47. Sweet sorrow

I’m not much of a traveler, partly because of the need for domestic-animal care in my absence.  My serial standard poodles each had rare and chronic illnesses that required medications and special feeding and an eagle eye on symptoms.  I hated to leave them.  But truth be told, I usually find time spent with my pets, in any condition, equally enjoyable as time spent away from home.  Before I started having dogs, I had cats, and they were easier, of course — although my Russian blue, named Vlad (the Impaler), was known to hiss and growl and slash at any and all humans except me.  Anyway, I’ve always taken my dogs along on any trips I could, whether camping or hoteling or staying in friends’ houses.  And now I’m about to spend a week at a lakehouse in Maine that’s been a favorite summer destination for me and my current canine, Reggie the browndog.

"Don't forsake me . . ."

But this summer for the first time, I’m leaving an animal behind.  Gus.  And as I end my last barn visit before heading out of town, I find myself lingering, putting off the goodbye, feeling bad about ditching him.  He was frustrated when I took just a couple days off to nurse my concussion.  This time it’s nearly a week that I won’t be able to call on him, to practice tricks and reward him with treats, to brush him and rub his ears, and to take him grazing.  I used to pooh-pooh my horse-owning friends’ concerns about leaving town — I mean, a horse is not a house pet; it has pasturemates and is Just Fine spending many hours without human interaction — but now I feel their pain.  Gus is my every-other-day good buddy, and we’ll miss each other.

I feed him a few treats as a not-so-fabulous parting gift.  I employ my usual upbeat, crisp tone of voice to tell him goodbye.  And as I drive away, he bellows a hee-haw at my departing tailgate.

46. More donkey botany

For some reason, Gus is being almost polite when I bring him away from grazing.  I’d like to think he’s internalizing the new reality of his inescapable lead rope and accepting that resistance is futile.  But when he gave me some protracted hell about walking out to his paddock one recent rainy day (“I don’t do mud puddles”), I was disabused: clearly lead-line misbehavior remains his go-to form of protest.  More likely, it’s simply time that’s changed his grazing manners.  The grass is no longer so spring-fresh and intoxicatingly succulent after a barren winter.  Also I’m scheduling his grazing sessions to last 30 minutes or more and then to conclude right when Sandy is delivering evening grain.  Few things trump the chance to graze, but grain is one of them.  Gus hardly balks as I lift his head from the greensward, and he readily abandons the pasture to go to his stall when his feed bucket awaits.

Nevertheless, he’s still thoroughly committed to ingesting as much pasture as possible.  More summer wildflowers (that is, weeds) are appearing now, and I’m whiling away his hours of grazing by noting every plant he eats or shuns.  He’ll eat ground ivy, also known as gill-over-the-ground, but he steers clear of bindweed, a kind of wild morning-glory.  He eats a tall chickweed and even the fuzzy leaves, stems, and blossoms of a white-flowering campion.  He enjoys tickseed trefoil — no wonder, since it’s a legume, like alfalfa and clover.  Among humans, lamb’s quarters are favored fodder for the tree-hugging set, and violets for the more lah-di-dah set, but Gus skips both plants.  Same for betony and burdock; the low-growing, lacy-leaved pineapple weed; random potentillas, or cinquefoils; and a wild prunella known as heal-all.  But his priorities are unmistakable:  even the weeds he most enjoys, such as plantain and bedstraw, ain’t a patch on a patch of grass.  Gus, the purist in spite of himself.

45. Botanical notes

I eat a big green salad every day.  I love, severally and individually, each item I might toss in as happenstance and the season allow.  Romaine, leaf, and head lettuces each taste of a slightly different shade of green (even when they’re red); vidalia onion is sweet and pungent; pea shoots or sunflower sprouts bring a faint whiff of good, clean dirt; red bell pepper tastes as day-glo bright as it looks; and extras — say, kalamata olives and heirloom tomatoes, or sugarsnap pea pods and chunks of apple — just make the party merrier.  No wonder I get vicarious satisfaction from Gus’s gourmet grazing.

Clockwise from top-left: bedstraw, plantain,
buttercup, chicory, clover, fescue

His multi-acre larder is now featuring a nice mix of sprouting, blooming, and fruiting plants, which his nimble lips seek avidly, take as they come, or occasionally reject.  I’ve watched him, for example, insist on cropping the bedstraw that grows under the fence rails where the mower can’t reach.  Its flower clusters, leaves, and sticky stems seem equally delicious.  Rye, fescue, blue, crab — all grasses are welcome.  Clovers large and small are fine but don’t seem a particular delicacy.  Ditto for dandelions (entirely edible even when the seedheads are fluffy) and for the wilted catkins dropped by nearby trees — they’re like peels or seeds that you don’t relish but you don’t bother to pick out either.  Buttercups are rather toxic to horses, and Gus shares his buddies’ instinctive distaste for them.  He eats around them, although if a certain mouthful does snag a stray buttercup leaf or flower, he doesn’t bother to spit it out.

