Chewing the Cud Read Free

— and somehow (the mechanics of the thing are quite beyond me) this great contraption, a crossbetween a giant's toast rack and a Roman ballista, would creak and crack and groan and throw half a wagonload up onto the top of the mow in one convulsive heave.
    Every day started among the horses, for first thing in the morning Howard the foreman gave his orders in the stables. In the gloom of the long, narrow building, a barred window at either end, he would stand with one arm thrown over a huge shining bottom and allot the different jobs to be done, depending on weather and season. And the air was a marvellous mixture of the smells of hay and leather and dung and just plain horse, and the sounds were of soft snortings and bubbly blowings through velvet lips and now and then the stamp of a heavy hoof on the cobbled floor.
    We would stand facing that long row of backsides, which were of several sizes and of many colors, for they were a motley lot at Tytherington Farm. Some, like the motorcars, had known better times — two or three heavy hunters and one animal with a bit of blood in him who had had to forget their palmier days and mingle with a lower class of person; halfway horses with hairy heels and common features. The poultrymen especially had strange beasts to pull their light loads — like Ginger, a rawboned chestnut with a lot of yellow teeth (very like her namesake in
Black Beauty
, for “the ears were laid back and the eyelooked rather ill-tempered”), and a kind of outsize pony called Pony, who could trot at lightning speed despite having very short legs and sported a forelock that completely covered its face. The queen of them all, to my mind, was Flower, a purebred Shire mare. The only one to look the part, she dwarfed the rest.
    Outside the stables, there were horses all over the place. The farmer and his wife hunted with the Wylye Valley, and there were always a number of fine animals turned out up on the downs in the off-season. And in an orchard behind the farm buildings there lived a strange assortment of very old pensioners — one mare was reputed to be forty-five years of age. And with them three gaunt mules, survivors of an eight-mule team that had done the plowing of the farm in the early twenties. Despite their impotence they dreamed vain dreams of virility and leaped upon the ancients with loud, pretentious brays.
    Most of the working horses were quirky beasts, each with its own pet phobia. Alice, for example, half-Shire, half-something, and a sprightly thirty-eight, was totally trustworthy in traffic but terrified of gateposts. Driving Alice through a gateway, which might occur many times a day, was something to be done with maximum concentration and a firm hold of the reins. She had to be steered exactly between the posts — fearful monsters, asyou could see by her pricked ears, braced neck, and rolling eyes. They were waiting, she knew, to do her a terrible mischief, and if you should touch a careless wheel against one as you went through, Alice was off, no matter what the load, straight into a gallop that would have done justice to a two-year-old.
    The great Flower had one bête noire or pet aversion (she was green, in fact) and that was a beast even larger than herself — the local bus. And her reaction was not to bolt but to buck. At sight of the approaching titan, she would throw herself against the breeching, tossing her head, whinnying, and paddling madly at the ground with her huge soup-plate hooves, the frenzy increasing as the bus drew nearer. Better to be in an empty Scotch cart than a loaded four-wheeled wagon when the giants met.
    And then there was Foxianna. She was a liver-chestnut mare with rusty mane and tail who had served her time in the hunting field and was as biddable as you could wish. Until she saw a pig. Pigs to her were devils incarnate, and even the smell or the distant sound of them was enough to give her the vapors.
    I drove her in a hay rake once, sitting contentedly