157. VIDEO: Going postal

Today I introduce Gus to a brand-new trick: pull open the mailbox door, place an envelope in it, shut the door, and raise the little red flag on the side.  It’s a common dog (and squirrel?) trick, so I have every confidence that Gus can master it in no time.  Like his push-the-baby-carriage-then-remove-the-toy-and-carry-it-onto-the-pedestal-then-wave-it-up-and-down, this one is a chain of several behaviors.  But this one doesn’t include any previously established tricks like the pedestal and the waving of objects.  This one requires finer motor skills too.  So we start small.

First I show him the main prop, a big, metal rural mailbox.  He immediately sniffs it and shoves it and bites its edges and pokes his nose inside it . . .  I half-open the door, and when he happens to nudge it, I click and treat.  It only takes a handful of times before he realizes that pushing the door closed is a trick.  In fact, he seems to catch on immediately that a hard nose-bop will slam it shut with a nice bang, so he’s extra-fascinated and doesn’t want me to put it aside.  

But that’s all for today.  Soon enough we’ll move on to the more technical maneuvers, like tugging the shoelace that I attached to the door-tab for ease of opening.  Then there’s poking a letter (or a rolled-up newspaper might be easier?) inside and leaving it there.  And smooshing the little red flag upward along the side wall of the mailbox might be the toughest manipulation of all.  Never fear:  there’s nothing on God’s green earth that Gus won't be able to learn.

156. The only good thing about snow

A couple of small snowfalls are enough to squash the turf, now mostly brown anyway.  The grass is evidently still yummy, but nowhere near as irresistible as it has been.  As I lead him from his paddock, Gus still sometimes hauls me over to the grazing field, but after just a few minutes of browsing the damp, half-frozen, half-dead lawn he’s totally willing to come away and into the indoor arena with me.  I never thought I’d be grateful for snow, but:  Thank-you, o, icy harbinger of darkness and death!

Once in the arena, Gus quickly recalls all its joys:  the chance to roll in the scritchy, dry dirt; games to play that bring sure and certain treats; occasionally some new learning, to really get those axons and dendrites firing.  And I’ve learned how to lunge Gus the way Sandy taught him, so now he actually enjoys running around in circles to warm up and get some exercise.  Her method is not to use a whip at all, but instead to twirl the free end of the lunge line toward his rump as the “Go!” signal.  I still line up plastic chairs in front of the arena gate, but if I lunge him in his accustomed manner, he rarely even ponders pulling away and busting through the exit.  Around and around he trots, his long ears flapping and his teacup hooves twinkling as he bounces over a couple of poles laid on the ground.  I can even ask him to canter, though the gait change is hardly noticeable, because his legs and his strides are so short.   It’s like watching a dachshund run an agility course.

Without a compulsive grass fetish to distract him, Gus is back to his mostly mannerly, often affectionate, always educable self.

155. Steamed

Today I lead Gus out of his paddock with good faith that we’ll play in the arena, including some running around to drain the excess energy that’s helping to make him an obnoxious punk rampant lately.  Not halfway to the arena, my faith is shattered.  Gus is an unreconstructed evildoer: again he drags me onto his grazing patch and won't budge.

The first couple of times this happened, I granted him his grazing rights.  I rolled with his moods and acceded to his desires.  I retained my patience, aplomb, and bonhomie.  Well, not today.  Today his snotty behavior instantly forces steam from my ears.  Even though he’s wearing a tough nylon blanket, I wallop him over the back with the tail end of the lead rope.  And I holler very bad names at him.  All of which, of course, only fuel-injects my anger and his defiance.

Before heading off to find the lunge whip, I remember to unclip his lead line for safety.  Not that he deserves any safety, I grumble to myself.  As I stalk back toward him, whip in hand, I’m grasping for any shred of positivity in this galling predicament, and I determine that I’ll still accomplish my goal of getting Gus to cover some ground and burn up energy — I’ll just do it outside rather than inside the arena.

And so the whip-waving game begins again.  Even his goat-on-a-pogo-stick canter is faster than my run, so once he leaves me in the dust, he takes a moment to stop and chomp grass, giving me a sassy side-eye as I stonily close the distance between us.  He really doesn’t care if the whip slaps his hind end, so he grabs one last mouthful before he picks up and flees just an inch before the lash might reach him.  

