108. Smokin’

Standing around while an animal grazes may have its pleasures, but it’s far from intellectually engaging.  So while Gus grazes, I make it my business to shoo away the biting flies by swinging the lead rope against his legs, gently scraping my boot along his shins, and chasing them off his belly and back.  I also make myself useful with brushless pre-grooming:  running my hands all over him to scrub off dead hair and wipe away any clinging mud or shavings or other debris.  

Today the winds are gusty.  That helps keep the flies off him, but I quickly realize it also reveals just how filthy he is.  In the past couple of days, he’s rolled repeatedly in a dust-bath wallow that he and his pasturemate Henry have excavated in their sandy-soiled paddock.   Now each time I rub Gus’s fur or pat his back, a visible puff of superfine dust erupts into the air and blows away.  I rub and pat and rub and pat, and the puffs just keep rising and blowing.  Trapped between his skin and his coat is what must be a wheelbarrowful of powdered dirt.

Absorbed in his grassy feast, Gus is oblivious, but I’m having a high old time watching the billows burst from under my hand.  I begin thumping him in syncopated rhythms, emitting complex smoke signals.  As I pat his back and neck and rump like a beatnik on bongos, he just grazes on, smoldering nonchalantly in the breeze.  Summertime, and the living is hazy.

52. Gus gets a booboo

I’m commiserating just a bit with the freaks among us who don’t love summer.  Myself, I loathe winter and adore summer — except for the biting flies.  They’re so vicious and voracious in the paddocks lately that I find myself actually looking forward to colder weather.

While the bugs are equal-opportunity tormenters of the horses, they single out Gus for extra persecution.  Sandy warned me about this:  put him next to any horse in any field, and Gus will always have double or triple the number of flies swarming him.  Sure enough, when I take him out for grazing, he’s covered in flies from the knees down, he never stops swishing his useless little cow-tail, and he shivers his back and belly skin almost continuously.  Sandy also warned me that he won’t tolerate being spritzed with bug repellent.  So nowadays, since he’s mostly shedded down to his sleek summer coat, I occupy myself while he grazes not by scrubbing off his loose hair but by swinging the end of the lead-rope around his ankles to shoo off the flies.  Which sometimes just cling harder (probably flipping me the bird with a spare claw) as the rope swipes over their backs.  And which always reconvene one nanosecond after the rope swings away.

Within in a day of gnats arriving on the farm, Gus’s ears were filled with little scabs.  From that day forward, he has to wear a fly-mask — a donkey-tailored version with risibly long ear pockets — whenever he’s out in his paddock during the day.  He kinda hates the fly-mask.  Its mesh is stiff enough to stand off his face a bit so he can blink freely, but it makes his head hot and itchy.  The minute I remove it, he tries to rub his forehead against me; I’m teaching him to stop barging into my chest and to let me scratch his face with my hand.  At least it keeps the gnats away.

The huge green-headed horse flies wait for really hot weather, but  the leg-biting stable flies have already joined their gnatty accomplices in livestock torture, and Gus’s ankles are as scabby as his ears were.  We apply little mesh fly-socks, but they tend to bunch up and scrunch down as he strolls the pasture.  One heavy, humid day, I whistle to him and he runs back and forth near the gate until I get there. 

He’s swarming with little flies.  He can barely stand for haltering (though treats help, of course), and he trots down the path into the arena. I remove his fly-gear and start leading him around, but he’s reluctant to walk, and I notice that he’s licking his lips nonstop.  He occasionally rubs his face on his front leg or reaches around to his flank to bite at a fly (several followed him from his paddock), but mostly he just stands there dully, licking and licking.  I feed him a treat, but once he’s swallowed it he continues pointlessly licking his chops.  If he were a dog, this would signal nausea or poisoning, but equids can’t vomit, and they’re prone to colic and gastric torsion that can be fatal.  I pull Sandy away from her chores to check on him.  I’d looked him over a bit and noticed nothing, but she quickly finds a chafed sore on his front ankle.  And when she touches it, he lowers his head and licks it.  Aha . . .

I’d have pegged Gus as a tough customer, but this reveals that he’s no stoic.  His Very Bad Booboo is debilitating, shutting down all bodily operations except for licking obsessively in an effort to ease the ouch.  The ever-resourceful Sandy dabs old-fashioned diaper-rash cream on the raw spot, and after he pulls his foot away a couple of times, he’s visibly soothed.  And he stops licking.  And we have a nice session of walking and cone-fetching and pirouetting.  He even pushes over a steel 50-gallon drum, and I ask him to bop it like a (much heavier) beachball. 

To ensure that the barrel rolls straight ahead, I click and treat only for applying his snout to its center section, and he sends it up and down the arena with gusto.

Sandy and I resolve to get  some new and softer fly-socks for Gus, but we can’t use them anyway until his booboo is finished healing.  My, the trials and tribs of a donkey living on Easy Street . . .