by Richard Foxx
Temperatures rarely go below the high 30’s during the night in what passes for winter here in California’s low desert and most times it’s mid 40’s. It’s a far cry from the near-zero temps and snowy days up in Montana where friends at Horse Prairie Ranch, and everyone else up there for that matter, turn their horses out to fend for themselves once winter sets in. The animals are hardy, and they’re none the worse for it.
But somehow, when you get out of bed in the morning and go outside with the dog and realize it really is cold, your thoughts turn to the guys out in the pasture so you give up after a few nights like that and begin blanketing them. It’s more for us than for them but after you do that you don’t feel quite as guilty turning the heat on in the bathroom when you shave.
Horses in pasture are always a little dusty. Sometimes they are downright dirty. You brush their coats before saddling them and between brushing and combing manes and tails you don’t often have time to take a close a look at their coats.
It’s a different story when you take the blankets off in the mornings. Their coats are usually clean. When I took Macarena’s blanket off the other morning I marveled, as I often do, at the coppery color of her chestnut hair, exactly like a newly-minted penny that gleams in the sun. Except this time I noticed that her wonderful red-gold color was flecked with some grey hairs. A lot of them.
I know she’s getting on, coming 19, but to know it on an abstract level and to see it in the concrete are two different things. I can accept the grey hairs on my head and accept the grey hairs on Sammy’s muzzle but it brought me up short on her. I’ve had her for about 13 years. She was, as Rudyard Kipling once wrote about a pony called the Maltese Cat, the pluperfect polo pony. She elevated my game orders of magnitude better, like a 15 handicap golfer suddenly playing to a five. She saved my life at least three times, or at least saved me from serious harm. She and I are telepathic together.
She knows what it means. She speaks a different language but she knows now that I know, too. And that’s always been enough between us.
Gotta go…