In a useless bid for intimidation, I smack the whip against inanimate objects that might make a loud crack.  My eye glints as I trundle past a bare picnic table, and I snap the whip down on it hard.  It gives a gratifying bang, but then I’m instantly jerked up short as the lash, caught in a knothole of the tabletop, suddenly drags me back around.  By the time I extricate the freakin’ thing, Gus is way down the path and chowing leisurely.  Dammit!  Let me tell you, it’s not easy to laugh and fume and run all at the same time.

After 20 minutes of racewalking and jogging, and dropping the whip once when I turn my ankle, and other Keystone Koppery on both our parts, I finally manage to approach Gus, hold the whip behind him as just an ushering tool, and direct his head toward his own paddock gate — which I had cunningly set ajar during one of the several times we’d racketed past it.  Clang!  Whew!  He’s corralled again, and I can go home.  Indeed you could say that my huff arrived and I left in it.

Thanks, dear reader, for allowing me to vent here.  My fury has now ebbed, all the cut-up carrot and apple bits that I never got to treat Gus with are now in a baggie, and the prospect of using them on my next visit seems almost . . . promising.  Still, just in case he frustrates me again with flaming assholery, maybe I’ll also bring a large gun. 

154. Good news, bad news

He may be cute and winsome on video, but lately Gus is a major asshole.  These past few weeks, the grass is delicious, the weather is brisk, and the biting flies are much reduced.  Also, his paddock is muddy, so he’s mostly just standing and dozing on its small dry hill.  Evidently those factors add up to a gluttonous, spirited, bored, and therefore outrageously disobedient donkey.

Sandy says he’s been pulling away from her quite often when she leads him between stall and paddock; with me too, he’s being a complete and utter shitheel.  All he wants, all the time, is to graze.  And when he’s indulging in his heart’s desire, he’s sweet as pie.  But any alternative activity suggested by any human transforms him into a wicked, obstinate, sassy, vicious little monster.  I hope he sits on a tack.

Today, as we walk from his  paddock to the arena, he sets his neck, trots hard, pulls the lead rope from my hand, and runs into his favorite grazing area.  Nothing new here.  I allow him to eat for a good half-hour, but then I can’t get him to come off the lawn.  I wait.  I cajole.  I lure.  He tugs.  He wrestles.  He rams.  

I know from painful experience that my psoas and other core muscles cannot survive being yanked and torqued by an 800-pound bundle of pure insistence.  So I drop the rope, go fetch a long lungeing whip, and return, whapping it on the ground behind him to send him scurrying.  If he’s going to disobey, at least he won't get to keep gorging on grass.  So say I . . .  But he outmaneuvers me, and before I can run over and stop him, he crouches and crawls under a fence board to escape into the adjoining pasture.  There the three resident horses — very big, very athletic geldings — greet him joyously and commence galloping around with him.

Gus still has his long rope trailing from his halter, and that’s a safety hazard for all parties.  So now I climb through the fence, into the melee of flying heels and thundering hooves, to try to unsnap the damn lead-line.  I secure my own personal space by blocking the horses with the lunge whip, but that keeps Gus out of reach too.  Finally I make my way through the hullabaloo, speak quietly to Gus and approach him, and remove the rope.

Now the youngest and silliest gelding is herding Gus in a small circle at high speed, while Gus tries to get himself onto the far side of the older horse, whom he’s more familiar with.  When you see him right next to these big ex-racehorses, Gus is a shrimp, a peanut, a bug.  He’s gamely galloping about, grunting and squeaking as he kicks vigorously at the horses, but to them he’s just a big toy.  At this point he's wishing he hadn't busted into this paddock after all, and he begins eyeing the fence.  He rams his chest against a board, breaking it like a ballbat, but it’s too high for him to jump.  Harrassed by hijinks, he doesn’t have time to drop low and scoot under again.  I run to the pasture gate and invite him out that way, but he’s still fooling around with the three big boys.  

Anyway, now the hilarity is waning, and I figure he’s just fine.  (He used to be turned out here with the geldings regularly, but he kept busting out when he got bored.  That’s why he’s in a different turnout now:  it’s small enough to encircle with electrified wire, which is the only way to keep Gus in.)  I leave them to their own devices and help a friend who’s training Gus’s pasturemate -- a very nice, very polite gelding, thank you very much.  A few minutes later, when I glance out to the big paddock, I see Gus and his merry band just grazing placidly.

