To Boots with love…

A few weeks before Boots was born, my friend Enza rang me about a disturbing dream she’d had the night before.  She’d dreamed that there was a white coffin in our foyer and all my horses were in the lounge room.  Whoever was in the coffin was saying “I can’t look after my baby, someone else will look after him better than me”.

I explained to her that it wasn’t rocket science.  I’m pretty sure I actually used those words. I explained that death was usually about new beginnings and she (Enza) couldn’t look after her horse UT, which was why he was with me.  I can still feel my shrug 20 + years later.

I’m not sure how reassured she was, because I’ve never thought to ask her, but I went on my merry life.

My first glimpse of this eagerly awaited gorgeous foal, he was boot and scooting around the yard – remember that western dancing style of line dancing called boot scooting? That’s how he got named Boot n’ Scoot from tapdancing his way around the yard, little legs going everywhere.  We called him Boots for short.

The day Boots was born, Copper, the elderly gelding in the photo above, starting neighing and calling and whickering at the gate between him and Taps and Boots.  For 9 days he called out if they got too far away, and grazed within a very small circle of the gate.  From time to time Taps brought the foal over to the gate for him, I expect to just shut him up. 

I did some minimal foal imprinting with him on that first day, because I had not yet met a horse who was happily foal imprinted, so I’m not a fan of full on foal imprinting although I did train in it.   I just put his tiny halter gently on him, asked for the tiniest give of a part-step to the left and one to the right and took the halter back off and left him alone.  I think I did that a couple more times on subsequent days.  I remember one day I led Taps out to the horse float, loaded her on it and Boots walked on happily beside her.  Unloaded them and took them back to the paddock.

On the 9th day I was eating my breakfast at our big picture windows that overlooked the paddock I had them in and Taps walked up to the fence, gushing two fire hydrants of blood out of her nose. 

In my kinesiology training we had been taught a technique to turn off arterial bleeding – I’d had a couple of successes with it with fairly decent bleeds in the past, but not an arterial one.  I was frantically doing that technique with no success.

In desperation I rang my reiki Master and asked for her help.  Reiki masters (like Reiki 2’s) can work by distance, sometimes quite spectacularly.  Viv tuned into him and as she was working, started talking “I can’t look after my baby someone else will look after him better than me.”  The exact echo of the words Enza had dreamed weeks earlier.

Short minutes from start to finish, she died.

We left Boots with her body for a few hours to allow him time to process her death.  Then we had the machine coming to bury her.

Sorry about the crappy old photos – we used to think this quality was excellent!  I think Boots was a yearling in this photo. Boots and Copper his “mum” gelding – two peas in a pod.

Meantime Copper the elderly gelding is going beserk at the gate – calling and calling.  Look at this photo, they even have the same markings you’d think they were related, but they’re not even the same breed.

We hadn’t even taught Boots to lead yet, just that simple “give to the ask of the halter”, but we needed to lead him away from Tap’s body.  So my daughter Mel haltered the foal and I went and got Copper, ready to do whatever I had to do to keep the foal safe from him if necessary, not at all sure whether his intentions were good or evil.  I knew little to nothing about foaling and had just heard stories of geldings hurting foals, so I was prepared for anything.

As background, by this time I had started “hearing” Bobby in my thoughts and was in the middle of writing all the note books that ended up becoming the book Bobby’s Diaries, but it was early days and my talent for hearing them was in its infancy.

So Mel’s got the untrained foal on a lead and I’m planning to lead Copper past him and we’ve got our fingers crossed that the foal will just follow him.  The second the gate was open, Copper dragged me across the paddock with the words and voice in my head saying “Give me my child” with SUCH power – there was no doubt about his intentions then.  Gosh this gives me goosebumps and makes me cry over twenty years later.

Boots followed and from that moment he was Copper’s child.

We were lucky enough to find a foster mare, but she not only wouldn’t have a bar of him, he was in danger anywhere near her.  She did allow us to milk her for a few weeks though.  So we raised Boots for a couple of months, 8 feeds a day, mares milk for as long as we had it.  Then a studmaster friend gave me an excellent recipe – a mixture of fresh high protein milk called Physical and a lactose free milk, that we balanced until we had a nice manure. 

It was the very beginning of the school holidays – the two boys Charlie (pictured riding his horse Copper) and John did the late night feeds and I went to bed early and did a 4am feed, while they slept in.

For errr… I’m not sure how long, maybe two or three months – Copper and Boots were by themselves in the foaling paddock.  Copper was a better Mum than most mares I’ve seen.  If that foal was on the ground sleeping, Copper was standing over the top of him.  I remember looking out the window and seeing Boots with his head between Copper’s back legs and Copper with his tail fanned out over the top of the foal keeping the flies off.  He even allowed the foal to suck the loose skin on his flank – the piece of skin where the horse’s belly meets their leg.  God knows how uncomfortable that must have been.  Copper was just incredible.

The beautiful memories are making me cry.  I’m taking a break for a bit and I’ll be back.

Later p.s.

I had been “lucky” enough in my work to have seen a number of problems caused by isolating orphan foals away from other horses so it was auto pilot for me to want Boots with at least one other horse.

Big head was one problem I’d seen – that’s a symptom of a minerally deficient skeleton that isn’t fit for purpose. It’s common when orphan foals are weaned too young.  The mother typically feeds her foal for 7 months plus.  So we made that the minimum for Boots, although he did go down to four feeds a day after a few months, then three, then two, then one – with his hard feed increasing as the milk feeds reduced and always access to good grass and hay.

I’d also seen incredibly sad and desperate adult horses that didn’t know they were horses.  This story … breath out with a pooof…

Think twice about how you deal with that orphan foal.