Vagueness and the Aftermath - A sporadic diary

As tikay has already told you, after spending most of the afternoon writing the concluding part of the ‘Horse story, I inadvertently pressed the wrong button and erased it all. I was mortified, and I rang Tony, (as I often do) when I need sympathy or advice.

Well the sympathy was a bit thin on the ground, (Unless you count laughing out loud as sympathy) and the advice was, and I quote

“Don’t try to re-write it again tonight Tom, you will only make a mess of it. It will never be as good as the first draft anyway, the spontaneity has gone.”

He was right of course, so I’ve decided not to try to re-write it at all. I’m just going to give you a brief synopsis and move on.

I wrote about the day I first managed to put a halter on Black Jack, and how he fought for almost an entire day and night to be free of it. I told of how I separated him from his mother and moved him to a stable close to my caravan.

I wrote about the six week period when I spent every morning before I went to work, and every evening when I came home teaching him to behave in a civilised manner. How I taught him to wear a halter, headstall and bridle. To tolerate weight on his back. To walk in and out of a horsebox, and to ignore loud noise and sudden movement.

I wrote about how he fought me, tooth and nail, every last inch of the way.

I wrote at length about the difficulty I had teaching him to let me pick his feet up because he hated anything touching his legs below the knee, and how would lash out violently at the slightest contact. I told how I eventually cured him by playing water from a hose onto his lower limbs, because no matter how much he kicked, he couldn’t kick it away.

I wrote about how, in those six weeks, he went from apprehensive, stubborn and scared, to obedient, confident and virtually bomb-proof.

I wrote about how proud of him I was, and how much I loved him.

Henry’s mare had stopped producing milk, she was dry, and Black Jack could no longer suckle. He had learned his lessons well, and he was heartily sick of being cooped up in a stable. It was time to give him some freedom.

I stopped the horsebox at the top of the lane and dropped the ramp. Black Jack came down without fuss, and as I walked toward the fields, he followed behind on a slack rein. I opened the gate led him through, slipping his halter off as I did so. He stood stock still for a moment, ears forward, nostrils flared. Then he caught sight of the other horses, and with a little squeal of anticipation, he set of towards them at full stretch gallop.

I watched him for a few moments as he ran, head high, mane and feather flying in the slipstream. He was so beautiful, I could have watched him all day, but I had work to do. One last glance, and I dragged myself away.

The next day, after work, jimmy and I went to check on the horses. As soon as we opened the gate, they came galloping towards us, spurred on no doubt, by the thought of digestive biscuits.

As they came I tried to spot Black Jack, but I couldn’t see him. He was still quite small though, and easily hidden by the other horses.

“I can’t see Jack” I called to Jimmy, a note of panic in my voice. Suddenly, a feeling of foreboding washed over me, and my blood ran cold.

Warning! The following text contains harrowing material.

By now the horses were milling around us as they always did, and Jack wasn’t there. I knew he hadn’t escaped or anything, horses are herd animals, and escapes were always on a one out, all out basis. No, he was here somewhere, either hurt or dead.

I found him laying on his side at the bottom of a dry ditch, totally immobile, his head trapped beneath his body. He was still breathing, I could see his chest rise and fall, but he had been there for a long time judging by the dry dung at his rear end.

With Jimmy’s help, I somehow managed to turn him over. His neck was bent so that his head was lying alongside his ribcage, it seemed to be fixed in that position. The full weight of his body pressing his head into the soil for so long had caused his eye to atrophy, and now it stared sightlessly at me, opaque and useless.

It was obvious what had happened, and it was obviously my fault. There were large bite marks all over his neck and shoulders. Jimmy’s old stallion “Rocky” had attacked him.

It just never occurred to me that Rocky might see him as a threat. They had been together since Jack was a week old. What I didn’t take into account was the fact that he had been away for several weeks and had started to mature, add this to the fact that Rocky was a born fighter who wouldn’t tolerate another entire anywhere near his mares, and you had a recipe for disaster.

I don’t know how Jack managed had to say alive at the bottom of that ditch, his injuries were horrific. I suspected that his neck was broken. His foreleg definitely was, the shattered bone poked through the flesh and glinted impossibly white in the sunlight. Thankfully, he was unconscious.

All I was concerned with now was putting him out of his misery. I asked Jimmy to please go and get my pickup and bring the horsebox from home. While I waited for him to return, I sat in the ditch and scratched Jacks mane. Then, with huge tears rolling down my cheeks, I phoned the knacker man to tell him I was coming.

Jimmy and I managed to jury-rig a simple pulley system to drag Jack from the ditch and into the horsebox. An hour later we rolled into the knacker man’s yard. It was like a scene from hell. Animal corpses in various stages of dissection and decay lay everywhere. The knacker man came out to meet us, his thick leather apron covered with all sorts of indescribable filth. His right hand dangled loosely by his side; in it he carried a small revolver.

Apparently his assistant ad gone out on another job and had taken the humane killer with him, the revolver, though not strictly legal, was kept on hand for this sort of emergency.

Jimmy and I opened the horsebox and then retired to a safe distance. Unlike in the movies, bullets entering bodies often come back out again, and it’s better not to get in the way. There was a sharp crack, and I knew that Jack would suffer no more.

We dragged him out on to the stained concrete; I paid the knacker man his fee, and climbed into my pickup. I carefully reversed the horsebox around and cast a last glance in Jack’s direction. I could no longer see him; the knacker man was using an old tractor with a loading shovel attached to move him, and he was hidden inside the bucket. Just as I turned to leave, one of his legs slipped out a little way, and the long black silky feather around his hoof fluttered in the breeze.

I have a thousand images of him in my mind, from that first glimpse as he stood boldly in front of his mother, swaying on his rubbery legs, all through his training when he defied me so often, to that fateful day when he ran full gallop to greet the other horses, but that last glimpse of that tiny part of him is the image that is the most vivid. It is burned into my mind like a brand.

I sold Henry’s mare to a very good friend of mine, he kept her for the rest of her life. She had a few decent foals, but never again did she produce anything that came close to Black Jack’s standard, and that’s how it should be. He was a one-off.

His sort comes along once in a lifetime, if you are very very lucky.

He was the one.