January 8, 2007

ell, yesterday afternoon and evening were certainly interesting. 

I went to Amy's house as she is as sick as a dog and I went to go help her out before noon, keep her company, make her soup heavy on ginger and garlic and to make sure she ate it. Make her take her Vitamin C and the mysterious Chinese Herbal Medicine. And work on some sewing we need to have done in a month. The winds were high at her house. We just were settled down to a movie and work on sewing stuff....

As we just started laying out stuff to sew, the winds turned to hurricane force and her electricity went out. Then the winds got even stronger. We finished watching the movie on her laptop computer which ran out of juice just as the movie finished. Then we are ripping out seams by lamplight. It rather looked like monastery with all the candles and oil lamps we had going. 

We went outside to do chores by the last of the daylight and she had a horse laying on the ground well away from the other horses in a pool of blood. We ran over to her and the horse is covered in blood. Blood is everywhere. We tried to move her/roll her over to evaluate and I had to run back and get a couple halters and lead ropes from the porch and when she put the halter on "Brassy", I snubbed the pup to a tree with the other lead rope to keep him out of the way. 

We get "Brassy" up and we were so grateful that it was not abdominal like we had thought. There was enough blood that we were seriously thinking to ourselves (which we disclosed to each other later) that we needed to call my boyfriend and have him bring a rifle over. There was a huge hematoma on her right upper haunch next to her vulva. We are talking the size of a basketball. Amy figures that her draft horse "Mouse" got "Brassy" into a corner and kicked the living beegeebies out of her. On my way back with the halters I had noted there was enough blood in "Mouse's" black-grey tail to be noticeable, but she had no obvious sign of injury. So between that and the blood trail from start to finish, it was obvious that "Mouse" had cornered "Brassy" by the dog pen side of the pasture, broke fence, ripped out "Brassy" hair and then chased her all over the pasture. Even when we were taking the very injured horse out of the pasture, "Mouse" was again going for her. 

Remember, we still have no electricity and the wind was serious enough that when I was in the outhouse earlier (and the best outhouse in the country, might I add), trees were falling over. So here we are trying to work with a horse, with now no light, no water and in high winds. Not the best scenario.  We put the injured horse in the dog pen, which is actually very large and you could put all the horses in it. Put a couple blankets on her and decided not to treat her any further at the moment in case she had internal injuries.  We checked on her ever few minutes. Once she was down with her head on the ground, but we scared her back up. Frankly I thought she was dead then. The rest of the night she stood with her hindquarters to the wind. Though I had water heating on the woodstove, we decided to let the blood freeze on her, rather than try to clean her up and the water freeze to her. 

After some beet pulp with alot of molasses to eat to give her fluids, energy and fuel, we had no choice but to go back in the house and monitor her from there. 

The electric was out for about 4 hours. We worked on embroidery, cooked popcorn on the woodstove, read by lamplight. After the power came back on after a while I took a shower!!! To some of you that may not sound exciting, but if you do not have a shower and only a bathtub, it is truly bliss. We started to watch another movie, but after my nice relaxing shower. I vaguely remember Amy talking to me and rousting from my slumber. I have no idea what she said, but I presume it was about the movie.

Thankfully I had a wool blanket here I am turning into a medieval cloak for "Kid" and thankfully I had not cut it apart yet. I slept under the cloak-to-be on the futon and slept very well actually. Other than the ferret making a racket every now and again, I was comfy, warm and slept like a log.

I was a lazy sluggard this morning.. I called the boys at 6 am to make sure they were out of bed for school. Then I stayed in my comfy little nest until 10:30 am while Amy set sourdough for pancakes and did the chores.  We need to put nestboxes in with both the Californian does who will have babies in 2 days. I know I have one, we may have to build another today.