When Sandy arrives, she helps me lead/shoo Gus into the arena.  She picks up a lunge whip and stations me at the arena gate with another whip.  And she chases him around that arena, turning on a dime and switching the whip to her other hand in order to cut him off and turn him if he tries to run past her.  When he does head toward the gate, I’m there brandishing my whip, sending him back into the ambit of Sandy’s whip.  After just five minutes, he’s slowing down, so Sandy slows and relaxes her energy.  They both stop moving, and the former fiend turns and faces her quietly and submissively, just as if he’s memorized the horse-whisperer’s handbook.  He goes up to her, she gives him nice scritches, and they turn and walk slowly toward the gate.  When she stops, he stops next to her.  When she walks again, he comes along with her.  It’s magic, only it’s real.

At the gate, I clip the lead onto him and we stroll ever so nicely into his stall, where I dump his dinner into his feed bucket for him.  

153. Donkeymentary

A friend I met through dogsitting has made a short documentary inspired by this very blog.  A creative and clever amateur videographer, and a lover of animals of every stripe, she’s been filming Gus and interviewing me over the past several months, and now she’s posted her finished product here.  

Here's a short trailer:

152. VIDEO: Walking in circles

A large circle, marked by eight traffic cones, has been a popular arena installation lately.  Sometimes wooden mats are set just outside the cones.  It’s an easy way to help horses practice things like bending their bodies on an arc and matching paces with their humans.  As soon as Gus sees it, he's intrigued.

First we walk around it, me just inside the cones and him just outside them.  He already knows — and loves — stopping with his front feet on a mat.  As always, he gets a click and treat for each mat stop.  After one complete round, I begin to hang behind him just a bit and send him on ahead to each mat.  At first, he turns toward me and waits for me to catch up, but by adding a little finger-wave behind and a maitre d’ arm ahead, I can usher him to the mat pretty easily.  A few more clicks, and he’s got it down pat.

A couple of sessions later, I begin to sink away toward the center of the circle and hang back.  Now his concern about my distance from him actually trumps his supermagnet attraction to the mat:  he slows, he bumbles, he misses the mat.  I simply go back to him, start him off again toward the next mat, and shrink away a teeny bit less far.  When he does it well a few times, I try shrinking away a bit more again.  Cueing him with a verbal “mat” helps him remember that the goal is to reach the mat regardless of my location.

At this point, we reduce the number of mats, so they’re now several paces apart.  As I recede more toward the center of the circle, I resort to a tai chi-ish energy move, as suggested by Alex Kurland the clicker guru, to keep Gus from drifting inward with me.  It’s a slow pushing gesture, with my arms but also with my brains and bowels, to project outward energy and keep him on the perimeter.  

At first, I’m astounded that it actually works, as a midair energy transfer sounds like it’s straight from a kids’ comic book.  But then, Sharon Wilsie and other animal-whisperer types all agree that horses routinely communicate among themselves using, as it were, energy fields.  Minuscule changes in their posture or balance or breathing are enough to speak volumes, from invitations to requests to objections.  So, a little body English, some close observation, an assertive thought . . . and you’re talking right from the horse’s mouth.

It’d be fun someday to remove all the mats, stand in the very center of the circle, and just send Gus strolling around on his own.  For now, it’s all about how much he dotes on this exercise.  He wants to keep walking around and around and around.  When I switch to a pedestal game or some cha-cha, he often blows it off and returns to the cone circle.  Whatev:  it’s always donkey’s choice.

151. Silvery screen

As the temperatures spike into the 90s, nobody on two or four feet wants to move a muscle.  Instead I go to the movies with a great friend I met nearly 30 years ago, when I first  moved to Saratoga and shared her horse for awhile.  We opt for a frothy and charming little French confection about a wise and stoic donkey who helps to ground a quirky, lovelorn young woman.

Even more charming: because it has subtitles and lacks monsters or explosions, and because we choose a weekday matinee, we find only one other person in the cinema. 

