Loose Horse
A stallion on the run demonstrates the collective community genius of my local hamlet.
I get a knock on the window at 5.45am.
I’m at my kitchen table writing (or about to write). The knocker seems simple. Ruddy-cheeked, open face, out of breath. I recall him wearing jeans and a check shirt that accentuates his spreading belly. But flicking through the photos now I find he’s dressed more like a safari guide.
A combination of surprise, local dialect and double glazing make his wild gesticulations incomprehensible. I open the front window to understand what on earth he’s talking about.
He tells me there’s a horse loose in the road.
I go outside in my robe. I can’t see the horse. I ask questions. I’m not convinced he’s sober. His name is B-. He’s driving to work at a pig farm when he sees it: a horse in the middle of the thin highway about a mile from my house. Dangerous.
It sees him too, and bolts.
It jumps a ditch and a fence, races through some fields past the church, and across the weird ancient moat thing that may have been a burial ground or a defensive fortification or a rubbish pit - we simply don’t know - then down our unsealed farm road.
I like that he’s come to me for help.
As if I’m his peer. A fellow early riser. A fellow at home on a farm. Not a city slicking Covid carpetbagger who just lives in the countryside for aesthetic reasons.
As if I can help.
Wait... I can!
I wake my wife. She dreams of horses. She would like to ride horses more often than she does. She would like to own a horse, in fact. Every time we test a new (second hand) car, she inspects it for a tow bar. She imagines it towing her imaginary horse.
She hears a horse is loose on the road and asks no further questions. She fetches her bridle from the storage box. She is going to catch this horse.
But to catch a horse, you have to find a horse.
A few hundred yards down the road my neighbour lives in a grand villa with a large lawn that slopes down to a trickle of a stream that carries on 40 miles east to become one of England’s great rivers.
The horse is bucking around by his kids’ soccer goal. It’s a very small horse. A bucking stallion.
Wife walks right up to it in her pyjamas and catches the horse!
She whispers to it, and clicks her fingers, and makes it walk round her in tight circles to calm down.
At no time do any of us do any talking or thinking or weighing of options. The solutions are blindingly clear. Next: we need a field to put the horse in while we try to find its owner.
You can’t just put a horse in any field. It needs to be properly fenced. i.e. a horse field. We know where the nearest one is.
The four of us walk further down the lane, past the guinea pig farm, and along to C-’s property. He’s a local landowner. He provides a livery service across two fields for a few nags of friends. He does it out of the goodness of his heart, and (I hear) to maintain the ‘working farm’ designation that affords certain tax advantages. Or something like that.
Now it’s my time to shine.
It’s 6am and it’s obvious that C- and his family are fast asleep. The last time we spoke, he told me not to walk along a field adjacent to the public right of way. It’s private land. Fair enough, I say. I know he’s in the right and I’m in the wrong. I make it clear that I have been told. I pledge to change my free-roaming ways.
I stand below what I imagine to be his bedroom window, and call his name loudly and repeatedly.
Dogs bark, and a hairy belly comes to the window. Hands hoist it up, the belly retreats and C-’s face pokes out.
I explain the situation. C- rallies immediately and without question.
We put the horse into what is meant to be an empty field. A quarter of it is roped off by an electric fence - a diet paddock for a fat pygmy carthorse that stands asleep on its feet.
Do you know that horses fight and kick and try to rape each other?
The formerly loose horse charges through the electric fence and tries to rape the pygmy. The lady puts up a good fight. She kicks the new horse in the face and buys herself enough time to move away. But, then she thinks better of it, and stands within humping/kicking distance. She may be in heat. This could get very ugly….
We all know what to do (including C-’s dog). We variously shout and bark and flap and wave our arms and try to restore the electric fence and maintain appropriate equine distance while B- takes photos of the loose horse and posts them to a local Facebook page. Within MINUTES the owner is found.
By 6.30am I’m back at my kitchen table writing about it all in my diary.
The loose horse walks by my window, attached to a long rope, being led by a heavily pregnant woman.
I poke my head out the window to claim all the credit for his capture.
She is very grateful. She was out of her mind for worry.
The horse is a stallion. Her beloved. He’s been neglected of late - not legally, but figuratively. In her condition, she can’t ride him every day as s/he’s both used to. He’s frustrated. He’s frisky. He’s struggling to adapt to change.
His response turns out to be some crazed, instinctual return to the womb.
Incredibly, his mother is one of the horses that lives in the field across the road from the one we put him in.
His mother didn’t live there when he was a foal. He’s never visited this area in his life. He lives 5 miles away, in a lovely field of his own. It’s lucky he never got into her field. She may have been obliged to kick him in the face. How he knew to run this way we will never know. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps it’s just an odd coincidence.
But I’m not so sure.
I never knew how to participate in the collective capture and return of a loose horse until I did.
I wonder if there are trickles of alternative consciousness flowing within us - that can act as tributaries to something collective we can tap under certain conditions.
Or not. Either way…
Just another one of those mornings.
Time for coffee.