End of the Trail

It was not the kind of day I would have picked if I had the choice to make. In a perfect world, we would still have been at home, in a grassy field, with sunlight and warmth, and a light breeze riffling the pasture around us. There would have been wide open space, and a big blue sky, and a few more mouthfuls of tender green grass to tear from the ground and savor.

But it was winter, and I had driven through a blizzard to get to the barn north of town where my two horses had spent the colder months for nearly twenty years. The snow on the unplowed road was easily as deep as the undercarriage of my Subaru. The wind rattled the big barn door behind me, and the snow drove sideways loudly into the metal cladding as the mare reached eagerly for another piece of sliced apple. I’d brought a full bag. I didn’t think we’d run out. It was time that was running out instead.

I had had at least one horse in my life since I was sixteen years old. That’s when Hoki arrived as a frisky, untrained six-month old colt. Hoki finally passed on the year before this, frail, most likely senile, and thirty three years old, after a life spent mostly eating, sleeping, and daydreaming whatever horses dream about. Probably clover blossoms and a soft, warm place to lie down. We had had some grand times when we were both quite a bit younger. Babe had made it a pair a few years after that, bought on a whim by my parents and ultimately transferred over to me. I joked often than their only real purpose in life was to be big, expensive lawn ornaments. And I loved to just look at them.

For the past twenty years that the horses spent the warmer months pastured at my house, I'd been up at dawn and sometimes earlier every spring and summer and early fall day, often still in my pajamas, sometimes by flashlight, measuring out horse feed and lately medications, and opening pasture fences. I don't think I'll be taking note of nearly as many sunrises from now on.

The other horse stabled in this small barn, bigger and stronger and, I suspect, meaner, tried to muscle her way into the bulk of the apples. I managed to hoard most of them for Babe anyway. A half-dozen prize-winning Dutch rabbits who shared the barn with the horses, their cages nestled by bales of fragrant hay, watched us warily as I parceled out the apple slices, and wept, and kept repeating the same words as I stroked her shaggy neck, “Baby, it’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.” The vet would be there soon. But this time, instead of making things better, we were going to end them.

There was a good deal of irony to the fact that the end of the trail had finally arrived during the first serious blizzard of the season. For years, I’d labeled Babe the “Calamity Jane” of the horse world—anything that could possibly medically go wrong with a horse inevitably did for her. In the years I had taken care of her, I had nursed her through multiple, near-fatal bouts with emphysema, laminitis, and colic. An autoimmune disorder left her prone to eye injuries, and they arrived like clockwork every summer for years. And after each disaster, she had bounced back, defying the odds and sometimes the predictions of the vet.

But this was different. She had suffered a knee injury earlier in the year, and while cortisone shots had eased her pain and difficulty for several months, the knee had now deteriorated beyond repair. Walking was now a struggle. She had looked at me only days before with the same plaintive stare I had seen through so many other struggles, the unspoken plea, “make it better.” And I knew this time that I could not.

On this day, she was thirty two years old, which was about ninety five in human years. And only three weeks before, at that miraculously old age, she was still staggeringly beautiful. She was a palomino, with languid, blonde, Marilyn Monroe looks. Golden coat and flaxen mane and tail. Big brown come-hither eyes fringed by ridiculous long blonde eyelashes. A curvaceous rump, and gorgeous legs. She was lazy as all get out, and I joked often that she was—like many horses—as dumb as a bag of hammers. But when she startled, and her head flew up and her haunches coiled, ready for flight, muscular neck arched, nostrils flaring and ears perked forward toward imagined danger, she was still every little girl’s fantasy of the absolutely perfect horse.

Now, she was dropping weight by the day. On this day, she was damp and bedraggled from the snow melting on her back, and it was clearly a struggle for her to move. The vet finally arrived, and pulled his Suburban full of gear up to the barn door. Because of the blizzard and the snow drifts piling up, we would need to put her down outside the barn to give the hauler a better chance of reaching her later and carting her away.

There was paperwork to sign, of course, there always is for the big, hard decisions in life. And then some more apples, and a nice shot of really good painkillers for the last walk through the barn door. She followed me, trusting, past the rabbits and over the threshold through the small side door, and we stepped unexpectedly into the sunlight. For a short while, the snow had stopped, and the wind dropped, and the blue sky peaked through the clouds. We trudged through the glittering snow to the appointed place, and I cried some more as I held her halter fast, and stroked her face while the vet busied himself with his final task. Then the moment came, and she dropped like a stone into a soft, perfect blanket of untouched foot-deep powder. She never took another breath.

She was a trouper. And she was beautiful.