Horses in the Dark
It happened after dark last night, out in the pasture. There was not any moonlight to speak of, which made navigating the field a difficult task. Just now it is a mass of frost daisies — pretty by daylight with their froth of white flowers, but a tumbled tangle of wiry stems, knee-high or taller, to trip one up at night.
Between ourselves, I should very much like to run a herd of goats through that field to reset the balance between grass and other plants, but what I have is four horses. Horses don’t eat frost daisies. Not even my threesome of small, rugged Galicenos will munch them down. So finding a horse in the two-acre pasture after dark is not easy.
At feeding time, I had already put little bay Margarita in the pen which she shares with my other mare, Bonita. But, in the interests of ensuring that each had her full meal, I had left Bonita loose out in the field with her bucket of feed hooked over a fence rail. Then I went off to care for several other things. I had a suspicion this might be a mistake. It was.
I had a suspicion this might be a mistake.
I came back to put her into the pen for the night. But meantime Bonita had finished eating and disappeared. I peered into the darkness; her pale buckskin coat had vanished somewhere into it, and I could only see the dark night, accented with tufts of even…