My Donkey, My Lover, and I is the English title, but the original Antoinette dans les Cevennes is far better, because Antoinette rents Patrick the donkey from a trail-hiking outfitter in the Cevennes mountains.  She’s a schoolteacher who’s having an affair with the father of one of her pupils; when her lover has to leave town because his wife has booked them on a mountain donkey-pack tour, Antoinette rashly decides to crash their family vacation.  Of course she has no experience with equids, and of course Patrick refuses to budge for much of the early part of the trek.  She pulls, she pushes.  She begs, she curses.  But soon she learns about him and talks to him — he’s a good listener — so they come to an understanding and develop a sweet companionship.  The scenery is absolutely gorgeous, Patrick and another donkey named Lapin (or Rabbit) are excellent performers, and the human characters are delightful.

It’s no more than one inch deep, but it’s a blissful 90-minute escape from the blistering suns of August.  And it’s donkeys on the big screen, so . . . opposable thumbs up.

150. Free to flee

With temperatures in the low 90s, Sandy keeps the horses inside the barn during the day.  When their humans visit, they often get a nice hose-down while they graze.  The water is always quite cold when it hits the horses, but as it drips off it’s warm and even hot.  No wonder they feel so much better after a hosing.

Gus being Gus, a hose is out of the question.  It was the “fsssht!” of a hose being turned on 20 feet away from him that made Gus panic so hard that he bowled me down like a ninepin. Noisy or not, squirting water gives him the willies. But I’ve managed to ply him with sponge baths  — punctuated by frequent clicks and treats for standing still — which cool him down pretty well.  I squeeze big gluts of water onto the insides of his upper legs, with their thin hair and big surface veins; and I damp-sponge the outsides and insides of his ludicrous ears.

For today’s bath, I practice an aspect of “natural horsemanship” on Gus.  Using a small circular corral and no lead-rope, so-called horse whisperers will allow a wild or spooky horse to indulge its urge to run when afraid; in fact, they wave a scary little flag at it, so that being scared gets scarier; then, when the horse slows or looks at them, they drop the flag and relax, to ease the pressure; eventually the horse runs itself out and decides that the trainers are a refuge from the fear.  It’s not super-kindly, but its lack of reliance on rope restraint does give the horse some agency.  And agency is all-important to Gus.  

So rather than holding Gus with one hand and squeezing the sponge with the other, I leave him at liberty.  When he submits to a sploosh of the sponge, he gets a click and treat.  But after three or four splooshes, the ickiness of being wet or the tickliness of being drippy is suddenly too much to bear and he stalks away to stand in the middle of the arena.  I wait.  He knows I have an apron full of treats.  Maybe I smooch to him and pat my belly invitingly, but I stay put.  In 20 seconds or so, he walks toward me, and I reward him for deciding to return.  A few more spongeings, and he takes his leave again.   Soon his exits just become circles as he loops right back to me.  I don’t want to keep rewarding the walk-away behavior, so upon arrival now I welcome him verbally, but he gets no click-and-treat.  What he does get is a chance for more spongeing, which is a chance for more rewards.

We both like this method:  it’s fully voluntary for both parties, and I’m sure not to stress him too much, because he’ll walk away before that happens.  The result is successful too:  I rinse down not only his legs and ears, but also his back and chest and neck.  When we retire to his stall for his dinner, he’s plenty soaked and happily parks himself in front of his box fan.  Cool as a cucumber in the pits of summer.

149. Bubblewrap

It’s full-on fly season now.  Solitary horseflies as big as your thumb hover and harrass, and when they bite it feels like a bee sting and then itches for days.  Stable flies home in on the lower legs of any livestock they can find; in Gus’s case, they jockey for position wing to wing, each trying to access just enough skin to reach the superficial capillaries on his shins.  Face flies and ear gnats swarm and bite, leaving swaths of little scabs.  They all compete with deer flies, mosquitoes, no-see-ums of various stripes, and the various truly evil tormentors who specialize in attacking eyes, or genitalia, or wounds . . .

Nevertheless, it’s good for Gus’s brain and body to be turned out with his pasturemate Bobby, and with a little hillside of grass to nibble, and with the smells and sights and sounds of the farm to monitor.  Since spring, when the little ear-biters hatch, we’ve turned him out with a flymask that covers his head in a stiff nylon mesh to allow vision for him but no entry for flies.  Around the summer solstice, when the stable flies arrived, we added fly socks, also made of stiff mesh that protects his lower legs.  And now the variety and numbers of pests are so high that he goes out wrapped in full-body armor.  

