There She Rides

Hector went down with colic on Thursday night, and Nelson, who has never hurried in his life, walked the yard with him for an hour and a half. The farmer found him at ten, pawing, looking round at his own flank, dropping down and getting up again, which in a horse means his gut has stopped and you ring the vet and you walk him. You walk him so he does not roll, because a horse that rolls with a twisted gut can finish himself, and you walk him because walking sometimes shifts it, and you walk him because it is the only thing you can do and standing there is worse. The vet was forty minutes away. So the farmer put a headcollar on seventeen hands of trembling Cavalry Black and led him out of the shelter, round the yard, under the light, and the horse, who has walked in step beside a man for seventeen years, walked in step beside a man, with sweat coming through the thick new coat and his eye white at the corner. Nelson came out of the shelter behind them. A donkey walks when there is a reason to walk, and the reason is usually grass. He had been in his dry corner, in the straw, with the night exactly as he likes it, and he came out into the yard without being called, fell in on the horse's off side, and walked. The farmer did one lap. The donkey did one lap. The farmer did twenty laps and the donkey did twenty laps, at the horse's pace, two feet from his shoulder, and did not stop, and did not graze, and did not once look at the gate. When Hector tried to go down, the donkey was in the way. Not pushing. Standing where the horse wanted to drop, so the horse had to stay up. The vet came at twenty to eleven. He put a needle in the neck and the thing eased inside half an hour, which it usually does when it is going to, and Hector passed a load in the corner of the yard that the farmer said was the finest thing he had ever seen a horse do. The vet asked how long the donkey had been walking. The farmer said since ten. The vet said in twenty years he had seen a lot of people walk a colic and had never once seen anything else do it. By midnight Hector was eating hay, carefully, with Nelson next to him. The donkey had walked further in ninety minutes than he walks in a week, and he went back into the straw and lay down without looking at anybody. The farmer went in and sat at the kitchen table in his coat for a while. He is not a man who sits at the kitchen table in his coat. A horse has never asked that donkey for anything. The donkey has never been given an order. Somewhere in there they have come to an arrangement, and on Thursday night it was walking.

Hector's old groom came up on the Saturday before last with a box of kit in the boot, and there was nowhere for any of it to go. He does not usually bring anything. The visits have a shape and it does not include kit. He stands at the rail, the old horse comes over before the car is in sight because he knows that engine and always has, and the two of them stand there a long time while the man talks and nothing whatsoever is required of either of them. On Saturday he opened the boot and there was a grooming box in it that has not been out of a garage in 4 years. He had a reason and it was thin. The regiment had done something on the Friday, a parade or a change or one of the things that has a title and a running order, and he had been down in London for it and had stood in a crowd on a pavement he used to be the other side of, and watched the current lot go past on the current horses. He knows every one of the animals that went by. He knows what each of them is like in the box on a bad morning and which one goes short behind on the cobbles and which one will not stand for the drums until the third or fourth time. He watched the whole thing at eye level with everybody else, and then went and had a pint on his own, and then got up on the Saturday and drove three and a half hours to Denbighshire with a grooming box in the boot. The horse in the field is 22 and woolly. The parade coat has been let go and will not come back. He rests a hind leg most of the day and there is a stiffness in him on a cold start that anyone would know on sight. The man tied him at the rail and did the whole thing anyway. Quarter, body brush, the lot, in order, the way it is done, on a coat that has not needed doing since the shoes came off. He did the feet. He did the mane, and then he sat down on an upturned bucket and plaited it, which took a long time because he has not done it in 4 years and because a plaiting job on a Cavalry Black is not a quick piece of work. Hector stood. He stood the entire time, which is what he is for and what he was bought for and drilled in for 17 years, and about halfway through the shape came back into him without a word being said to him. He came up off the resting leg. He squared himself. The head came up and the ears came forward and half a tonne of retired soldier went quiet and formal on a Saturday morning in a wet Welsh field with an audience of one man on a bucket and a donkey. Nelson watched the beginning of it and lost interest, because the good hay was unguarded and there was a limit to how much of this concerned him. He came over once, presented an ear at the man's free hand, was paid, and went back. The man took the plaits out again before he left. That is the part the yard has gone over more than once. He put them in and then he stood there for a while and then he took them out, one at a time, and brushed the crimp out of the mane, and turned the horse loose in a field with a donkey in it. He gave the yard the box on his way out and said they may as well have it, and then took it back off them at the car and put it in the boot. He was gone by two. The yard did not ask and he did not say. Somebody who was there says that when he was doing the last of it he told the horse the names of a couple of people, and that was all of it, and the horse had his head down in the grass by then and was not listening to any of it.

Hector has been named in the reviews of a driving school he has no connection with. The listing says: patient female instructor, dual controls, pass rates above local average, nervous and mature learners welcome, Denbighshire and surrounding. The reviews say: - Five stars. "She takes you up the farm lane for hill starts. There is a passing place halfway with an enormous black horse standing in it. He is on the other side of the fence. It does not feel like it." - Five stars. "Stalled eleven times on that hill. Horse watched all eleven. Did not react to any of them." - Four stars. "Good instructor. Would mention the horse in the advert." - One star. "Made me reverse round a corner with an audience." - Five stars. "Reply to the above. The audience was one horse and a donkey and they were both asleep." - Five stars. "My daughter has autism and could not cope with traffic. Six weeks on that lane with nothing coming and a horse who does not move. She passed in March. First time." - Four stars. "Bit of a trek out to the lane every lesson but I see why she does it." - Five stars. "I am sixty two. My husband did all the driving for thirty nine years and then he could not and then I could not either. She started me on that lane because there is nothing on it. I used to sit at the passing place with the engine off getting my breath and that horse would come over and stand there while I did it. He has no idea. I know he has no idea. I passed on the second attempt in June and I drove to Rhyl on my own the following Tuesday for no reason at all." The instructor did not put the horse in the advert because it did not occur to her that a horse was a feature. She uses that lane because it is quiet and it has a gradient. A Cavalry Black is bought for one quality and drilled in it for years: he stands. Bands, guns, flags, crowds, cameras, the whole machinery of a state occasion going off around him, and he does not move a hoof. Seventeen years of that. He retired to a field beside a single track lane in Denbighshire, where the entire traffic consists of a milk lorry and a succession of terrified people in Corsas failing to find the bite point. Every learner in that valley is taught to pass a horse slowly and give it room. They practise it on the one horse in Wales who would not notice either way.