|
|
|
Back To Blog Entries
| A Percheron named Jane
by speedydonut at 4/26/2008 2:10:15 PM
This is prompted by Coppermare's blog, Tribute to an Arabian.
My first foster home at age 5 was a small dairy farm, and a garden of delights to a little girl accustomed to city life.
Among those delights were two very different horses: a Percheron named Jane and a Thoroughbred named Ginger.
Jane was a grandmotherly type...she stood over 24 hands and was as gentle as she was massive. For a child who had never been around horses, she stood perfectly still while I roamed around under her, petted her tummy, patted her withers and her chest...the extent of my reach.
After I'd been there for a few months, I walked out to the pasture one day and Jane slowly walked over to me, lowered her head for me to pet her muzzle, then walked over to the fence and just leaned against it. Never being one to pass up an opportunity, I climbed the fence and got onto her back. I thought I could touch to sky, I was so high up. Jane just leaned until I got a good handful of mane, then she ambled off. She took me all over that pasture and into the edges of the surrounding woods, always being careful to avoid low-hanging branches that might have knocked me off. When she'd had enough, she went back to the fence and leaned again so that I could "dismount."
That became our routine, Jane's and mine. After chores every day, I'd go to the pasture. If Jane felt like taking me for a walk, she'd lean on the fence. If she didn't, I'd take the curry brush and brush everything I could reach from withers and chest down to her feathers. She was my comfort when the mother was angry and the father drunk. I hope she got some pleasure from the child who loved her.
After I started school, the walks came less often, but the brushing was every day. Coming home from school one afternoon, I stepped off the bus to hear a horse screaming. Unless you've ever heard that, you can't imagine the terror it conveys...
I ran toward the sound, and my foster parents and several of the neighbors were gathered around Jane. She had stepped into a section of the creek that had quicksand and was up to her knees in it. One neighbor had a rig-up truck there, and my foster father had run a sling under Jane's belly. They were trying to get her out and she was trying to help, but she was just too heavy for the truck. The sling was removed, the neighbors left, my foster mother and sisters went back to the house. My foster father told me to follow them. I refused. In one of the most understanding and compassionate gestures I ever received from them, my foster parents allowed me to spend the night with Jane.
She tired, and the screaming stopped, and the struggling stopped, which slowed the progress of her sinking. The quicksand had almost covered her back when I had to leave for school.
Right after the schoolbus left, my foster father put her down. Maybe it would have been kinder to have done it as soon as he realized that we couldn't save her, but Jane and I had a chance to say "Good-bye" that we'd have otherwise missed. And half a century later, I still tear up remembering that gentle giant and her friendship.
I'll deal with Ginger later.
|
|
|
|
|
 |