Memories of Autumn

September SEAHA note from the editor

Man it's been hot. It's been so hot my neighbor's corn started popping. There was so much corn flying over the fence the mules thought it was snowing. They started shivering so hard we had to put blankets on them.
It will soon be over, and we will revel in the cool autumn weather. Or will we? My friend comes from Wyoming and is a "the grass is always browner on the other side" type. He insists my memory fails me, that it didn't get cool till December last year. Lord help us.
But he's wrong, I can feel it. The long awaited rains came, all 3 days of them the past month, and now there's that feel to the air. A snap. A sense that the coolness is about to arrive, like when you're in the mountains and hear a twilight rush of wind coming down the canyon. You know in moments it will hit you, and you brace for it. The animals feel it coming even stronger. They are closely tied to the seasons because they are out in them. In nature this is the time to fatten up and prepare for when food is scarce. Until a few generations ago, that's what people did too. And the horses and mules were there to help them; tending the crops. Harvesting and moving them to storage. Carrying their owners to market to buy and trade each other's bounty. They also served the trappers and hunters throughout the summer, then carried them to the Sante Fe rendezvous. Have you ever stopped to think that 100 years ago you traveled by horse or you didn't travel? Not far. How many horses were in America? How long did they live? How did they fair? The centuries of friendship and reliance on equines are as strong in our collective consciousness as is their memory of the need to fatten up. I'll do my part, and give Horace and Cricket a little rice bran each day. Haagen Daas for equines, to go with their popcorn. (apologies to Mrs. Wilder).
Bring on the fall.

Equine Torture Device Found

August SEAHA note from the editor

They say a mule, like the elephant, never forgets. Horace has something in the dim, black and white reaches of his memory that tells him any horse-drawn conveyance is made for equine torture. I learned about his demons in my neighborhood, where the occasional buggy, wagon or surrey is sometimes seen. When Horace sees them (blocks away) he always reacts the same way; he goes into "full point", with radar-ears marking the target instead of the cocked paw of the hunting dog. He snorts a few times loud enough to be heard yards away, then he spins and trots the other direction. This rider cannot get him near the mule-monster; sometimes that particular block is off-limits for days, just to be sure. Several of us SEAHA members went to cool, wet Flagstaff last weekend and stayed at the Elden horse camp. All was well until the end of the last day when the lady in the adjacent camp hitched up a previously hidden meadowbrook cart to her white pony. Horace did everything in his power to initiate step three of his reaction. The highline creaked and popped but seemed to hold as he pulled, kicked, and maypoled around the tree at the end of the line. He wasn't panicked, but would unwind himself, point/snort and wind back around the tree the other way. To make things better I moved him to join Scott and Christine's horses further away. Moving him back to my camp the next morning was no simple task. Though the cart was again out of site, and the white pony was still alive in it's corral, getting him into the area was like towing a horse trailer by hand. Tied to a hitching post to prevent the maypole game, he decided to dig his way out of danger. He pawed and pawed, alternating feet and bobbing his head. The easy boots I had not yet messed with removing came off in a jiffy. Every time he would calm down the lady would walk by the camp for some reason. Yes, he recognized her too. She was the torture-master. At least for once he loaded into the trailer nicely. "Get me outta here!" Whatever happened to this 20-year old mule before I got him I wish he could forget.