I Kind of Like You

There's something about Minnesota weather in late February/early March that can madden a person. The calendar suggests that spring is around the corner, but the weather remains firmly stuck below zero--or at least that's what it's been lately with the wind chill factored in--and this has been going on for weeks. I've tried to keep the bird feeders filled and the birdbath topped off. I've spent countless hours driving out to the barn, 45 minutes each way in good weather, to put my horse Tuula's blanket on, or take it off. If it looks like the weather will be below zero, the blanket goes on. If it looks like it will stay reliably above zero, including wind chill, the blanket is off.

I bought Tuula about six years ago from a place known as a kill pen. There are many these places where unwanted horses end up before being shipped to Mexico for slaughter. The horses might be injured, too old for regular work, have behavioral issues, or be too expensive to maintain. The kill pen where I found her advertised each week's horses online so people would have the opportunity to buy them for what they were worth as meat, a last chance before being loaded into a trailer and sent south. The last time I checked, this kill pen had nearly a 100% placement rate, so it's clear they were doing some measure of good in an industry that has a dark side.

I heard about this place when I was looking for a new horse. It brought me back to when I was a teenager and realized I had made a terrible, irreversible error. The horse I had through high school was boarded at a place that was sold. There didn't seem to be any other places in the Duluth area that had boarding that cheap, and many of the other kids were selling their ponies to a local dealer who promised to find them new homes. I was going away to college anyway, so I did what the other kids did. I sold my horse to the same outfit. When I returned home on winter break, I was curious about what had happened to my horse and called the dealer. At first he said something about an auction in Mora, then recognized my concern and said my horse had been bought by a little girl who would gentle him. It was a preposterous, romantic lie. I realized then that I had sent my beloved horse to a slaughterhouse.

Rescuing another horse from that fate wouldn't cancel what I had done, but perhaps it would be a form of reparation. When Tuula came up to me in the kill pen and put her nose in the halter I carried on my shoulder as if to say, "Please take me out of here," I knew I had to do what she asked. Eventually I would figure out that the reason she was there was that she was essentially untrained. She was smart enough to follow the horse in front of her but didn't know any human signals. This resulted in an utter fail on her second day at a children's summer camp, and she was sent to the kill pen.

The place where I board Tuula is not what most people envision when they think of horse boarding. Where we are, the horses live in a pasture year-round, not a barn. Retirees with horses are the ones responsible for the day-to-day basics: enough hay in the winter, enough water at all times, pasture rotation in the summer, and so on. It's not a glamorous place--for boarders, there's an old refrigerator in the unheated tack room for beer and carrots and an aqua blue port-a-john that gets "refreshed" once a week.

The horses have a sheet metal shed for shelter as well as a roof over the outside wall of a barn, but most of them decline those amenities. They prefer to stay at the top of the hill gathered around several hay racks, eating all day or gazing towards the horizon, perhaps wondering whether the snow really does go on forever. Sometimes they nest in spilled hay, curling up like large cats and lightly snoozing. Some of them flop down and lie completely flat in an unnerving imitation of a dead horse.

Horses generally don't die from Minnesota winters. They grow winter coats that insulate them from the cold--snow shouldn't melt off their backs. They generate heat by constantly eating, and the colder the weather, the faster the food supply diminishes. This pace of eating to stay warm is harder to do as a horse ages and has wear issues with teeth, but Tuula is comparatively young--in her prime, as Miss Jean Brodie would say--and probably could get by without a blanket. Yet her winter coat is fairly short, more posh thoroughbred than plushie Welsh pony. So lately I've been thinking that while a horse in her condition probably can survive the direst parts of winter without a blanket, that doesn't necessarily mean said horse is happy to do so.

Thus the seesawing February weather has meant that my own behavior must seesawed as well--driving out to put the blanket on one day, driving out to take it off the next. The calendar for February reads: 2/1 "Windy! Blanket on," 2/5 "Blanket off," 2/6 "Blanket on," 2/7 "Blanket off, did loop in the woods," 2/11 "Blanket on!" 2/14 "Blanket off," 2/15 "Windy! Blanket on," 2/19 "Cold, windy, blanket still on," 2/20 "Very warm! Blanket off," 2/21 "Blanket on..." you get the idea.  I don't like keeping the thing on her for long periods of time because it can cause wear marks and chafing, like what humans would experience if they had to wear the same items of clothing 24/7.

