For grass, Gus even misbehaves with Sandy. The other day, he pulled away from her a few times, but she didn’t just curse and walk after him. She cursed and chased him. She yelled and waved her arms and ran at him, so that he couldn’t stop to graze — he got no yummy reward for his escapes. Eventually, he galloped right into his paddock and up to the back fence, watching and panting as the gate was slammed shut. I like the sound of that.
Today we work in the outdoor arena — walking over the bridge and through the tarp strips, standing on the wooden mat, walking in zigzags as I indicate each direction change with my arms in maitre d’ pose — but even during this work, Gus tries to pull away a couple of times, drawn by the grass beckoning just outside the arena fence. I get him to comply nicely, if lazily, with a few exercises, and then I take him grazing. But first I snap on his heavy, long lead rope and tuck his smaller, lighter one into my pocket.
After 30 minutes of blissful grazing (his busy mouth doesn't miss a beat as I lift his feet to pick his hooves), I decide it’s time to quit. He’s pretty sated, so he accedes until we near his paddock gate. He tries to pull away, but I yank back in time to dissuade him. He curls his neck and barges into me, trying to knock me over backward, but I dance and dodge. And now he resorts to sheer force, trotting away too hard and too fast for me to resist. I whap his shoulder with a handful of looped rope, I curse him loudly, and he departs. (By the way, now, for the first time ever, Gus poops in my presence. Is he so revved up that his sphincters loosen? Has all that fresh grass stimulated peristalsis? Is it a more deliberate strategy to jettison extra ballast while making a run for it?)
But before he can stop and lower his head to graze, I unfurl the smaller lead line, wave it around my head, and run toward him, bellowing imprecations like a sailor.
He startles and scoots down a lane between two paddocks, behind which he runs into deep, soft mud. Mired to his knees, he makes a U-turn. I step aside to let him by (and to see if he’ll surrender as he draws near me), but he gallops faster past me and zooms down the driveway. I stop chasing, and Gus stops running in order to greet the geldings through their fence. I tuck the whippy lead line behind my back and jog in a big arc to approach him from the side so that I can chase him back up the driveway and away from the street.
But he lets me take up his lead rope, and he walks with me toward the barns. (He's stuffed with so many carrot and apple cubes from our training, topped by so much rich grass, that he's practically waddling.) He offers a couple of desultory tugs to veer away from me, but I keep inviting him forward with one arm and, with the other arm, swinging the extra rope behind me to tickle his hindquarters. Knowing his paddock gate is latched, since his pasturemate Henry is inside, and knowing I can't trust Gus to stay put while I unlatch the gate, I suggest we walk to his stall instead. He knows a few things too, and one of them is that dinnertime is nigh, so he marches into his stall without demur. (Gus is such an easy keeper that his dinner is a very scant fistful of grain; Sandy throws it into his bucket hard so it’ll sound like a larger amount. As all his bigger neighbors get grain at the same time, Gus seems to anticipate and relish his token crumbs as much as they do their bucketsful.)
Lesson learned by Gus: running away will no longer yield extra grazing, just extra running. Lesson learned by me: when Gus gives me hell, I can give him some hell of my own.
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