Lee Marvin's horse leaning against the side of a building while drunken Kid Shalleen slept in the saddle? Well, that drunken horse had nothing on this one. It was literally staggering away from the gate, shaking its head and repeatedly pawing at the air in front of it as it reeled.
There was a brief moment of sudden guilt that washed over me. For an instant I considered calling out to my wife to let her know what had happened... then my better judgment kicked in and I began to ponder the consequences of that confession.
She came up to the house a few hours later in a panic, rushing to the phone to call the vet. Apparently, two of the horses had gotten into a fight and one of them had been kicked right between the eyes and would require sutures.
Imagine that...
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