Whispering Back (29 page)

It was about 10 p.m. when I went out to the field to get Sensi and Karma and bring them in for the night. I soon knew something was wrong. Sensi was sweating and agitated, turning and nudging her flanks. I put her in the round pen and ran to get Sarah, for a second opinion. She quickly agreed with my diagnosis and went to call the vet.

Sensi had lain down in the sand of the round pen, panting. She would groan periodically and roll on her back, a glazed expression coming over her eyes. I stroked her face, trying to calm her as a sudden rush of panic gripped me. She was dying. The thought of what this would do to Nicole, whose own father had died just two weeks before, was almost unbearable. After what seemed an eternity, the vet arrived. He administered a strong painkiller and anti-spasmodic drug, but it didn’t seem to work. Sarah told me I should stand back, for although I wanted so much to help, Sensi was now having convulsions. Her legs flailed wildly, her head writhed in the sand. The vet had called the nearest equine hospital capable of doing the major surgical procedure that was the only medical action that could be taken. The operating theatre was being prepared. It seemed a big gamble, being about forty minutes’ drive away. The first thing we needed to do was to get her standing. When there was a lull in her exertions, I pulled her lead rope with insistent urgency while everyone pushed her on and, on the second effort, she made it to her feet. Sarah very kindly went and got Peter and their trailer.

It was not an ideal situation. It was very dark up by the round pen, being past midnight. There was one weak bulb at the front but other than that there was no light except the brake lights on the trailer, which was painted dark both inside and out. It could not have been much less inviting, and in addition to having Karma behind her, charging around the pen in a panic at seeing her mum being led away, Sensi was also heavily sedated. She breathed laboriously and swayed on her feet as I tried to get her moving backwards and forwards. But even a pressure halter was ineffective, due to the sedative, and Sensi remained inert. I could hardly get her moving when she was away from the trailer, and as soon as she resisted the pressure, locking her head and body against it with a stubborn determination that still glinted in her hazy, faraway eyes, I was unable to shift her no matter how hard I pulled.

I tried to load her until my arms felt like they were about to fall off. The others also tried. Having waited patiently for a considerable time, holding back from giving me advice, they must have been itching to have a go. But they soon found that nothing would shift her. She would go to the edge of the doorway but no further. We continued for over an hour, and then the vet and I suddenly were struck by the same thought. Our eyes met. ‘Why are we bothering?’ we said to each other. ‘She doesn’t have colic any more.’

Sensi had pulled it off again, in some style, keeping the four of us up half the night. She was fine. It seemed as though the struggle she had put up might have helped take her mind off the pain. Karma was even more relieved than I was, even though she was not aware that it would have meant weeks of us feeding her every few hours if Sensi hadn’t made it.

In the end I never did teach Sensi to load. Instead I watched as my working pupil, a quiet strong man from Denmark called Brian Mortensen, did it for practice. She behaved exactly as one would expect, in fact she was not very hard at all, and within twenty minutes of him starting to work with her, she was loading without a lead rope, as if she had done so all her life. Even though I had cured many worse loaders by then, I was still surprised, like so many owners I have worked for. To see my own horse, such an established bad loader, whom I had never seen walk confidently up a ramp, going up inside my horsebox as if she had never done any differently, was simply unbelievable. I had a real insight into the feelings owners must often have when I work for them. It can be very hard to let go and accept that things have changed.

Joe didn’t sound promising when his owner, Sally, described him on the phone. His grandfather had won the Grand National, which meant that from the moment he was conceived, Joe was in danger of being regarded primarily as a form of investment rather than a sentient being. Now retired, he was twelve years old, a 16.2 hand high thoroughbred with a major napping problem and a phobia of pigs. As he lived on a pig farm, this fear was a big problem, and his napping was so bad that he couldn’t even be ridden the 100 yards or so to a neighbour’s outdoor arena so his owner, Sally, could school him. ‘He’s had quite a long time off,’ Sally said, ‘while my broken leg’s been recovering.’