(And like horses, he’s an expert spitter-outer.  If he accidentally uproots a grass rather than nipping the blade off cleanly, he continues biting fresh grass and chewing what’s in his mouth without missing a beat, but soon the roots get poked out to the side and he scissors them off and lets them drop.  No threshing machine could sort more efficiently.)

I’ve subtly steered Gus toward certain plants just to see what his mouth will think of them.  He avoids chicory and hawkweed, but he likes plantains off all shapes and sizes, blooming or not.  Not surprisingly, he also eats some sort of wild-carrot thing that grows sparsely amidst the turf, so I expect he’ll go for Queen Anne’s lace later this summer.   More botanical adventures to come, for both of us saladheads.

44. Slow comeback

Three days after the violent accident with Gus, I go to the barn to reassure him that I haven’t inexplicably disappeared from his life.  I’m still woozy and weird, so I stay outside his paddock fence and feed him chunks of apple through the bars of the gate.  He’s restless and fussy, pacing back and forth, all but shouting at me to get him the hell outta there.  But I’m too feeble to handle him safely.  I give him my regrets, scratch his neck, and leave him to his ennui and frustration.

Two days after that, I return.  It’s a hot, sunny day and I figure I can poddle around well enough to bring him into the coolth of the indoor arena for some lazy, hands-off trick-training.  When I arrive, though, he’s not stewing in his usual paddock.  Because it’s a weekend when Sandy can stay on the premises all day to round him up if he escapes, she has turned him out in the wide, multi-horse paddock with all the good grass.  Will he want to come play with me, or will he blow me off to continue grazing?

I take his halter and walk way, way out through the grass to fetch him.  I give him my signature whistle, but far from stirring him to bray and run to my arms, as he usually does —

 — today it barely elicits an ear-twitch.  At one point, he raises his head and gives me a look, but he ponders my approach, weighing its value, for only a second or two before he opts for more munching.  

Just to be sure that he's sure, I feed him a treat and slip the halter on, and I lead him toward the gate in a very clear attitude of questioning and offering, not commanding or expecting.  He kinda comes along and kinda resists, but soon he pulls enough to tell me that he wants to stay out here.  So I promptly unbuckle his halter, give him a farewell treat, and walk back.  It’s a rare privilege for him to graze in this pasture, and I’m in no condition to provide him with a training session that he’d enjoy more.

                                   ___________________________________


The next day, my noggin is feeling appreciably better.  I load my apron with the carrot and apple chunks I’d saved from yesterday, and this time the sound of my car arriving is enough to get Gus hee-hawing.  He’s back in his own boring paddock, it’s late afternoon, and he’s ready for some diversion.  I try not to be too gingerly around him (I mean, what are the chances of lightning striking twice?), but I’m relieved that he walks politely into the arena and behaves nicely in everything we do.

I take off his lead rope and we walk over a few ground rails together.  I send him to his pedestal and he pirouettes.  We walk to a wooden mat and practice standing still on it before I invite him with slow, grand arm gestures to walk around to the next mat.  He stays with me for awhile, but then the siren song of the arena dirt lures him away to inspect and sniff all over.  I reattach the lead line and he willingly rejoins our walking and mat-standing. 

I also practice asking for the backup the way clinician Alex Kurland had showed me.  I slide my hand up the lead rope to the clasp, and I turn my arm to take more control of the rope right under his halter, but I only lightly suggest a backward pressure.  And I wait.  Eventually he does start backing, and I immediately release the rope pressure.  If he stops, I ask again.  After two tries, I can keep him backing for a few paces just by “pushing” the loose belly of the rope a bit under his chin.  Much kinder and gentler than poking my finger on his shoulder and leaning my weight into his halter.

We end on this high note, and he barely tugs at all as I lead him to our usual grazing field.  I make a point of standing farther away and farther back, but nothing happens to startle him anyway.  Without meaning to (or maybe it’s a deliberate plan?), he eats his way toward the unmown grass against the doorway of the small barn, and in he walks.  He looks with interest at the first few stalls and tack trunks as we stroll down the barn aisle, but then he stops dead.  Is he just now realizing where he is?  Or does he suspect a trap?  I manage to keep him going out the far door, and only a blip of resistance darkens his brow as we head for his own barn.

