Smoke’s Image

[threeringedmoon]

Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.

Smoke’s Image 1977-2005
Two weeks ago, I realized that a decision that we knew we would have to make about Smoke sooner or later was going to be sooner. Saturday, I watched him lurch down the hill to the barn and saw that his right knee, which had been bad for a long time, had given up functioning all together. Bute gave him a little relief through the weekend, and today his vet came out and put him down. Jack and a friend came to be with me while it happened.

I bought Smoke, a Palomino Quarter Horse, about ten years ago for trail riding and hunting. He was the second best trail horse I have ridden and the best I have owned. He had worked hard all his life as a champion roping horse and ranch foreman’s working stock horse before his owner decided that he needed a less strenuous life and sold him to someone as a trail horse. That didn’t work out for him, and he ended up at a friend’s place as a rescue horse. I bought him several years later.

During my early years of struggling with Hap, Smoke was my confidence builder: a horse I could saddle and ride by myself and remember why riding was supposed to be fun. I think Smoke spooked with me once: he stopped moving, and lifted his head higher about a foot to stare at the offending object. I never came off of him, though I came close once when we failed to make up our minds about which way we were going around a yucca plant at a gallop. After that, I let him decide.

Smoke was a great baby-sitter. When friends would get a new horse, they would ask me and Smoke to go out with them the first time so the other horse would gain courage and emulate his calm unflappability on the trail. (At least, that was the theory.) I also used to accompany kids on their ponies. Smoke seemed to know when we were baby-sitting, and would stay two horse lengths behind, even when he had to do an impossibly slow lope to do so.

Smoke wasn’t all joy, since he suffered from panic attacks when closed into stalls. I’ll never forget the night when Jack called me out to the barn because Smoke had just gone over a metal gate to get out of a stall and had folded it in the process. We didn’t know whether to be more amazed at the amount of damage to the gate, or surprised that he didn’t get more than superficial lacerations himself. (After that episode, Jack believed me when I said that Smoke could never be shut in a stall.)

His last day was a beautifully sunny autumn day, with lots of carrots to gum and his friends close by. I’ll miss him.