It’s never very comforting when owners refer to their broken limbs in connection with a horse. It reminds you what a risky business it all is. Of course, the difference between a nasty break and a few bruises can simply lie in the way you land. As they say, it’s not the falling that’s the problem, it’s the hitting the ground at the end of it.

In this case, as it turned out, the owner had hit the ground having slipped while feeding her chickens!

Sally wanted to do the best for her horse. She’d had his back checked, a new saddle fitted, and his teeth done. She’d had riding lessons. Confident that his problems weren’t physical, she’d ‘tried everything’ when riding him. By now I’d worked out what this was code for. ‘So what does he do when you hit him?’ I asked her, when we met.

‘Oh, that makes him far worse. He gets angry, rears, swishes his tail. And when I tried riding him in spurs, he just bucked me straight off. I didn’t try that again.’

I tried to stop myself from grinning. Horses put up with a lot, but they all have their limits. Joe clearly didn’t consider having bits of metal stuck into his ribs acceptable.

I stepped back and had a good look at him. He was in some ways a very beautiful horse, but he had an air of despair about him. He had an extraordinarily long, fine, elegant face, but his body looked like it had been through the wringer a few times. There were deep hollows along his back where years of ill-fitting saddles had dug into his flesh. He had thirteen lines of white hair seared into his skin on both front legs, a legacy of line firing, which used to be common practice in the treatment of tendon injuries. Hot irons or a blistering agent are applied to the tendons, in the expectation that the inflammation this causes will help the tendon to heal, by building up scar tissue. Although applied under anaesthetic, the treatment results in the horse being unable to move without pain for a considerable time. This is believed by some to be the only benefit of firing, as it means the horse has to be on box rest, and cannot be worked for a long time, even by the most over-zealous trainer. Even so, box rest is now considered of dubious benefit for most injuries.

Not surprisingly, he hated vets. He could sniff one out at a hundred paces, and Sally’s had become adept at long-range diagnosis as soon as he realised the perils of close inspection. Scars rippled his hindquarters where he’d been hit by a bus when he’d panicked while being long-lined, and had broken through a fence onto a road. Overall, he had an ‘upside down’ look, where all the muscles along the top of his neck and back were virtually non-existent, and all the muscles on the underside of his body were bulging and tight from the effort of moving while resisting the discomfort of a rider on his back. No wonder he didn’t want to go anywhere.

He shifted uncomfortably under my gaze, and I had the feeling that he knew he was in a mess, and that he knew it wasn’t fair to have had that inflicted on him. A horse of natural grace and splendour, it was degrading for him to look such a wreck. If I’ve ever seen disappointment in a horse, I saw it in Joe; he’d given everything that had ever been asked of him, but it hadn’t got him anywhere. Now he’d given up. He expected nothing of anyone, and it would be easier all round if no one expected anything of him.

When I placed his new saddle on his back to check its fit, he stamped his foot and swished his tail. As I gently did the girth up, he not so gently tried to take a chunk out of me.

‘He’s always like that,’ Sally said.

It was easy to see why: his saddle was so narrow it was pinching his withers.

‘I did wonder about that, but my master saddler said it was fine. But it didn’t seem right that he should have such a violent reaction to it. I wondered if perhaps it was remembered pain?’

There’s some logic in this; if a horse is caused pain by, say, an ill-fitting saddle, they can have a negative association with any saddle, however comfortable it is. The reaction can fade over time, but you can still see some of the anticipation or the memory of the discomfort. However, Joe’s reaction was raw and current. He was telling Sally loudly and clearly that the saddle wasn’t right. Like so many people in her position, she had trusted the ‘experts’ rather than herself and her horse. Most owners could work out what their horses are telling them if they allow themselves to listen.

It was particularly uncomfortable for him to be mounted, as the weight in the stirrup caused the saddle to dig into his back even more on the other side. He tried to communicate this by moving away from the mounting block unless he was held by someone on the ground. Once the rider was on board, he was gentlemanly enough not to try to dislodge them, but he was determined he wasn’t going to go anywhere. I was not about to make him.

