Whispering Back

by Adam Goodfellow

  Oddly enough, Finn, now that he didn’t have to climb a ramp, was strolling in and out of the box quite merrily, as if he’d been doing it all his life. That Finn was inside only seemed to agitate the Chief further. It was as if he was annoyed with Finn for undermining his protest. His ears were flat back, his eyes were rolling, and he was pawing the ground furiously with a foreleg.

  ‘Shall I have a go?’ I asked, as tactfully as possible. ‘I shouldn’t really be giving you my dirty work, after all.’

  ‘Just be careful,’ warned Leslie, ‘he’s a vicious brute. He nearly got me with his feet a couple of times.’

  The Chief was seriously annoyed, but after I’d stroked his hot, damp, neck for a while, his irritation seemed to dissolve a little. I moved him backwards and forwards a few times, just a few steps, and rewarded him extravagantly every time he complied. I asked him to step onto the ramp, and he resisted angrily, leaning back against the pressure, and jerking his head from side to side. I met his resistance with one concerted pull, leaning all my body weight back against him, but as always ready to release should he rear up. He stamped his foot hard on the ramp, once, and then shot into the box, nearly bowling me over in the process. By the time Finn was ensconced beside him, he was happily munching his hay, playfully taking bites out of those parts of Finn that he could reach over the partition. Major tucked himself in beside Finn, like a perfect Police horse.

  Sensi was another story. Cathy had offered to load her, and I had gladly agreed, feeling it would be easier for someone who wasn’t emotionally involved. Sensi eventually agreed to go in, after she’d exhausted every other option, and we’d shut down every possible escape route.

  We’d put Sensi in first, being the larger horse, so that we could swing the partitions across and give her a bit more space initially, but this meant that the space for Misty didn’t look very inviting, particularly as Sensi was swishing her tail in a most unwelcoming way. The trailer was in the corner of the school, with a fence along one side, and straw bales stacked up on the other. I was at a loss as to how to get Misty to step up the ramp. I had never used any kind of force with her, and even getting her to back up and come forward felt a bit strong. In the end, Cathy suggested holding a line behind her – not touching her with it at all – and without any better suggestions, I agreed. Misty saw the line, backed up towards it, felt it against her quarters, panicked, and pulled back. I let go, and Misty set off frantically around the school, hotly pursued by the lead rope. She stopped in a corner and stood trembling. I gently gathered up the rope and led her slowly back to the box, wondering what on earth we could try next. To my astonishment, as I led her up to the ramp one more time, she leapt straight on. I guess she was more frightened by the ropes than the trailer.

  With everyone on board, it was time for one last quick check around to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, a quick squeeze with Julia, whom I’d be seeing the next day on the course, and then I set off in the car to try to catch up with Leslie and the other horses, who’d left about twenty minutes before us.

  I managed to get to Moor Wood in time to unload the horses. The stallion leapt out of the box, neighing loudly, and passaged impressively across the yard. Finn, who couldn’t passage to save his life, ambled across the yard like he’d been there all his life, and following his example, the stallion soon settled down. Major looked around, probably wondering where the football match was.

  As Leslie drank his tea in the annexe, I was glad we were parting on good terms. He seemed very genuine when he said, ‘I wish you well. Good luck.’

  Months later I saw an ad in Horse and Rider. I was looking idly through the ‘Horses for Sale’ section, and my eye was caught by a photo of a horse that looked very familiar, a striking grey Arab. I looked at the phone number, and realised with a shock that it was indeed Leslie’s number. It was the horse that he’d been trying unsuccessfully for several months to break in, misrepresented as a genuine, unstarted youngster. We’d had our differences, but I’d always thought he was a decent, if somewhat unfriendly and awkward person. I just couldn’t believe that he would pull such a deception, and try to sell such a horse knowing not only that someone could get hurt, but almost certainly would get hurt, and that the horse was likely to be destroyed as an untrainable and dangerous animal. I know it’s common practice in the horse world to send difficult horses to the sales, on the understanding of ‘buyer beware’, and some people consider this honourable enough, but to me this deceit was a step too far. I looked at the front of the magazine, and realised the edition was already well out of date. There was no point phoning up and telling the editor. Months later I found out from Jane that someone had indeed bought the horse, a mother and daughter team, who were intending to break the horse in themselves and do endurance riding with him. We never heard if they survived the experience or not.