As warm weather approached, Sandy — a seamstress as well as horsewoman and infinitely catholic factotum — carefully tucked and tailored a horse-sized fly sheet to fit Gus’s donkey torso.  The sides hang low, almost down to his socks, so he looks like a stumpy medieval charger in armor and colors, ready for a miniature joust.  So far, we think it’s helping:  I haven’t yet found him screwed tight into his shrubby hidey-hole where he spent a lot of last summer.

During trick-training in the arena, Gus still gets naked.  It’s a chance for me to wipe his eyes and scratch his face, and empty his socks of the shavings that get in there when he lies down in his stall.  And after our session, we still go out grazing, since he finds the flies magically less annoying when he’s chewing.  The grass and clover are mangier these days, but the up-side is that Gus is actually willing to quit grazing before the flies eat him down to a skeleton.  On the sultriest days, when the bugs are always at their worst, Sandy leaves him inside, or brings him back in early, so he can shelter in the shady barn with his big electric box-fan blowing on him.

It’s a little sad that he’s a boy in a bubble, but it beats being bug bait.

148. Sideways

Along with our back-and-forth cha-cha steps, I’d like to teach Gus some grapeviney side-winding.  I made a basic, ballpark start by placing three mats in a row and asking him to step onto the next mat over.  But as I feared, it’s not easy to keep his body straight; he tends to bend his spine or swing his hips so that he comes at the mats on a diagonal.  (Years ago, I taught my doggie-dancing partner Dinah the wonderpoodle to keep her body facing straight ahead while sidepassing [check it out here, starting at 1:05], but it’s easier with a 50-pound, hip-high animal than with an 800-pound, shoulder-high one.  To keep Dinah’s back straight, I just had to keep her head in place, and I did that by holding a treat right where I wanted her nose to be.  I can’t similarly maneuver my little arm and Gus’s big neck . . .)

Can't wait for the human
to join the dance...

Today, I try a device often used by Western trail riders to teach the sidepass:  a ground pole.  From our cha-cha practice, Gus already knows how to step halfway across a pole, stopping with his front feet ahead of it and his rear feet  behind it.  Now I place two mats side by side and just in front of the pole.  This setup immediately helps Gus get the idea.   If he wants to avoid bumbling and tripping over the ground pole with his rear feet, he can’t veer or turn his body.  To keep his hind end clear as he straddles the pole, he can only make a purely sideways step to get his front feet onto the next-door mat.

Also I prevent him from rushing in hopes of getting treats faster (see photo; harrumph).  Between each sidestep, I signal the-grownups-are-talking with clasped hands, and he stands still, waiting for my “sideways” cue.  

Moving to his right, he usually executes the one-and-a-half or two sidesteps to the mat quite nicely and gets a click and treat.  Moving to the left, he takes one good step and then loses his posture, swings either his shoulders or his hips out of sync, and shuffles sloppily onto the mat.  No problem:  next time, I click and treat after the very first step — which pause allows him to stay in correct alignment — and then he takes the next step and gets another click as he reaches the mat.  Soon he’ll figure out the leftward movement without as much help.  Then we’ll be able to space the mats farther apart, and then remove them altogether, and voilà:  electric-slide donkey boogie.

147. Chowhound

I hardly dare say this out loud, but Gus is still agreeing to end his grazing sessions pretty politely.  One reason might be that he’s discovered a swath of very lush, very tall grasses in a corner that never gets mowed, so a few minutes of gorging on that bounty seems to fill up his belly.  Once sated, he can accept the announcement of quitting time.

Today he avoids the spent dandelions, although his grazing buddy Henry the quarterhorse focuses intently on harvesting only dandelions, bundling a big sheaf of them, complete with their fluffy seedheads, into his capacious mouth.  Gus does scarf up some white-flowering chickweed that’s inextricable among the grass blades.  He and Henry both eat daintily around each neon-yellow buttercup, nudging its leaves aside as they pluck its neighbors.  

