12/07/2024
This is a read , and I unapologetically recommend you read it . Amazing wordsmith for anyone dealing with "not just yet" scenarios.
On Friday afternoon, I went down to the field to find the red mare unable to move.
It was from one hour to the next. At 3pm, she had been walking brightly by my side. When I went back at four, she could not even pick up her off fore. It was so lifeless and powerless that I thought she had broken her leg or snapped a tendon, except that she showed no signs of distress and I could find no swelling or pain or obvious marks of trauma.
It occurred to me, at once and very vividly, that this might be the end of the road.
I became vastly calm.
Friends helped. My good neighbour was there, and I telephoned at once to my friend Kathy in Wales. I know the kind people at the vet’s office well, and they sent out the nearest emergency vet.
He arrived within half an hour and was astonishingly focused and efficient. With his head torch, because the light was by now fading, he found, hidden away under her winter coat, on the point of the shoulder, a tiny puncture mark. Goodness knows what she had hit or how she had hit it, but whatever it was had gone all the way in to the muscle and to the nerve and almost to the bone. I said, ruefully, that I’d been boasting only the other day about how hardy my thoroughbreds are, and how accident-free, and how well and bonny just now. (With the honourable exception of Tern, who still likes walking into trees for kicks and giggles.)
He got at once onto the case. There were many injections - sedation, local anaesthetic, painkillers and anti-inflammatories, penicillin. (Once again, my song of gratitude flew up into the bright air for Alexander Fleming and his petri dish.)
The other mares had gathered round, and even though I made a few half-hearted attempts to remind them of our rules about personal space, at one point the vet was doing his job with Tern’s head resting gently on his shoulder. They were not jostling or crowding, because we are strict on manners and they are naturally courteous, but they were so entirely there. Every so often I would feel a muzzle on my arm or a shadow by my side and it would be Florence or Clova, saying, ‘We are here. We are here. You are not alone.’
There was the shaving of the area and the flushing of the wound. I held the saline bag and felt useful. The red mare’s head fell lower and lower. Tern stepped back to let the vet do his work, but she kept a close eye.
And in the end he left us, giving a best-case scenario and not having to spell out the worst case. He was not quite sure why she could not move. He would send out our regular vet in the morning. I thanked him passionately and set up an open-air box-rest for the red mare and waited until she was awake from the sedation before giving her plenty of hay and a vast bucket of water and I told her that if she needed to go, then she must go, but I would like it very much if she could stay with us for a while yet.
I rang back my friend Kathy. ‘The Place of Peace,’ I said, ‘ is being stress-tested to buggery.’
Amazingly, all those years of work and learning and practice came through. The low dread - the imagined worst - was there, because everyone who lives with animals always has it there, somewhere, in the dark recesses of the mind, but I saw it and thanked it for coming and chose not to dwell in it. This is what I had practised for. The practice is: you get to choose. The practice says: dwelling in the worst does you no good and the mare no good and the situation no good. So I pitched my tent, very consciously, on another part of the mountain.
I went home and slept and did not wake up at three in the morning, fighting monsters. I did, as I rose and went down to the field, think through what I would do if I found her lifeless on the ground. Very calm, and oddly logical. It sounds strange, but I expanded my internal capacity. I could feel it growing.
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha!’ said the red mare, when I arrived. ‘Just joking you.’
She was bright as forty-seven buttons, moving about her little fenced-off area by the gate, ready for anything. She was so bright that I took her out for a walk and she wanted to go the long way round and she was so filled with meaning and purpose that I could barely keep up with her.
‘You are so ridiculously alive,’ I told her.
‘You bet your bottom dollar,’ she said, marching busily through the trees.
In the heart of the deep wood, I had that kind of cry that only comes when you have prepared yourself for bad news and you have got good news.
‘That’s all right,’ said the red mare. ‘You get it all out. I’ll just keep walking.’
Then I was so happy that I sang her songs all the way home. I sang Leaving on a Jet Plane and that old Beach Boys number about the Sloop John B and Losing My Religion by REM. (I’ve got new headphones and I feel like a rockstar or a funky DJ. They are very conducive to the hollering out of the songs. I confess I did rather startle one cyclist.)
Our usual vet arrived, beaming in the sunshine. I’ve known her since she was three years old and I always write that because it makes me laugh so much that the little blonde infant grew up and went to Cambridge to take many degrees in veterinary medicine and then came home to her beloved hills and looked after horses.
She could hardly believe what she saw. ‘That is such a relaxed and happy horse!’ she said. We were laughing and giddy at the surprise of it, after the state of affairs only the night before. Everything got checked and everything was tip-top and the red mare and I have some more antibiotics and some more painkiller and there will be a little more outdoor box-rest to be on the safe side.
I had walked up to the edge of the abyss and looked down into the dark chasm.
Funnily enough, I decided Nietzsche was wrong. The abyss did not gaze back into me. It’s there, and one day I shall have to enter it. We humans all do. Because the ones we love go somewhere else. There is death. There are wrenching farewells. But for some reason, on Friday, when I felt it was very near, I accepted this granite fact, somewhere in the heart of me. The abyss and I can live together. Or something like that.
The main thing is that I am filled with gratitude. For dear old Alexander and his wonderful, life-changing discovery; for our brilliant vets; for the red mare, with her strength and toughness and resilience. For good fortune, which looked down on us this time, and smiled. For the abyss, which said, ‘Not now. Not yet.’