  Leslie had just left when Cathy arrived with Sensi and Misty, who were delighted with their new space, and charged around it several times, causing chaos in the adjoining fields, before settling down to eat.

  When Adam arrived later that evening, we put up the round pen. The light was fading, and bats were flickering around us. We looked out across the valley to where the glow of the setting sun could be seen dimly through the trees. Adam looked harried and care-worn, but as we worked on, the colour returned to his cheeks, and the systematic, repetitive work seemed to revive his spirits. By the time we were pushing in the last holding pin, the moon was high, and the stars were glittering through the fast-clearing cloud. Adam hugged me and we both stared up at the heavens, fascinated to see a night sky that was never visible in Milton Keynes, unable to pierce through the nightly blanket of light-pollution.

  Finn was visibly unimpressed the next morning when we turned him out, not into the fields, but into the round pen with the stallion. We had placed the pen on the site of an old cow byre, and it was all hard-standing, with just a thin smattering of short grass to occupy them. Finn usually accepts his role as playmate to the big-and-burly with good grace, but occasionally he feels the restraints of the job quite keenly. He got the position as a result of three major attributes: he’s made out of rhinoceros hide; he isn’t intimidated by anyone (except, oddly enough, Misty, the only one who’s smaller than him); and he’ll play for hours at a time. This makes him worth his weight in gold to us, and although we don’t have to call on his services all that often, when we do, he’s invaluable. After an hour or two of being with Finn, the Chief was so calm, willing and manageable, that no one would have guessed he was a stallion at all. I don’t know if all Exmoor ponies are as bold and cheeky as Finn, but I suspect many would make excellent companions for stallions.

  To appease him, I set about putting up some electric fencing so that they could have a portion of the field to themselves. This worked well and the Chief seemed to respect it until, predictably enough, we went away for a few days.

  On the Friday after we arrived at Moor Wood, Monty came over to England to do a mini-tour. Really, one of us should have stayed behind, but our landlady Sarah kindly offered to look after the horses for us. It didn’t seem fair for Adam to miss the tour that was part of his course, and Kelly wanted me to go along to do the merchandise. While we were away we received a call to say that the stallion had broken out, got in with our other horses, and generally caused chaos. Luckily he hadn’t got in with Sarah’s lot, or things could have got very ugly. As it was, he had sustained a nasty kick to the inside of one of his forelegs, which Sarah was taking care of. It had taken them hours to catch all the horses and separate them out again, and to repair the damage to the fence. In our hearts, we knew we should have just had the stallion stay in the pen, but it would have meant more mucking out and hay-fetching, and we wanted to give Sarah and Peter as little extra work as possible. Besides, in the first few days that he’d been in the field he had shown no sign at all of wanting to break out. They were very good about it, but we felt terrible. It didn’t seem like the best start to our tenanc
y. And it confirmed in my mind the suspicion started by the flood during the April tour: whenever I went away, something bad happened.

  It was the evening after the tour, and the stallion’s wound was beginning to heal nicely. Our new farrier was in the yard, putting some shoes on the horses, when Adam said, ‘Perhaps we should ask him to take Sensi’s back shoes off, so we can get the Chief to cover her. I think she’s in season. And we won’t have him for all that much longer.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ I said crossly. We hadn’t got back until the early hours of the morning, and I didn’t want to have to think about anything. ‘I don’t think she’s in season, anyway.’

  Sensi chose that moment to spread her back legs and urinate copiously, producing a stream of hormone drenched fluid. The acrid smell left no doubt as to her reproductive receptivity.

  ‘Although I suppose he might as well remove the shoes anyway,’ I conceded.

  The conception was an unorthodox mating, watched with fascination by the neighbour’s two young children. We didn’t want to interfere too much, yet we weren’t quite confident enough to leave them to their own devices. But aside from one worrying moment when the stallion nearly strangled himself with Sensi’s lead rope, it went fairly smoothly. When it was over, we led a rather smug-looking Sensi away. For some reason, Adam and I both felt certain that she had conceived, and I think Sensi knew too. She had no further need of the stallion, and when he whinnied plaintively across the field to her later, she didn’t even flick an ear in his direction.

