Under a blood moon, that was how Tara went down in the end. The old chestnut mare sure knew how to make an exit. She knew how to do most things, having lived 35 years entirely on her own terms.
The builder boyfriend and I stood speechless in the field afterwards, marooned in that strange moonlight. Then the other two horses, standing by the round bale a few feet away, did something I shall never forget. Seconds after she passed, Darcy and Grace put their noses together and breathed.
Perhaps they felt her spirit leaving, perhaps they wanted to comfort each other. Either way, they were perfectly silent, touching faces with a wonderful sort of grace.
If you believe animals still have the instincts that have been blunted in us, then you will believe me when I say they processed Tara’s death in a way that rescued me.
I knelt down in the dark and said a prayer. I don’t think the builder boyfriend was up for touching noses, though he did put his arms around me. I saw the headlights at the field entrance and that was alright too.
‘Was it a nice horse?’ the man with the lorry asked. Nice? The word hung in the air. A smile spread across our faces.
In fact, her show name was Twice As Nice. What an irony. When she came off the lorry, I asked a friend to test ride her and her verdict was ‘Hmm, a bit on the forehand’. That was an extremely polite way of describing her total and utter refusal to take any form of direction from a rider, even steering.
I look back on her life and wonder how on earth I survived it. She was a tank of a horse, fierce and relentless.
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