Tuula seems to enjoy her blanket. When I put it on, she stands regally, ears forward, posing like one of the model horses I used to play with as a child. Researchers wondering whether horses can learn to read symbols devised an experiment where horses indicated whether they wanted their blankets on or off by touching a pictures of horses with or without blankets. The horses learned quickly and made intentional decisions, asking for blankets in cold and inclement weather, then asking for them to be taken off when the weather was nice.

When I first read about this study, I daydreamed about teaching Tuula this trick, but then reality set in. I'm not at the barn often enough to act on her requests. I could imagine her pawing away at a picture of a horse, kicking at the paint in frustration. If I taught her this method of communication, I'd also have to teach her how to make a phone call and have some person stationed in the neighborhood willing to drive over at a moment's notice. "Yes, I know it's midnight, but Tuula just called, and she'd like her blanket now. There's a nasty front coming in from the northwest."

One thing she seems to have learned this year is that when the blanket goes on, it means that bad weather is coming. That, and the fact that I often can't stay long due to the cold or my schedule means our visits lately have been tinged with a bittersweet melancholy. I'll get there, ready her feed, then call to her. She usually sees me, whinnies, and ambles on in. Sometimes she's already near the gate, and she sees me before I see her. She looks at me, catches my eye, then gives a little whinny as if to say, "Here I am."

She doesn't get much feed, really just a symbolic gesture of being fed, and I brush her down, give her a few treats, and talk to her. She seems to enjoy my conversation and sometimes gives a little tug on the brass ferrule on my barn jacket. It's at nose level for her, at the end of the string that tightens my jacket's hood.

I wasn't completely surprised when she first started doing this. I had already noticed that Tuula likes to chew on metal. Perhaps it's a fidget or stress reliever, like when she was getting irritated with the farrier holding her hoof in the air but settled down when I gave her the snap end of a lead rope to play with. She loves having me put her bridle on, and when I take it off, I have to go slowly so she can chomp on the bit several times before letting it slide out of her mouth. She once picked up the metal twist-off cap from a wine bottle, and it took four of us trying to hold her mouth open, saying, "Drop it, drop it," before she did, leaving us with a bent mess of metal.

When she first started tugging on the ferrule a few years ago, I didn't know what she was saying. Was it her idea of a joke? Sometimes it seemed she was holding the string of it in her mouth like a pacifier.

In these cold February days where I have just enough time to get to the barn, feed her, brush her, then put the blanket on or take it off, it seems like we're both sad to part. We've developed a ritual where I dispense a certain number of crunchy treats and a certain number of molasses treats as I walk her back to the pasture and take off her halter. Then she waits by the fence at the corner closest to the tack room and watches me through the tack room windows as I walk back and forth, putting things away, before coming back outside to deliver the last two treats.

Lately, we've been standing at the fence together after those last two treats, and maybe I'm softly rubbing her ears or the whorl of her forehead. I sigh, apologizing that I have to leave so soon. I tell her to stay safe, to not get sick or injured. A lot can happen out there--a kick to the head, getting tangled in loose wire. Last summer, a new horse apparently tried to jump the electric wire fence, and a thin metal fencepost when straight through his neck. By some miracle, that horse is still alive, but he could easily have bled to death in the pasture without anyone noticing.

As we stand together on our respective sides of the fence, Tuula will pick up the ferrule on the end of the hood string, maybe giving it a slight tug, or sometimes not pulling at all. It's a gentle thing, almost a kiss. It feels as if she's saying, "I kind of like you. I wish you didn't have to go so soon."

But go I must. I give her a final farewell, maybe breathe a little air through my nose to her, something horses do in greeting. Then I walk back to my car. She usually stands at the corner a bit longer, because sometimes I've forgotten something and come back. But when she sees the car pull away, she knows it's time to leave and walk back up the hill to join her friends at the hayrack. Do they ask her about me? Has she been asking me to stay safe? I would love to know.