  Two weeks later she ran straight through a metal gate and broke her nose in twenty-five places.

  I found her and Major munching the long sweet grass on the triangle outside their field when I went to do the morning check. At first glance, they looked fine, perhaps just a little guilty. Sensi is a brilliant escapologist, and I thought perhaps she’d worked out how to open the catch on one of the gates. She looked like she had a slight graze on her nose, but closer inspection revealed that quite a large portion of her face was caved in, and that every time she exhaled, blood bubbled from two deep puncture wounds to her sinus. It was definitely time to call the vet.

  It may have been the lack of breakfast, or it may have been the way the vet diligently pointed out the various cracks and breaks and holes as she carefully probed the wound, but either way I felt quite faint as I held the saline wash for her. A nagging thought pushed itself to the front of my mind:

  ‘Do you think this could affect her foal? We think she conceived a fortnight ago . . .’

  The vet’s face said it all. Horses tend to abort or reabsorb the foetus when they undergo severe shocks. We would just have to wait and see. The ultrasound scan was booked in for a week or so.

  ‘Don’t worry if she seems a bit depressed, she’ll probably be in a lot of pain. She’s likely to have one hell of a headache. I don’t want to give her too much for it, in case she does keep the foal. The biggest worry is that she gets some kind of bone infection. That could be very serious. We really have to put her on antibiotics, because an infection on this sort of site could be fatal. I’ll give her the first injection now. Will you be all right to give her the others?’

  I agreed, possibly too readily, as she subsequently proved very hard to inject. It turned out that we’d been given the wrong needles, ones too fine for the thick penicillin, and it took about a minute to get the damned stuff into her muscle. This must have been very uncomfortable for poor old Sensi.

  ‘The other thing is, we must keep the flies off the wound. She’ll have to stay in for at least a week.’

  That posed more of a problem. Most horses don’t take to box rest like humans take to bed rest. They take to it like humans take to prison.

  Sensi watched me intently as I busied around, making a stable comfortable for her. Her eyes were bright, her ears were forward, and she seemed to be wondering what all the fuss was about. As I settled her in her box, I was suddenly overcome with a blinding headache. She started munching her haynet contentedly as I staggered back to the annexe, hardly able to see. I felt very much like I’d just run head first through a metal gate. She obviously felt fine.

  When I got to work that afternoon, the shock of it all suddenly hit me. I could barely fill Adam in on the details, so close was I to falling apart, and Julia later told me that looking at my face she had to fear the worst.

  When Adam and I got home that evening, I showed him the accident scene. What had happened was clear. Sensi and Major had been on opposite sides of the electric fence. Major had for some reason charged through it, and Sensi had found herself surrounded by the fence, and had to run to escape it. When they got to the field boundary, Major (more or less) jumped the metal fence, buckling it completely out of shape, but causing only a minor injury to his leg. The end of the electric tape was still draped over the top bar. Sensi, on the other hand, heading for the gate, had tried to stop. There were skid marks nine feet long leading up to and straight through the gateway, and no sign at all that she had attempted to jump it. Indeed, she must have had her head right down, balancing herself in her attempt to halt. She had burst the antique wrought-iron gate open, bending it dramatically in the process. She could have killed herself.

  Sensi took to box rest surprisingly well. It could have had something to do with the numerous small treats we took her, the hours spent grooming and massaging her, the fresh grass we picked, and the night-time walks we took her on to avoid the ravaging flies. If she’d had a bell, she would have rung it incessantly. As it was, she didn’t need one. If we spent too long indoors, or walked through the yard without stopping at her box, she would neigh imperiously. She even started insisting that we got up earlier in the morning, and on one occasion I was convinced she had surprised me into dropping my toast so that she could have it.

  So all in all, it was perhaps not the smoothest possible start to life in our ‘picturesque country idyll’. We loved the place, but, having two sets of landlords – Sarah and Peter, and Henry – we always felt like we had to creep around, and were perpetually worried about saying or doing the wrong thing. We needed to surface the round pen, and do something about the leaky roof in the studio, but Sarah and Peter had been adamant that as sub-tenants, we weren’t to bother Henry directly. ‘He’s categorically stated that he’ll only deal with us,’ they told us. So not only was the surfacing of the round pen not a foregone conclusion, but even the right of this large, metal, not so picturesque structure to be there was under question. They seemed loath to bring anything up with him, and clearly felt that they were using up favours to address any of our issues.

