Trouble comes in Threes

I took my Fell mare Ruby out for a drive this afternoon. The weather was just too good to waste!

She's had her hooves trimmed by the blacksmith in the past few days, so I fit her road boots - Easyboot Epics on the front and Easyboot Gloves on the back - to prevent her getting sore. I was planning to do 6 miles, going round Orton and back. Said boots all go on very easily (which should really have been a warning to me). Harness up, yoke up, and away we go.

The outward leg of the journey is lovely. Just enough wind to keep us cool, lots of sunshine, and spectacular huge spikes of bright purple Northern Marsh Orchids coming into bloom in damp spots along the roadsides. Ruby settles into the work and goes past the event horses at Selsmire without any spookiness. Her bugbear, the extremely-white grey one, hasn't got his green rug on, so this time she recognises him as a horse and not a collection of fag packets or garden chairs, or whatever she imagined he was last time they met.

She isn't bothered by going down the middle of Orton village between all the parked cars. She isn't very bothered either by the Water Board men cleaning out drains at the junction opposite Hall Farm, until one of them retrieves a ten foot length of drainage rod, wipes it and throws it down beside its mates with a noise like a whipcrack. She jumps sideways about six feet. And the bloke shouts, "Hey - you've lost a shoe!" which is much more polite than what I am thinking!

Ruby isn't keen on standing still, but I tell her - fairly mildly - not to be such a fool. She takes her cue as much from the tone of my voice as anything else. The bloke retrieves her boot and trots obligingly after us, off the main road. He tosses it (he obviously has a habit of throwing stuff) and it misses the carriage and lands between Ruby's feet. I move her on a few yards so he can pick it up, and this time he manages to deposit it on the floor. "I'm not used to horses," he says. I say, "Not to worry," and thank him, and we walk along the lane past the school, then I stop in the Methodist chapel car park where I tie Ruby to the fence, and while she reaches over for grass, I reinstate the boot.

It goes all right after that, for a while. I meet a friend and have a chat, and Ruby is perfectly happy to wait for us. Then we set off to trot home.

Back past the eventers and the stands of marsh orchids. Suddenly there's a rhythmic clanking and I see that the yachting quick-release shackle on the end of one of the traces has quick released itself and the trace is swinging free. This doesn't seem to worry Ruby, but it worries me. I suspect the wind blew Ruby's long tail onto the webbing pull-tab and that was enough to flip the shackle open. Fortunately the trace-carrier loop does its job so the trace isn't tangling round her feet. We pull up and turn onto the grass verge, where with moderate swearing I re-fasten the shackle, and off we go again.

Ruby's got into her stride by now and as we trot down into Greenholme I can feel her bunching herself to canter up the brow to the farm.

And the bloody boot flies off again.

This time I say, "Sod it!" and let her canter on home. Unyoke, unharness, give her a small feed and leave her munching, still with three boots on, while I whizz back in the car to pick up the boot, before anyone can run over it and wreck it.

When I'm taking off Ruby's remaining boots it occurs to me to try the much-too-keen-to-fly hind boot (the Glove) on her front hoof, for which it used to be too small. And it fits. So now I am wondering - have all her hooves got smaller over the time she's been working unshod? That seems very strange, but it's possible. Or maybe the boots ease a bit with use? Measuring and re-fitting will have to be done before I can be sure. I may have to get a smaller pair of Gloves for her hind feet and move the current ones to her front feet.

I turn Ruby out into the paddock, which is what she's really been wanting since before we went for our drive.

Last of all, I dismantle both the quick-release shackles, take out the helical retaining springs, decompress them quite a lot, and re-fit them. It will take a much stronger pull to flip them open now, and if necessary I will shorten the pull tabs, or do without them altogether.

So, although things went wrong, we coped. And that's the main thing.

I conclude, though, that I must be in a time warp, because this is the kind of day that usually happens to me when we go back into work after winter. I can only assume it's very mild for January.





PS - I happen to have Ruby's foot measurements from 2007 which was when we went barefoot/booted. While assessing the actual figures is a bit mind boggling, charting them makes it very clear that her hooves have got BIGGER over the intervening years. The lines indicating length and width for each newly trimmed hoof make a significant upward leap from 2007 to this year's measurements.

Therefore - it's imperative that I clean the boots and her hooves of the oil I use to protect feather! I must away to the shops for some cheapo toothpaste!

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Sue's books can be found at her web site, Jackdaw E Books, http://www.jackdawebooks.co.uk/

Ruby being daft...it must be Spring!

Ruby's not done much because I've been busy, so she has probably had too much opportunity to graze spring grass. She's lost a lot of her winter coat and has come up nice and glossy despite a heavy coating of mud...

We went out for a drive just after lunch and immediately met one of the big timber-wagons that are coming past us for the felling of the wood in Bretherdale. I now know that the Bennington is shorter overall than the Quayside gigs because it went round on a sixpence in our "narrows" between the stone walls of the garden and the field opposite. Ruby stood in the yard while the monster went by, and we started the drive over again.

It all went OK, including having our photos taken at the railway bridge, until we reached Selsmire where the event horses were all out at grass in their heavy rugs. Ruby knows that the first 4 in the field on the left are not really interested in her any more, though they look up and stare; but once again, when we reached the next field she spotted "that grey horse" and ground to a halt. She considered trying the spin-and-run that she caught me with a couple of months ago, but I talked her out of that and she just stood there, assessing. This is most unlike her because she is normally such a bold mare! She has even met this grey horse a couple of times, out on the road. So why the sight of a grey in a rug is so scary, I can't really work out, unless she can only see the legs and head and not the rug in between. Talking to her, twitching the rein and outright smacking her with the whip all produced only one or two steps forward so as I'd got her to the side of the road enabling cars to get by (if necessary) I was prepared to sit it out. Eventually after about 5 minutes a van came from the opposite direction and at that point she appeared to come out of her "trance" and walked on! I think I need to get her a supplement with magnesium in it, to counteract the grass.

I took her another mile or so, then turned and came back. She behaved fine coming past the horses this time (the grey was further away and behind a couple of other horses). We met the timber wagon, again but I had spotted him coming from over a mile away as I came down the hill, and I found a gate open into a little garth, where we stood out of his way and exchanged waves with the driver before continuing on our merry way.

Ruby was hardly damp at all when we got in - combination of shedding winter woollies, and a quite cold wind.

Poor Micky Wippitt was furiously jealous that I had done things with Ruby without taking him into the game - biting the wire of his kennel run and yelping - but I can't let him run free just at the moment because it's lambing time and he is far too keen on chasing after leaping lambies! And if I were to lead him and Ruby, his extending lead would get wound round her legs AND his. Neither of them bother about this, but I'd need more hands than I currently have, to untangle them.