TheBanyanTree: Good Pony Mandy

[Theta Brentnall]

She was a good pony - Gerry called her a dog with hooves.  She has 
collected a whole raft of physical problems in the last few months and 
after the last vet visit, the options the vet offered were few and 
pessimistic and all involved her living a lot of pain.  So this morning I 
fed her the sweet alfalfa she hasn't been allowed to have, and handsful of 
sweet corn and apples, and then put her in the horse trailer for her last 
trip.  Poor baby, her feet were so sore she could hardly walk into the 
trailer, even though she was on so much painkiller that she'd have been 
giggling if she could.

The vet asked if I was going to leave her there.  No, sir, I was not.  How 
could I leave her with strangers for her last bit of time?  I fed her green 
grass while the vet put the line in her vein, and massaged her neck while 
her head got heavy.  They warned me that she would fall, but she just 
sighed, sank down on her knees and rolled easily on her side, and then she 
was gone.

Fourteen years she has been with us.   The day we brought her home, she was 
trotting around, checking out the pasture.  Liz couldn't take her eyes off 
her.   I asked if she liked her new horse.  Liz gave a great sigh and said, 
"Oh, yes!  This is the best day of my life."   Mandy was a skinny little 
thing when I got her - every rib showing and her mane and tail chewed by 
the other horses.  She had been harshly treated and the first few months 
every time we reached out a hand to her, she would flinch.  She didn't run 
away, though, and in time she learned that we were not going to hurt 
her.  Liz and I brushed her for hours, and I stood, holding her feet one at 
a time until she trusted me enough to let her hoof lay in my hand without 
tensing in expectation of pain.

I learned to trust her, just as she learned to trust us.  She was 
sure-footed and smart, and nothing bothered her.  Those terrible 
horse-eating rocks, limbs, candy wrappers, leaves and other monsters out on 
the trail that terrified other horses didn't impress her a bit.  When the 
others were dancing and snorting, she would just give a gusty sigh, push 
past them and trot on past the scary thing with her ears back as if to say, 
"what babies!  Get over it!"

Liz's riding school had a dressage competition and Liz put the course up in 
our pasture and rode it over and over, so often that Mandy memorized 
it.  Liz got great marks for her horsemanship because the judges said they 
didn't see her give any cue to the horse.  Well, she didn't.  She just sat 
on Mandy like a statue and Mandy did all the work.  One of the other moms 
sniffed about how short Mandy's tail was.

"If that horse was mine, I'd at least put a prosthetic on that pathetic 
excuse of a tail."

I laughed and said I loved that little broom of a tail.  It was a $500 
tail.  The woman looked shocked.

"The horse trader wanted a thousand dollars for her," I said, "and I told 
her that the pony didn't have a tail, so I'd give her $500."

The woman looked really shocked then and huffed away.  Another mom hanging 
on the fence with us laughed and said that the woman had paid $10,000 for 
her kid's horse, and here was a little $500 broomtailed mutt of a pony, 
walking away with first place in the competition.

Liz could ride Mandy with nothing but a halter and a lead rope.  She'd come 
home from school, put the halter on Mandy and they would go gallop around 
the orchard down at the end of the street.  In recent years, when Liz would 
bring home her friends from college they loved to ride Mandy and my big 
guy, Sabie.  Sometimes the big boys tried to play cowboy on Mandy, and she 
had a way of slyly side-stepping out from under them, and then she would 
look down at them on the ground with her head cocked, as if to say, "Well, 
what are you doing down there?"  But if you put a little kid on her, she 
would move so carefully that I never worried about the child falling.

I hope there is a special place for good horses, with springtime grass and 
lots of room for running, and little angels who brush them and feed them 
apples and jump on their backs to ride like the wind.  Mandy deserves 
that.  She was a good pony.

Theta