Ride 32: Heat, Wind, Scary Things, Shedding

Due to various things, some socially unmentionable (nobody wants to hear about certain common minor illnesses, right?  RIGHT!!), some related to DST, some related to stuff-that-had-to-be-done, today was the first day this week I actually made it onto Rags.  Storms, rain, mud (no deterrent to UK riders, who are used to rain and mud; I don’t have riding rain gear.  Yet.), very high winds on several days (branches coming down out of trees high),  delivery of a new mower that needed Slime ™ in its tires because every Texas field of grass has thorny stuff in it, from cactus hidden in the grass to baby thorn-bearing trees, to the aforementioned fallen limbs (well thorned) etc.

But…today I made it.  Not early…but finally, in the early afternoon, when it was already at or approaching 90F.  Rags considered this regrettable.  He and Tigger have finally begun shedding out, and his coat is thicker than Tig’s (almost shaggy compared to lush velvet.)   I sympathized, but since I was wearing two shirts to ward off the midday sun, not *that* much.  Getting him tacked up was complicated by having put the front girth strap on the near side in the wrong part of the girth buckle, making it impossible to tighten or release until the other side was off.  But we got it done.  R- helped.  Then we started off with a brief session on the pole layout, which I’ll change tomorrow for another week.

One side of the polework space. The separate ground poles are for future trotting.  The raised poles are for walking over & the design makes a visible turn and continues to the right.

Then out to the near meadow, where Rags made a couple of abortive attempts to turn back (“why me?  why today? it’s hot!  I don’t wanna…”) which I dealt with calmly but firmly, and then again a couple of times going up the west trail to the Dry Woods (ditto) and a few times thereafter on the way out.  His desire to come back home, once we started back, meant no more unplanned stops or swerves.  His way of going indicated no physical distress…when he was walking, he was walking with impulsion and making time.  The scary or worrisome things were things many horses don’t like.  Not only was it hot (not warm: HOT in the full sun)  but there was a brisk hot wind with strong gusts in addition to the prevailing windspeed.  That kind of thing creates louder sounds from tall dry grass and trees, and brings sounds upwind nearer.  Horses are not fond of roaring wind, the various creaking and crackling and scraping sounds such winds create.  Smells come with the wind–and as with sounds, horses have much better sense of smell than humans.  Rags’ stops for “go home now?” are different from his stops for scary things: for the former, he will try to duck to one side and then stop, or even continue to turn around, and for the latter he stops short, head up, ears stiffly pricked, back and neck stiff.   For the “scary things” I let him stand a little, then tell him to “walk on” and now he usually does.

To the left (not shown) are the chairs on the east side. When the creek has water, it flows south here, right to left, across gravel.  Our trail leads across it at an angle, then sharp right up the opposite bank, then gradually approaches the N fence and heads west.  So from here kind of a double S curve. 

The first of the scaries came on Diagonal, when a particular strong gust brought both a loud noise from the grass and creek woods, but a sound that could’ve been a very distant dog or dogs.  Or even a startled coyote.  We went on.  When we turned toward the entrance to Tractor Crossing of the dry creek near the north fence, he stopped again, alert and stiff as another big gust came by, and the Ashe junipers we were about to ride between waved at us like those inflated tube-things you sometimes see at car dealerships, bowing and waving.  We started up again, went between the junipers, and then he jerked and threw up his head…and that, it turned out, was a wasp that had been in one of them, and flew out, hitting him in the nose (not stinging, thank goodness, just bounced off his nose and flew into the other juniper.)  We had no stops or scares, riding up the north fenceline trail to the NW corner and then through about half the shaded Ashe juniper part of the trail.  There’s a spot where he *always* wants to dive off to the right, toward the fence, but it’s not really open and the fence itself is barbed wire.  This time he added “but I’m scared” to the usual veering rightward.  The West Woods, now directly in front of us, were almost roaring, and grass to our left was flattening and rising up, flattening and rising up.