  In addition, there was the small problem of money. We didn’t have any. The rent was £750 per month, plus £75 per month for the studio. This was not exactly the sort of sum we had in mind as a ‘peppercorn’, but without the studio we couldn’t have lived in the annexe. Not that it would have been a bit cramped, we simply wouldn’t have fitted, not unless we put most of our stuff into storage. I was being paid about £12 per hour by the college, which seemed reasonable, but at only ten hours per week it didn’t add up to much. Kelly was paying me generously for the weekend courses, but again, there weren’t that many. Adam, as a student on the course, had an income of exactly zero. We were still receiving a little money for the courses we had designed for the Japanese school, but the person we had franchised them out to had driven a very hard bargain. So when we were offered an unrideable pony to train, we jumped at the chance, even though the terms were not at all favourable.

  Although she was the first horse we took in at Moor Wood, Maybee’s story was quite typical of the horses we’ve trained. Her owners, a woman called Doris and her ten-year-old daughter, had started to break her in themselves, and all went well the first couple of times she was ridden. Then on the third occasion she simply exploded, bucking off her young rider, and careering across the field in a mad panic. They tried sitting on her a few more times, but she was getting worse and worse. They decided to leave it for a while,
and breed a foal from her, but when they tried to ride her again, eighteen months later, she was just as bad. They tried getting professional jockeys to ride her, but Maybee managed to get through three of them before they decided to call it a day with that particular option. She’d had a few months off, but her owners were anxious to do something with her. She was a bright, friendly pony, perfect in every other way, and still quite young, at seven years old. They’d broken in many Arabs, and were by no means inexperienced, but Maybee had them stumped.

  In spite of the fact that we were offering a money-back guarantee, and only charging our increased but still modest rate of £80 per week, Doris was only prepared to let us have the pony for two weeks. She told me later that she really didn’t think I’d be able to help, and that even though she was prepared to give the pony one more chance, she didn’t want me to waste any more time than that, or risk traumatising Maybee further.

  She was only about 13 hands high, but no less dangerous for that. In addition, when she arrived, she was covered in show sheen, a silicon-based substance that made her extraordinarily slippery. Round as a barrel, she needed no help on that score. She was kind-hearted and generous, however, and although she was clearly terrified at the prospect of being mounted, she worked hard to overcome her fear. As she was so small, I didn’t need anyone to give me a leg-up, and so I was able to practise jumping up and down beside her, and leaning across her, without having to do all the sessions in the evenings after the course with Adam.

  Maybee progressed brilliantly, and the only thing she ever did under saddle was to once do a helicopter impression – spinning around several times on the spot. I may not be able to sit more than a few jumps of a bucking horse, but years of Sensi’s shying had improved my ability to deal with very sudden turns. After that, Maybee never really had another issue under saddle again. Knowing that, against our advice, she hadn’t yet had her teeth checked, we took the precaution of only ever riding her in a headcollar, which certainly contributed to our success, for the owner discovered later that she had a cracked wolf-tooth that would have caused her considerable pain, had it been knocked by a bit. When Doris came to see her, she was overjoyed with her progress, and let us have her for another week so that her daughter would be able to ride her confidently when they took her home. She said something that provided a useful insight into a very frustrating phenomenon. Owners often say to us that their horses are unrideable, dangerous, only worth a bullet, and that this is their last chance. Then when the horse is ‘fixed’, they say it wasn’t so bad in the first place, and complain that the canter isn’t very collected, for instance. (I heard this said by someone at a Monty demonstration who had brought a bucking horse that no one had successfully ridden for five years. He was cantering around smoothly and happily after half an hour, having bucked like a rodeo horse initially, and she said, ‘But look at how loose those reins are, he’s not trying to collect the horse at all. No wonder it’s not bucking.’) Doris said something that made me realise this sort of comment isn’t mean-spiritedness. She said, ‘If I hadn’t seen her be so bad, I would almost believe I was making it up, or exaggerating. Seeing her this good makes it really hard to believe she was ever difficult. I really would doubt my memory, if I didn’t have the photos to prove it.’