Two days pass, and today Gus seems his old self. He wants to trot around and seems comfortable doing it. He pops onto his pedestal and begins pirouetting the instant I barely ask. We invent a new game — walking figure-eights in the back corners of the barn (where the walls help shape our fairly tight circles) — and he grooves on it. He doesn’t crank his neck and wrap the lead rope over his snout in order to pull it harder away from me. He doesn’t plant his feet and pretend to be deaf and blind. When we leave the arena, he does refuse to return to his stall and insists on taking me outside instead, for some grazing on the frosty, matted, brown lawn. These all strike me as indicators of peak health in Little Caesar.
I give Sandy this update, and she recounts how, that morning, he barged out the paddock gate before she could get his halter buckled. Yep, this is the Gus we’ve come to expect. And curse. And love.
We’re still keeping an eye on him, trying to judge which of his ornery transgressions might stem from his feeling bad and which simply reflect his feeling fine. And we’re hoping hard for more fine-ornery in future.
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