Fortunately, the wind dropped again, and we went on, making the turn off from the obvious and wider tractor trail into the woods proper, downhill, across the fallen tree at the low end, down into dry Westbrook and up the far side into the SW Meadow where Owl Pavilion is.  All well there, no hesitation; he’s been on this trail multiple times both ways now. Then another hard stop: “whuts that mom!  that thing!  that  branch too!  scary-scary!!”  R had done a lot of mowing in the SW meadow and I hadn’t been there since the mowing uncovered a shallow plastic bowl with gravel in it…gravel we used to have in the artificial stream, but had taken out after n upheaval when something disrupted the whole stream and we had to reline it and redo it.  The bowl is tan-colored, and the outer surface is textured.  The gravel, filling it level, was multicolored.  Did he think it was a snake?  I dunno.  It was all I could think of.  He resisted going forward  but finally made a circuit around it, facing it, and then backing away to get into the shade near Owl.  I gave him a cookie once we were in the shade.  The wind dropped again and I decided to get out of the woods while the getting was good, so we went back around the bowl and branch (this time no hesitation) and back into the West Woods, across the dry streambed, up over the fallen tree and back out again to open sky.  (Alas, no pictures of this yet, because I don’t feel confident carrying my good camera on horseback.  And I can’t use the cellphone because I don’t know how to get the pictures from the camera into my computer where I can edit them and post them.  Also…on that bit of trail…I need both hands on the reins and alertness.)

Then we took the gully trail south and east.  We were right beside the Fort Cedar cluster of trees when I saw movement in the woods ahead of us (the trail goes between Fort Cedar and the West Woods) and so did Rags.  One crackle of movement and everything got very still.  I could see parts of one animal and other parts of a second, somewhat smaller.  Tannish.  Well, our white-tails look tan in summer, but…so do the big cats.  Rags was snuffing, breathing fast, totally alert.  I told him it was deer, and deer didn’t hurt us, and we’d just waked them up from a midday nap on a hot windy day…said they were scared of us and wasn’t that silly, too?   I felt him relax slowly and said “OK, let’s go on home, gave him a nudge and he walked on around the south end of Fort Cedar and onto the north/south part of the Gully Trail.  We went on north beside the gully system on the west side of the gully, noticing other places R- had mowed, up to the head of the gully, turning right (east) around it and back through the twisty ways that brought us to the north fence trail near Tractor Ford.  On days he’s having scary moments, I stop him when he’s *not* scared, both for practice (his and mine) in making smooth stops, and to let him know stopping could happen any time.

Picture taken from a walk last year of two new grasses, but that gash in the ground is the main gully, which has changed a lot in 20 years.  From horseback you can see more of it at once. 

Our last real stop was after Tractor Ford, where we have chairs to rest in set under a trimmed-up Ashe juniper, for shade.  As we went on, and approached the two “guardian” Ashe junipers to that area, I saw a big red wasp fly from one to another again, and managed to get Rags through without having him worry about it.  We turned onto Diagonal at the trail junction and had the wind just to the right of directly in our faces–better than still and that hot.  Rags indicated he would like to trot now, and I said “OK, trot-trot” and nudged him.  It’s a gentle up-slope and fairly smooth grass.  He picked up a trot; I started posting, and this time he didn’t immediately change his rhythm or stop.  We trotted the rest of the way on Diagonal and around the turn onto Center Walk.  I said “Easy…easy…” and brought him back to walk when I felt that either his or my rhythm was faltering (not sure which–in my present state of fitness, I *can* post a trot but I can’t stay with a horse changing its trot.  Yet.)  We walked up to the Dry Woods and turned right onto the west Dry Woods trail.  He wanted to try trotting again, on the downslope…like the other, a very gentle slope, but interrupted by several terrace berms rather than running between terrace berms as Diagonal does.  I let him try, but he wanted to hurry, and his rhythm was (for me right now) impossible to post to, so I brought him back again.

