This evening sheer luck led me to save a horse’s life.
Sheer luck, that I decided to go to the barn to give my horse Ben his late hay and turn him out for the night around 7:00, when the sun was still setting and the light was good, rather than waiting another hour.
Sheer luck (or was it his already piqued curiosity?), that as I was trying to put Ben’s midweight turnout rug on him, he circled over to the open window in the back wall of his stall, looked out, spooked back, looked out again, spooked back again, so that I was led in my turn to look out.
Sheer luck that, not seeing directly ahead of me the deer I expected in the grassy weedy wasteland of an abandoned garden out there, I glanced to the right.
And saw a horse at the far edge of the former garden, on its back in a hollow, its hindquarters toward me, its legs in the air.
Not moving.
Then it stirred, it lifted its head and looked toward me, and I realized it was alive! I bolted out of Ben’s stall (yes, latching the door), ran to the house to get the barn owner, Annette, blurted out what I’d seen, and raced back with her. We grabbed a couple of leadropes from the shedrow as we hustled through it, out back and down to where the bay lay helpless, her blanket straps cruelly tight from her struggles.
We managed to wrench the straps undone. Beijing (a mare who, we discovered later, had most likely been sprung from her stall by the horse next to her fiddling with the stall latch) tried to roll over but couldn’t. She was at an angle that lifted all of her feet away from anything to push against.
I flipped a leadrope around her upper foreleg, snugged it close to her elbow, and began to pull. Annette grabbed her lower foreleg at the knee and lifted. Beijing heaved, twisted, and made it over! With her hooves at last on the ground she scrambled to her feet and trotted back to the barn, entering the open doorway of the indoor arena. We followed her, closed the gate, checked her over for injuries, made sure she was moving easily, and left her with hay and water to spend the night there, free to move about and hopefully not stiffen up.
Damn! Where she was lying when I spotted her was well away from where anyone normally goes, even in the daytime. In the dark, Annette on her bedcheck rounds later would never have seen her. Beijing was lying on sodden weeds. The temperature was in the 40s and forecast to fall into the 30s. If she’d been there all night, I believe she would have died of hypothermia and the great difficulty in breathing created by lying in that position for any length of time.
Beijing, through it all, stayed amazingly calm. She didn’t thrash as we tried to help her, was unfazed when we tended to her in the ring, and happily set to on the hay Annette gave her. Was that faith that the humans would make it right that I saw in her big brown eyes as she watched us work on her?
Sheer luck, a chain of lucky happenstance, saved Beijing. I still shake when I think of what could have been.