Over in the tall grass, there’s a weedy little mulberry tree with fresh new leaves and tight green flowerbuds.  Taking a momentary break from the grass, Gus reaches up and pulls a few tree leaves into his mouth.  If they cling to the branch and he can’t jerk them free, he adjusts his grip to bite down hard on the woody twig and detach it wholesale.  It gets noisily chewed up together with the leaves.  After Gus swallows maybe three mouthfuls of mulberry this way, he drops his head into the shoulder-deep grass again.

All the while, I’m improving my idle time by scrubbing my fingers over his back and sides, loosening great tufts of fur, in hopes of hurrying along his epic summertime shedding process.  As usual, he’s itchy and his skin is getting scurfy, and he’s losing fur in ugly patches.  Whether from scratching against a fencepost or tree or from clawing with a hind hoof, he’s now got a huge, raggedy-ass patch of bare skin on one side of his neck.  Rubbing his back today, I suddenly feel a mildly sickening release and come up with a dense hair-wad the size of a kaiser roll; parting the fur around the area, I find a matching expanse of pinkish skin.  

Every spring Sandy ponders how to respond to this asinine alopecia.  Topical remedies include CBD salve, diaper-rash cream, or cortisone ointment; systemic meds range from Benedryl pills to de-stung stinging-nettle leaves in his feed.  Every summer Gus finally ends up with a nice, smooth coat.  But in between, it’s an ugly and uncomfortable ordeal.  In paddock and stall, he suffers the tortures of the damned, don’t you know; out grazing, somehow he enjoys miraculous relief.

146. Patience over anger

With an electro-stim TENS device, extra-strength acetaminophen, wintergreen and arnica and other herbal rubs, and a brilliant physical therapist, my spine and guts are recovering from the tug-of-war with Gus, the long-eared Sherman tank.

Today I bring an apple, in hopes that bribery and luring might aid my cause.  This time, I give him a good 30 minutes of gluttonous grazing before asking him to quit and come away.  Lifting his head is a bit of a haul, but when he pushes and curls and objects, I can dance away without stressing my back.  And instead of applying any pressure on the lead rope to ask him to start walking, I stand and wait.  With no fight to engage in, he seems a bit flummoxed.  He presses the top of his head into my side and leaves it there; a thin wisp of smoke curls out of both ears as he tries to rethink.  I mention the magic words “It’s time for your dinner.”  He doesn’t budge.  I use a maitre d’ gesture to usher him forward and I chirrup, “Walk on!”  Nada.  I show him the apple, which he sniffs, but then he bulls forward a few steps and rams his head back down to the turf and grabs a bite of grass.  

I lift his head again and we wait again, both of us cursing under our breaths.  I bite the apple and hold the juicy bitten piece right at his nostril, and now he eyes it and he eyes me — and he begins walking off the pasture.  We walk briskly all the way into his stall, where I toss the apple piece into his bucket and slam the door shut behind us.

Praise the Lord, a strategy may be developing.  Waiting is crucial — Gus hates feeling rushed or pressured.  Letting him make the first move is crucial — he will do nothing that isn’t his own decision to do.  And bribery with sweet treats is crucial — his natural gluttony often trumps his other agendas.

Start your clocks:  how quickly will Gus hatch some new scheme of resistance, devise an alternative escape plan, and outwit me yet again?

145. Taking the spring out of springtime

The early May grass at Gus’s farm is gorgeous.  All the equids are gobbling it up like starvelings.  For me, that presents the perennial problem of getting Gus to leave the pasture when his grazing time is up.  The horses may resist a bit when their owners pick up the lead rope and head them away from the grass, but they reluctantly assent and follow politely along.  Not Gus.  As with all things in his life, Gus does not do what he doesn’t want, and nobody can make him, so there.

Each spring, I have to remind myself how to handle — or avoid handling — this intractable problem.  With the lead rope looped both over and under his muzzle, I can prevail if it cinches tightly, and if I give it a bit of slack before he hits the end of it, and if I pull back with all my weight.  It’s not fun, but it seems preferable to letting him realize that he can pull the rope away and run off and keep grazing.

