Today again, Gus is a consummate ass. He’s contrararian and inscrutable. He comes in from his paddock just fine, rolls luxuriously, trots along with me around half the arena and gets a click and treat, and then metamorphoses into an impossible brat. He pulls the lead line over his jaw and across his thick neck and trots hard toward the gate. I lean back with all my weight, get towed along, and eventually stop him. I offer to let him roll again. Phooey, he says. I bring out his favorite wooden mat. He turns his back on it. I unsnap the lead line and set him free. He stands like an ox.
I stroke and prod him all over, looking for an injury or sore spot, and he seems fine. When I pat my belly and back away, he comes to me and eats up his treat as avidly as usual. But he refuses to walk farther away from the arena gate. When Barbara tells me that her quarterhorse Henry was apathetic and listless today too, and that all the two of them did was wander fecklessly around the stable grounds, I decide to indulge Gus as well. As I walk out of the arena, he stays behind, standing at the open gate and looking vaguely sheepish, so I hook up the lead line and give him a maitre d’ “this way, sir” gesture, and he comes along. I let him choose our itinerary.
First he visits his preferred grazing field, only to realize it's snow-covered. Just under the barn eaves is a strip of bare grass that lures him over. But the roof is dripping snowmelt, and that’s just too yucky on the back of his head. We depart for a stroll down the driveway. Gus stops to greet the big geldings over their paddock fence; he and Lar nuzzle sleepily, then he lets Sky nibble his halter once or twice, before he moves away; and he spends a few minutes eating a desultory mouthful or two from a little hank of hay that got dropped outside the fence. His every action is carried out in affectless slo-mo. (Horse-speak trainer Sharon Wilsie’s “swimming underwater while on Valium” comes to mind . . .) Gus plods on down the driveway, where the snowplow has uncovered some narrow strips of grass. He picks at these with zero enthusiasm.
To lure Gus back up the driveway toward the barns, I toss bits of apple and carrot from my treat apron. When he sees them land and bounce ahead of him, he follows them and lips them up. But as we apporoach his barn, he digs his hooves in and leans baaaaack. OK, say I, wanna return to your paddock, where your pal Henry is hanging out? Up yours, he replies. At this point, I kick him hard and beat him with the lead rope. Oh, I do not, much as I half-wish to. Instead I let him explore a nearby paddock, empty of horses now but containing many manure piles and two small hay piles. Gus inhales data from several poops, and then drops a load himself. He noses through each hay pile, but barely eats a stalk or two. Yet when I suggest we move on, he refuses adamantly.
Now I yell insults and punch him in his stupid face. No, I don’t; of course not. I bite my tongue and convince him kindly and patiently to decide to come away with me. At last he marches nicely into his stall — he knows it’s nearly dinner time — and lets me groom and reblanket him with minimal defiance. What the . . . ??
There’s no full moon to blame this on now. Maybe it’s the barometer shifting, as wet weather is in the offing. Or maybe it’s just a pissy day in the life of a sometimes pissy donkey.
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