While the vet was checking Gracie, I asked him to take a look at Tara, the old chestnut hunter. Just a look, mind you, from a safe distance. I wouldn’t recommend anyone, however qualified, approach the red devil.
Aged 32, she is slower than she used to be but still finds ways to express her love of violence. Imagine the dragon from Lord of the Rings coming at you with its neck stretched out, baring teeth, and somehow bending itself round to aim its back end at you at the same time.
She has always been like that — coming at you with both ends, they call it — so no suggestions on a postcard, please, as to what made her this way. She’s had a wonderful life, and she has never stopped celebrating it by being unconscionably aggressive and hideous. If you anthropomorphise animals enough to give them lovely attributes, then you have to make the leap to allow them to have awful traits, too.
Anyone who has ever met Tara won’t argue with this. She is the horse equivalent of a sociopath, or possibly a full-on psychopath. Anyone else would have traded her on years ago. But I found a way to harness her psychopathic tendencies by riding her at full pelt and we reached an accommodation.
She has this weirdly seductive power. I would like to call it the life force, but it’s more like the death force, as Sybil Fawlty once said of her mother. She is indestructible, infallible, dare I say immortal? She is the only horse, or indeed person I know, who has never had a single day sick.
She is a force for evil certainly, but a force nevertheless. When people ask why on earth I love her, I say it’s not love exactly.
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