Joe came to Moor Wood for several weeks. Sensitive and intelligent, he went through the usual processes with a sort of disdainful good grace. Tarpaulin work was a little beneath him, and long-lining, after his horrific accident, clearly worried him, but introduced to it slowly, he overcame his fear. Sally and I led him up and down the steep Cotswold hills, and he gradually began to take an interest in his surroundings. His reluctance to go forward melted with the miles and soon we found our legs unable to match his enormous stride. Pennie Hooper, our massage therapist, began to smooth out the knots accumulated over years of tension, and he visibly softened. There was still a long way to go, but he was starting on the road to recovery.

‘You know, this horse has hurdled,’ Pennie said the first time she assessed him.

Pennie can look at a horse from 50 yards and the body will tell her the horse’s story. Her fingers fill in the details. She’s petite and slim, but her hands are like iron, and she’s got muscles like Popeye. With a shock of cropped blond hair and an assortment of trendy jewellery, when she pulls into a stable yard in her sky blue Porsche, she hardly comes across as a typical horsewoman. The establishment accepts her, however, because of the incredible depth of her knowledge of horse anatomy and movement. Most of her clients are competition riders who use her skills to get the best performance from their horses. We use her with almost every remedial horse we have in, to gain as much insight into the horse’s history and physical state as possible.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ I told her confidently. ‘He was a flat race horse.’

‘Maybe so, but he’s also definitely hurdled.’

Sally later confirmed what Pennie had known for certain. Joe had hurdled, but only for one season, several years ago. Because hurdling involves jumping at speed, the horse moves his forelimbs in a particular way, throwing them forward, as in a gallop stride, rather than tucking them under his chest, as in showjumping. This movement pattern is written in the muscles, and unless something is done to remove it, it stays there.

It’s not that I think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with hurdling. It’s just that any horse needs well-fitting tack, a careful fitness regime, support and maintenance, and the more intense the activity, the more help their bodies need to be restored to their healthy state after such stressful activity. Some of what we ask horses to do, on the other hand, does compromise them unnecessarily. We once did a lecture-demo at a riding club, and Pennie came along to assess the horses for us. One horse we were asked to work with was notoriously aggressive. Pennie took one look at him and said, ‘This horse is jumped with a tight martingale.’

This also turned out to be true. Unable to stretch his head and neck properly over fences, the horse was forced to use his body in a completely unnatural way. As a result, his muscles were like rock from head to toe. He was in constant pain. This horse, who greeted anyone he met with a flurry of teeth and hooves, stood quietly while Pennie eased his aching muscles, only shooting her the odd warning look when she went in deeper than he could bear.

Joe also told Pennie what he could cope with, and every time she saw him he was able to heal a little more.

With his body more comfortable, and a saddle that didn’t pinch, Joe began to reconsider his views on being ridden out. The early rides involved a lot of standing still and going backwards, but within a week or so he would quite happily ride out on his own or in company. We used an item of equipment called a ‘wip-wop’. This is just a piece of soft rope that you flick at the horse, touching him behind your leg on either side. Unlike a whip, it doesn’t hurt at all, but it’s an unpleasant, possibly annoying sensation, and also works in the horse’s visual field; the sight of something moving swiftly behind their head will often encourage forward movement. The trick to using the wip-wop lies in the timing. As soon as the horse moves forward, you have to stop using it, and in this way they learn how to ‘switch it off’. With Joe, however, there was an additional factor. If you used just slightly too strong an aid, it seemed to offend him, and he would point-blank refuse to move until he had recovered from his sense of wounded dignity. You had to ask him politely, not tell him what to do. I had some fantastic rides on him. His trot felt like he left you up in the air for minutes at a time, and in canter he seemed to cover 20 yards in one stride. The power coming up through him, even in his still far-from-perfect physical state, was breathtaking, and I longed for a race track to really let him loose on.