54. Gimme shelter

Gus’s refuge

The dog days of summer are not for donkeys.  As the humidity climbs, so do the biting flies, boiling up from the ground and swarming Gus from hoof to poll.  Ever resourceful, he’s managed to hollow out a donkey-shaped hidey-hole in the thickets in the back corner of his paddock.  It’s shady in there, and the ground is bare dirt, so it’s less buggy than the sun-soaked grassy areas.  He crams himself into it, stands very still, and waits for deliverance. 

When I arrive and whistle, he bolts from it and canters down to the gate to meet me.  His shoulders and legs are thick with flies, and he can’t bear to stand still for me to buckle his halter; once I shove it on and fling open the gate, we hurry straight into the arena.

In his past days of severe ennui, before he was getting enough work and fun, Gus routinely barged anyone who opened the paddock gate.  Barbara, Henry’s owner, often needed Sandy as a fender-offer so that she could safely extract her horse without letting Gus escape.  In recent months, she reports, he’s been much more polite.  As if he’s confident that his person will come and he’ll get his turn, he magnanimously grants Barbara and Henry enough space to leave the paddock unmolested.  But then last week he again became a flight risk:  he was so fly-frantic that he ignored her signals to stay back and tried to bowl her over bodily and plunge out the gate.  She resorted to yelling and swatting with Henry’s lead line to send Gus away, slipping Henry out and slamming the gate behind her just in time.  I'm ever so sure that Gus apologized like a contrite drunk, saying he was not himself and it was just the flies talking.

Sandy treats Gus with dab-on bug repellent that’s supposed to last for two weeks, but the swarms persist.  She’s able to spritz some insecticide on him, but like most brands of fly spray, it’s effective for mere minutes.  (Maybe these chemicals would be as effective as they advertise if we had cooler, breezier weather, or a habitat that’s less infested, or some strain of kinder, gentler bugs?)  His fly mask keeps his eyes and ears protected.  And his dapper new fly socks work well, but from the knees up his legs are scaly with masses of clustered scabs.  He also has spatterings of bug bites on his neck and body.

On the really tropical afternoons, all we can do is park him in his stall.  It’s not just dark and dry and cool; it has a box-fan bungee-corded to the rails, blowing a blessed breeze right where he stands to munch his hay.  As much as he usually hates being confined, he’s visibly relieved to be in there.  He even leaves off grazing after just a few minutes, entirely of his own volition, and practically walks himself into his stall.  After he has his dinner and I offer to take him back outside, he digs in his hooves and leans back; the only allowable destinations, he tells me, are the arena or his stall.  And so it shall be.

Between his shrubby self-made hidey-hole and his plush human-engineered stall, Gus leads quite the charmed and sheltered life.