I decided tonight when I did chores that it was the time of year to start putting the herds back together. I took old John, the mule, out of the pasture and let him eat his mush next to the truck. He is somewhere near 40, so I did not think he would appreciate the excitement of Jet Ranger’s three horses joining the herd. I gave the others, Dulci, Sophie, Cirrus and Nimbus, some grain to munch on while I walked down the fence line to where the solar charger sits and controls the fence that separates the pastures to turn it off. (I’m no) Angel was near and saw me open the gate. It did not take her long to come through and pass me. Legend and MeToo were close behind.
The two little girls stared at the intruders like they were oncoming hordes of Mongols racing to burn their village.
They stayed together and held their ground for as long as they could. One of the horde was an obvious crazy woman.
A wild and scary daughter.
And the fearsome general who commanded this oncoming charge.
There was plenty of swirling, squealing and mud flying. My “boys” took flight and were starting to panic when they spotted me. They slid to a stop on either side, hid behind me and blew snorts of warning at the confusion and introductions. It is so good to know that in a panic, they both chose to be with me as their safe place! They stayed with me until Legend tried to run the girls and they both decided to intercede on the ladies’ behalf and defend the girls. They took off at a gallop as a united front.
(If you look closely, you will see both boys. Cirrus is in the front here.) And gathered their girls back from the marauder’s clutches.
It was a short time of confusion and running and everyone settled down. I took John down to the west pasture with Reo and Bit and put him in with them for now. He will enjoy the relative quiet of these two solid citizens until I need to put everyone together when we start feeding hay and having to haul water and keep it from freezing. I dread the winter to come.
It had been overcast for most of the day. As I walked back down the lane, swinging my empty feed bucket and the dogs trotting beside me, the sun came through a break in the clouds behind me. The sudden glow of light stopped me in my tracks. Every leaf, every blade of grass, every weed head, was on fire and glowing. It painted the bean leaves in front of me and the edges of the hills and clouds in the distance. I tried to take it all in. Just as suddenly, it faded and disappeared.
I loaded the dogs and headed back to the shop to work some more and look at tonight’s photos. I really do enjoy playing the home version of National Geographic.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: herd, horses 
©Copyright 2008 by Bethany Caskey. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Bethany Caskey’s website.
A nice light fluffy snow is sifting down again today. Here in Saskatchewan we don’t always get a large amount of snow, and what we get tends to be dry and fine, not the heavy saturated dumps that other parts of the country often see. I’m happy to see more snow as I bought snowshoes last year after the big January blizzard so I could get out and do photos of the drifts. So far this year I’ve only been out once on the snowshoes as we just don’t have quite enough snow cover. It’s likely OK now—we’ve had a couple of small falls and a bit of drifting since I was last out, so once it warms up a tad I’ll get out again.
In the meantime, here are a couple of shots post-blizzard last year. The first one is the concession building (for summer show season) at the stable where I keep my horse. The drifts went right up over the roof on that one corner. The other shot was taken under the overhanging roof that is on the right of the first picture. This is a full-scale carousel zebra who is looking particularly frantic about the situation he has found himself in. Mind you, he looks quite distressed all the time, poor thing. I call this one “Save me”. I had to snowshoe up to the north side of the building over a drift consderably taller than me, then bend down to shoot into the space between the bottom of the roof and the top of the drift in front of the zebra. When I stood upright on the drift I was considerably taller than the roof of the concession. That was a “biggest in the last 50 years” blizzard, so I suppose it’s too much to hope for another one like that any time soon.
If you’re a “regular” (for the whole few days I’ve been doing this) please note that I’ve switched to “not every day” mode now. I figure maybe twice a week will be about right. We’ll see.
Over the years I have evolved a few key phrases I try to keep in mind to make life run a little more easily. One of these is “it never hurts to state the obvious”. This is kind of a corollary to my “never assume” one. If you try to go with the pair of these, you generally have a pretty good idea what is happening, is expected to happen, or what the other person *thinks* will happen. I still go astray with miscommunication every now and then, but that’s generally when I forget these little words to live by.
This came to mind when I was wandering through my photo archives of the last year (doubtless looking for something else…I spend a lot of time doing that, but rediscover a lot of interesting visuals that way). I found my photo of this road sign that “states the obvious”, taken last spring en route to my friend’s farm where I was hoping to photograph the wild swans that had stopped over in a body of water (formerly a field in drier times) across the road from her place. I have a bit of a thing about swans (I have a bit of a “thing” about a lot of things as you’ll find over time) so I had hopes of this opportunity, but being truly wild birds, and survivors, they weren’t about to get in decent range of even my longish lens, so I didn’t get any acceptable shots of them that day. I did get some very nice ones in the fall, though, of captive swans at the local zoo, in their very nice setting.
Well, I see the eccentric format is still with us. Next time I’ll try changing something to see if I can get a first sentence that can be read without contortion.
