Maple stands tied when the horse next to her initiates both horses barrel kicking. Horses do this sometimes, but when one or both can’t get away is when there’s trouble. I walk around the corner as it begins and ends. Maple gets kicked, then Maple kicks the other horse, and they both quit. Blood streams quick down Maple’s left hind beneath the hock. The day in my head, spent warm & horseback, is pushed out by frustration and fear. I squat down to Maple’s leg, she holds it up with fresh pain. I note the barefoot toe of the offending horse makes a clean cut through to my horse’s bone. The horse that started the trouble has no obvious injuries. Horses have splint bones, narrow bones which taper down the inside and outside of the canon bones which are the larger bones on each of the lower limbs. Sometimes the splints fuse to the larger canon bone, such as in older horses like mine, sometimes they don’t.
I stick my finger into this opening where those splints taper off to feel immediately the open surface area of her canon bone. I first am surprised that it feels like a tooth – it’s warm, both slimy and tacky, and is absolutely alive under my finger. She doesn’t seem to mind my finger, from her sweet compliance or an unawareness, I do not know. I overcome this startling sensation of my invasion & shift to the feel of the bone for any obvious disturbance to it. All slick, there’s no fracture or bump or discrepancy to the surface of bone my finger can find. Just the feel of a stranger’s warm, wet tooth under my finger. Everyday I irrigate, dress, monitor the hole in her leg for thirty days, more or less. Now that leg is sound and the old crescent scar of it hides under her winter hairs. Trouble can be life-altering, trouble can be an inconvenience, a month or lifetime of healing. Any way it will, trouble will make its way.