He walks right into his stall and behaves like a gentleman, even when his grain arrives.  I groom the bejeepers out of him, rolling up wad after wad of loose hair.  I pick out his mud-impacted feet.  And I leave — him to his freshly bedded stall and hay tub, me to my dinner at home.

43. Owwww . . .

After my collision with the runaway dumptruck that was Gus, I undertake a comprehensive consult with my favorite medical practitioner, Dr. Internet.  I learn that sufferers of concussion should avoid video and computer screens, but nevertheless I continue my consult long enough to confirm that no medical expertise or technology is required to diagnose concussion and that the only treatment for it is rest.  I learn that healing can take at least a week or two.  I get a sobering reminder of how damaging it can be to sustain a second head bump before a concussion has healed, so I sit quietly and walk carefully.  I learn the signs of a serious head injury, which I don’t have, but I read up on how to respond in case they develop.  I do have classic symptoms of a mild concussion:  persistent headache, fatigue, and a touch of mental fogginess. 

Also, as expected, every single muscle in my entire body is sore.  The slender cords in my throat from chin to collarbone, a surprisingly wide array of hip and shoulder sinews, little finger muscles I didn’t know I had — my every bend, turn, and inhalation makes them twang excruciatingly.  My very hair hurts.  I make an appointment with my sage and virtuosic physical therapist to ease my whiplash, and I settle into a routine of ice-packs and heating pads, napping and light reading, arnica and wintergreen and acetaminophen.

And to help pass the time, I make like a sportscaster analyzing a highlights reel.  Since Sandy was behind us and to our right, Gus shied away forward and to his left, where I was standing, rubbing his neck.  I’ve known since childhood never to loiter directly in front of equines, because they’re most frequently scared of goblins behind them, plus their vision is poor for objects (including humans) close in front of them.  Asleep at the switch, I had been standing imprudently adjacent to Gus’s head when he exploded.
 

And exploding is what equines do:  evolution has hard-wired them to panic first and ask questions later.  But even in terrified hysterics, they usually try to avoid crashes with humans.  As he trampled me, Gus actually, miraculously, managed to dance over my prostrate carcass without weighting his feet.  I clearly felt, and Sandy clearly saw, a hoof land flat on my breastbone, yet it left nary a bruise.  Impact with a charging donkey did me no harm; it was impact with the ground that hurt me.  Luckily it was springy, rain-softened turf rather than ice or pavement.

Still, exploding is what I could’ve done, if not for the competence of my skin and skeleton.  I can't help imagining, given how my hat and glasses flew (and I think my arms went spread-eagled too), that a breach in the sealed packet of my body would’ve resulted in a 180-degree internal-organ splatter zone behind ground zero.  I’m thankful that I stayed perfectly intact even under powerful G-forces — what a marvel is the human fuselage . . .

42. Ker-BLAM!

“Uh-oh . . . holy shit!” is the sound track to what briefly seems like the end of the world.  Here’s how it happens:

Gus and I shelter from the heat in the indoor arena, where we do some really quite nice long-lining, if I do say so myself.  I sometimes creep up too close behind him and let one or both reins go floppy, but I’m better at noticing it right away.  And every time I regain a gentle but steady contact on the reins, I instantly see him step out in his most businesslike way.  With that contact as our baseline, I can also take and give just a tiny bit to steer him left or right, so our zigzagging is evening out.  I remove the surcingle and reins, we do a few of our party tricks, and then we exit gladly for some grazing.  He’s now confident that I will let him graze, and I’m now confident that I will win the end-of-grazing battle to get him safely penned for the evening.  Joy and harmony embrace us.

While Gus gluts himself on grass, I stand alongside and rake my fingers through his fur, all over and repeatedly, to help him shed his winter coat.  He slips into a trance of eating and massage, two of his favorite pastimes ever.  Sandy arrives and begins her dinnertime chores, but we’re immersed in nirvana.

Next thing I know, there’s a wad of fur and bone pressing urgently into my face and chest, and I find myself stepping backward.  I only get two quick, short steps and then, in rapid succession, my feet are off the ground, I feel a slamming sensation, and my whole head is in agony.  “Uh-oh,” says a voice from afar.  The instant I realize that I’ve been knocked over backward, the next sensation I get is a hoof stepping onto my sternum and then a big movement and shadow across my body and away.  “Holy shit!” says the voice.  A second later, I feel a hand on my hand and the voice is asking me if I’m OK.

