Today, for the first time in 2.5 years of owning this mare, she willingly followed me around the round pen: no ropes, no halter, no gimmicks, just trust.
Yup.
I'm trying to keep the ego at bay, here. It's a small step, but it's a BIG small step.
Sometimes I think Donnie is a voodoohorsewhisperertypeofguy, because he often tells me how he "has conversations" with the horses from time to time when he knows we're having trouble with them, when stuff isn't going well for us in our personal lives. He told me a couple weeks ago that he had one of these conversations with Stella about me. He wouldn't tell me what he said, just that she responded favorably when he was talking to her. I don't know what I believe in terms of a horse's ability to understand humans sometimes, but I do know that horses get honesty. They get emotions. They read in between the lines, and they recognize the truth when they see it or hear it. They also recognize when you're lying to them.
Today when I went to grab Stella, I wasn't sure I wanted to work her. I wasn't sure I wanted to be faced with everything I've been dealing with. I wasn't sure if I wanted that chucked back at me, her reply being "You're gonna have to do better than that." Donnie came in as I was putting her halter on. He said she'd changed a lot in the past few weeks, that she was unhappy and wanted a job back, that she needed me to be there. I started in on how I felt awful and I was nervous and unsure. Sure enough, like he's done before, he tipped his glasses to the end of his nose, gripped my shoulders, looked me in the eye and said, "listen to me. She is ready. You are the one who isn't. She will help you if you let her."
Hmm...letting someone else in, letting someone help me? I haven't heard that before...
Up the driveway we went, Stella walking calmly beside me the whole way. "Things are going to get better," I said, and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. To that she responded with the same: a big sigh, fluttering through her nostrils and a few chews.
She didn't take off in the roundpen when I let her go, even after a week of no work (I've had a wicked cold since last Wednesday, and it kept me from doing much...) She showed her usual displeasure with my asserting what I wanted: whenever she went to drag her nose in the dirt to investigate, I asked her for a direction change, to which she usually replied with a buck and a squeal. "Why can't I do what I want?!?" she said as she cantered around the round pen. We did some things we haven't ever before: the communication is definitely getting stronger and more subtle. I could ask her for changes of direction by only hinting at stepping back. I could push her to a canter by angling my body forward and giving the leadrope a twirl. I could bring her back to a trot by angling my body away from her and breathing out.
After several minutes of changes, transitions and periods of focus, I noticed a scrape on her leg. A few days ago I'd come to do morning chores and found an entire strand of fencing tape down and flapping in the wind, pulled clean through the insulators. I figured Stella and her neighbor Annie must have been playing and someone got caught and spooked as a result, but neither appeared injured or upset so I didn't worry. That is, until I found a solid metal bucket hook on the floor in Stella's stall, ripped clean from the wall, screws still in the holes. I checked her over but didn't see anything.
When I finished checking her leg (while I somehow still managed to miss the small gaping hole in her chest above the big, fluid filled edema....yeah, must be my injury initiation into 2012) I started to walk away. To my amazement, she followed. Hell, she practically jumped up next to me. We stopped, and started again and there she was...
I'm sure you're wondering about the edema and gaping hole. Nothing terribly serious, it looks gross but it's relatively superficial, no puncture or serious damage. The edema is easy to explain: the fluid build-up has nowhere to go, no place to drain to, so it's sitting in a pocket it's created for itself underneath the wound: it makes her look like she's got a saggy boob, but it's not hot, not tender and relatively hard, so the chances of infection are slim. There's a flap of tissue that will probably shrivel up and fall off, no point in stapling. I didn't even call the vet: the cut on her leg has already started to heal, it looks like she scraped enough to take the hair and first layer of skin off. I cleaned it and put goo on it. The hole in her chest was another story, but again, nothing that required sutures. It looks awful but I took care of it myself: Donnie headed her while I rinsed it with warm water, clipped the hair around it, attempted to remove the flap of skin and dabbed at it with chlorohexidine scrub. Some charcoal powder to stop the bleeding, a little antibiotic ointment and a dose of SMZ's via oral syringe and she was good to go. And the mare stood like a trooper through the whole thing.
Gotta love this little girl. Pics to come.
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