Today, I need to bring Gus into his stall  after about 20 minutes on the grass.  He shoves his anvil-like head into my ribs and pushes me away.  I dance around and evade.  He dips his head to drape the lead across his neck and starts to pull away hard.  I scurry to his other side, bringing the line off his neck again.  He backs up and backs up and backs up, until I grip the rope, at which instant he barges forward and then curls back against me.  Now I’m getting steamed and tugging on the rope, which irks him so that he resists more . . . and war is declared.  When he turns tail and revs into a fast trot straight away from me, I hang on for dear life, vituperating through gritted teeth.  He tows me across the whole pasture, my arms outstretched, my body leaned back, my knees bent to stay low, and my feet running fast to avoid being pulled down.  Not a dignified picture.

But I freakin’ win, damit!  The rope’s latch-snap digs into Gus’s chin so he finally stops running.  After that, I gather up the rope and he marches alongside me into the barn like a good soldier.  He’s smart enough to know when resistance is futile.  

Me, I’m not that smart.  Or that athletic anymore.  Within two minutes, I realize I’ve strained some crucial core muscles:  I’m not hurting, but I’m feeling jittery and woozy and almost queasy — some major abdominal nerve is panicking . . .  As I groom Gus and put away our musical toys, I begin to feel pain illuminate my lower back and wash down my right leg.  Shit!  When I suffered this same injury years earlier, from hours of digging in clay soil to haul out a buried hunk of heavy iron, the misery lasted for many months.  And here I’ve done it again just because I got mad at a donkey?  Who’s the ass now?

While I nurse my sore back, I ponder what to do when next I visit Gus.  He does need to be grazed — it’s good for his belly and brain.  But he does need to stop grazing at some point, and how can I make that happen?

144. VIDEO: Orchestrations

My friend Paul — he who so sturdily up-armored the drum and cymbals foot pedals — has furthered Gus’s musical career yet again.  I told him my aspirations for a bicycle-horn holder that could attach to the Sweet-Ass bandstand, and he devised the perfect solution. 

Onto a piece of two-by-four, he seated a firm but flexible rubber housing for the base of a CB radio antenna; into that he vertically inserted a thin fiberglas-plastic rod (such as homeowners use to mark the edges of their driveways for the winter snowplows); and at its top end, he attached a stub of PVC pipe and clamped on a new, plastic, hot-pink bulb horn that squeaks like the loudest and most obnoxious dog toy imaginable.  He even drilled a small hole through each end of the rod and used little cotter-pin devices to prevent the rod and the horn from twisting or spinning.  It’s a MacGyver of beauty.

And Gus loves it very much.  I wondered if he might at first be alarmed by the horn’s squawk being so much louder and more sudden than the old horn’s, but I shoulda known:  when he’s the one causing the noise, the brasher the better.  I still like the classic lower pitch of the old horn too, so I’m dreaming up ways to mount that one next to the new one.  And to teach Gus yet another conductor’s hand-signal to differentiate between the two . . .

[Here's one 90-second video, if you

prefer that to these staccato snippets...]

At this point in our studies, we’re pretty clear and reliable with the downward-pointing arm for stepping on the cymbals pedal and with the slow horizontal arm for playing the keyboard.  He’s still keener on stomping the pedal, so usually we start our “mi-mi-mi” warmups with him ignoring my keyboard signal and instead just pounding away on the cymbals.  But soon we get into sync, and the concerto begins to take shape.

Of course, any orchestration requires not just notes but also rests (unless it’s by Philip Glass, whose music beats any psy-ops torture at inducing abject, driveling insanity).  And no artiste can segue between “Flight of the Bumblebee” and “Sabre Dance” without risk of seizure or syncope.  Therefore, especially given Gus’s near-obsession with his music, I feel it important for his health and welfare to ensure that he take a breather now and then.  Since he’s an expert at backing up for the cha-cha and he’s an old hand at “the grownups are talking (so just stand still and be patient),” I can ask him to step away from the bandstand and then invite him back to it with a modicum of calm and control.

For directing Gus to the horn, my thumb-and-fingers squeeze gesture is still a work in progress:  I need to learn where to place my hand so that Gus can see it beyond his enormous snout, and Gus needs to learn that it’s not an invitation to nuzzle my hand for a treat.  He also needs to firm up his understanding that the bulb is the part of the horn to bite, rather than its flared bell.  The shriek of this new horn seems so gratifying to him that I’m confident he’ll learn these finer points in no time at all.

Next, watch for video of our newest instrument:  the jingle bells.