Yesterday I drove down the road to open a couple of gates. I put signs on them asking anyone who came along to leave them open because the horses are coming home for the winter! Eighteen of them, anyway; the other thirteen are going over the mountains to Bishop on Sunday, carrying happy riders who actually enjoy sitting in a hard saddle for eight to twelve hours at a stretch! A nice little Sunday outing, gorgeous scenery as they cross the crest of the Sierra Nevada, a guaranteed memory-maker, an experience I would pay to miss. Those thirteen horses will be trucked down to Furnace Creek in Death Valley where they’ll spend the winter, carrying Euro-oozing European vacationers through the gorgeous desert scenery.Now I get to feed twenty-three horses instead of a mere five. Now I get to toss bales of hay onto the truck instead of merely tossing flakes over the fence. Now the fights between four-leggers are bigger and longer-lasting. Now my admiration of horses further diminishes to near-nonexistence. I have always thought that it would be worth it hire a vet to remove the one tiny brain cell that causes a horse to put its ears back and go biting and kicking and making life miserable for its companions, but on second thought it’s probably cruel to leave a horse with only half a brain.
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