February 19, 2004 - 11:58 a.m.
last night a mare was ripped open by the foal that came so late.
I watched him try to stand,
and he
was everything
in extremes
too beautiful,
too awkward,
too tiny,
too large
with knees so much bigger than his tiny spindle legs,
he could not figure out that they needed to be beneath him
so christian helped him to stand
covered in the fluffiest brown coat
he leaned against me
so beautiful that it breaks my heart
his mother so calm
in spite of the blood on her legs
her milk was so much more important than her pain
while the other mares bore their teeth and blocked the view of their young ones, putting themselves between the bars and their babies
brodie just kept breathing and seemed relieved that someone else was there to help her, to make sure her foal could eat
and once i stopped being afraid of their fear
i remembered how much i love these animals. i felt so surreal in that barn. it sounds like an oxy moron, but honestly, the smell and the cold air spread across every surface and bursts of steam rising from 20 sets of nostrils is nothing like the city, the cats, affectionately referred to as the "parrots", perched on shoulders are nothing like the lazy cats that sleep at the foot of Sean's bed, warming a place for him while he is so long away.
there is a warmth here, in spite of the wildness. the cats seem so eager to be touched, the eyes of the horses capture me and i cannot stop looking.
The placenta is in a bucket, wrapped up in a plastic bag. Bosley knows he is not allowed to eat it, he is not supposed to go into the stalls either but he tries... and i can see this overwhelming curiosity in his darting eyes and wagging tail.
eventually i feel inside this place, instead of like i;m floating above it. I put my hands through the bars, and although i have no more apples, they let me touch their faces.
no one brushes them. because it does not matter how they look. one mare has a huge festering cut on her udder. he shines the flashlight up towards her belly. i can see the puss, grey and scarlet scabs and ooze. It makes me so sad. I could never be a vet. as much as i love being around animals, i don't think that i could be so close to the realness of birth and the reality of the injuries we can't do anything about.
Christian reminds me that we project our own fears onto these animals. We assume that because WE take medicine for everything, because we live in a culture obssessed with antiseptic, there should be something we can DO for them. we forget that other animals have a different threshold for pain.
if a horse breaks it's leg, it will never walk again. Human bones break cleanly, a horse's breaks like chalk in a vice. Even a cast would force them to lie down and it would have to be cut off before they could get up. They cannot wear a cast because the bones will not heal and they will never be able to put weight on it.
I could have stayed there for hours, even though my hands felt frozen and i'd stopped noticing the smell. I wanted to put both hands on their skin and feel that energy. It has fascinated me forever. My parents thought that i was going through a phase as a little girl, when i wanted a horse.
i started to think so too.
but seeing him try so hard to stand, and try again after resting his head back down in the peet his tiny lungs heaving at the effort... i cannot believe that i have seen this, that these things happen, every day and that most people never get to see it.
we always seem so satisfied with ourselves for everything that humans have accomplished. But we were not born in the middle of a a freezing winter night, left on a barn floor to figure out how to get the food we needed. No one asked us to walk just hours after we had been born.
It is so amazing.
his little face was so perfect, his eyes so dark.