We did our brief “end of lesson” walk over poles again, and this time he hit every one of the last six or seven.  Then dismount, run up the stirrups, lead him back to the barn, untack…and partway through untacking I felt sickish.  R- finished the untacking for me, helped me back to the house, and as soon as I’d drunk some I headed for a nap…the nausea had eased, but the headache and unsteadiness hadn’t.  Several hours sleep in a house cooler than 90F helped a lot.  I was able to go out and feed, clean out and replenish the water,  brush all the sweat marks out of Rags’ coat, etc. before coming in for supper.

I count the ride a success: Rags gets an A for behaving well every time he was scared and completing an approximate 1.6 to 2 mile ride in the heat; I get a B, maybe +, for not trying to go to far in our first  hot ride of the year…but not only should I get the horse home w/o his having a problem, I should get myself home *before* the point of nausea from heat.  To be fair, the headache and “sinking” feeling came on fast, after I was in the north horse lot with him, but…I should have quit immediately and not tried the pole exercise even though I’ve been making it routine.  The nausea hit while I was undoing the girth and I had to sit down fast because I felt I was also going to fall.   A good ride all in all, with both of us gaining confidence (at first, anyway) and learning more.

The pale yellow-green part is the early flower stalk of a bluebonnet–the first flower stalk I’d seen, 2 days ago.  Now we have open ones, blue-and-white, in several places, along with little bitty tiny rosettes that may not bloom this year because not enough rain.   But spring is sprung, even if with the caution and restraint of dry-land plants that endure periodic drought and know how to survive and reproduce even in bad years.

Added Sunday morning: two little baby cactuses,  maybe 3 inches tall, one reason not to walk barefoot in the grass.   The other is of course Mr, Mrs, and Jr rattlesnake.  Also hard to see when the short grass starts coming up in the spring, or in the taller grasses any time.   Something over a week ago, R- and I took a walk looking for how to open the old trail (or a facsimile) across what we called Main Ford (cattle used it a lot)  and out of the creek woods on the west side.  We ended up walking through dangerous snake habitat (cool day, though) of  thick Indiangrass, still winter colored and higher than our knees.  The original trail out led to a cattle crossing of the gully system; what I want as a riding trail would parallel the gully system far enough away not to degrade its east bank and connect with the E/W part of the Gully Trail.  There’s not a good horse crossing of the main creek bed except at Main Ford and Tractor Ford.  Tractor is the easier of those; Main Ford will require cutting up a couple of trees fallen across and “stuck” there, but it will be OK for a horse.  Deer Ford, which I used to use to get down to what was, at one time, a seasonal spring right at the creek (tiny, but lovely) is far too steep for comfortable riding, and the opposite side of it never had a good way up that bank for anything bigger than a deer.  A couple of other places a human can get down to the creek on one side, and it’s possible to cross near the south end if you’re agile and don’t have knee and hip problems, but the east side is covered in rip-rap R- installed in hopes of preserving a live oak from flood water, and the west side is a vertical soil bank into which we set some flat stones as steps before the rip-rap thing.  We once had a big heavy board there to walk across, but a flood gave it to someone else downstream (at least, I hope someone found it and said “Thank you, flood, that’s just what I needed to fix this other thing.”  Anyway, a horse crossing at Main Ford, just west of the Entrance Meadow, would let me (and a guest if they had a gentle horse) enter the creek woods near the south fence, ride north to Main Ford, and come out in the grass between the creek woods and gully system…under shade.   That would be really, really convenient in summer.  Part of my plan for the place includes having more riding trails so more “observational” chores can be done by riding around (which, after all, is fun.)  I hope I can persuade Rags to learn “dragging” as a horse activity, so I can saddle him western, tie the drag rope to the saddle horn, and pull log chunks out of the creek after R- cuts them loose.  Should be possible.  Having gained back five pounds between holidays and last week, I need to lose that before putting the western saddle on him, because of its weight limit.