Amazingly, the wind is not knocked out of me, and I’m relatively comfortable sprawled there on the ground.  With my eyes still closed, I tell the voice, which I recognize as Sandy’s, “I think I’m actually fine.”  My first question, of course, is what the hell happened, and Sandy apologetically blames herself for not saying something before she turned on a water-hose.  Seriously??  Gus has seen and heard Sandy using a hose a thousand times before without feeling the need to spook — using the hose is no reason for her to apologize.  Dopey donkey. 

Now I realize that everything about my person that wasn’t buttoned or zippered has been sent flying by the impact.  My baseball cap has sailed way off to my side, and we finally find my glasses deposited on the turf at least three feet behind my head.  My extremities are uninjured, my retinas still in place (I had a detachment a few years ago that required major eye surgery to reattach it, so that’s always a concern for me), and my chest remarkably hoofprint-free; only my head is aching like a sonofabitch.  But I’m not queasy or dizzy or demented, so the concussion seems mild.  Sandy, always prepared, produces from her pocket two little vials of curative essential oils for me to apply to my temples and neck.  And she watches me like a mother hen to make sure I really am OK as I stand up and move around.

What about Gus, you ask?  He’s lounging a few feet away, cool as a cuke.  He’s had to relocate his grazing operation, since there’s a human selfishly spraddled across otherwise perfectly good eats, but he’s making do with the grass right nearby.  And what does he have to say for himself?  Bupkis.  The hose didn’t dance around or hiss like a snake, so what made his brain go white with panic?  All we can guess is that he was so profoundly blissed out that he lost all awareness of the world around him, and whatever he glimpsed or heard must’ve struck him as so surprising and alien that he startled like a stick of dynamite.

Already peace is upon the earth again, and Gus, thinking of dinner, hardly resists my leading him back to his stall.  I pick his feet and bid him goodnight.  On the drive home, I begin guessing which of my muscles will be sorest tomorrow.

41. Hairy behavior

Gus is shedding.  By the handful, bucketful, and mattressful.  

While he’s grazing after our sessions, I have nothing better to do, so I brush him steadily.  Usually I just use my fingers, rubbing him in circles and against the grain and up and down, shaking clumps of hair into the wind every few seconds.  Or if I remember to bring his gear out with me beforehand, I use a soft rubbery thing with big knobs to scrub the hair loose, then I scrape him with a hoop-shaped and slightly saw-toothed shedding blade, and then I finish with a regular brush.  But really I never finish.  No matter how many times I go over him and no matter how much hair comes out, the same amount is yielded by every next pass of a hand or brush.

(My dog, a Heinz 57 mix heavy on the hound and German shepherd, is the same right now.  I scrub and rub, and I rake with a shedding blade, and I brush and brush, and the quantity of released hair never diminishes.  Ditto for the hair still coating him:  he should be bald by now, but he’s no less shaggy than before.)

Gus’s bison brow is thinning, and his chest is smoothing out.  But his lush crop of belly fur still billows in the breeze, and the hair on his back piles up in swirls and rivulets.  I notice all these details, because our de-shedding sessions run to 30 and 40 minutes these days.  That’s how long it takes him to maybe slow down in his munching, and that’s when my attempt to terminate the session is less likely to result in knock-down, drag-out resistance.  

I’m gratified to report that the over-and-under lead-rope technique is still 100% effective at preventing any knock-down drag-out escapes.  Sandy has told me that it’s worked for her too.  Thing is, in operant conditioning like clicker-training, there’s a phenomenon called an extinction burst.  When an animal comes to expect that a behavior yields a desirable result and then finds that it no longer does, a common response is to intensify that behavior — to demand, goddammit, that it work as expected.  (If a toddler’s fussing has cued its parents to deliver a snack, but then they start ignoring it, the fussing may burst into a tantrum.)  If the trainer remains firm and consistent, this behavior burst precedes the extinction — the giving up and abandonment — of the behavior.  

While I’m braced for this with Gus's escaping the lead line, lately I’m beginning to hope we’ll get the extinction without the burst.  He does still yank and shove, and now he’s trying the signature donkey move of refusing to move.  But the new rope attachment has so far risen to every challenge and enabled us to get him from Point A to Point B no matter what.  And the what hasn't yet escalated into anything I'd call a burst.

He’s a smart guy.  He’ll learn that resistance is futile, and it’s easier to accede to his alien overlords.  Well . . . he would if he were a horse, or a dog, or a cow . . . but he’s not.  What we may have here is an 800-pound honeybadger with hooves.