It’s been a very busy few days!

Rhapsody arrived safe and well, though very late, on Monday night – the horsebox apparently ran into bad traffic on the roads across to Skye and they didn’t get Rhapsody loaded until nearly three in the afternoon. She came off the box rather stiff but composed, accepted the bucket of feed I’d prepared for her and had a good drink, then started saying hi to mine, who were trying to stick four heads over one door to see who the stranger was.

Of course, we were working by torchlight so I can only say Dancer was surprised but very polite in meeting a strange horse. She’s not in the slightest concerned about Rhapsody now, though quite courteous when they meet over a door or fence.

Poppy is not. She does not want another mare near her and is being very rude when they meet. Rhapsody backs off, sensibly.

Abe is polite and friendly, in his own laid-back manner, but the real surprise has been George – he’s being extremely friendly and kind to the stranger, leaves his grazing to spend time with her when she calls and nickers back if she’s out of reach but calling! Rhapsody seems to like him, too.

At the moment Rhapsody’s coming in at night and being put out in the morning, but today she got the run of the whole of her ‘paddock’ for the first time and has explored all the way around the space, which runs from the orchard up to the roadside fence, then along the walkway to the woody triangle. She’s spent the day paralleling the herd’s movements, with George popping over for a chat at regular intervals! If they carry on being friendly together for a few more days, I think I’ll put them in a paddock together and see what happens.

My mother’s gone off to Skye with my sister today, so I’m enjoying a nice relaxed day at home! I will pop down to the village later to see Michelle and pick up tomorrow’s chicks for the ferrets, but that’s all and there’s no time pressure. It’s wonderful!

Panic only because Rhapsody’s arriving on Monday so I’m dashing about trying to finalise everything she needs. I’ve got the last of the stray fence and barbed wire out of her paddock this morning, anyway! She needs a water bucket, but there’s one spare I’ll move over for her tonight and fill tomorrow morning.

I was trying to get pix of the baby bunnies this morning so I can sell them better, and George arrived to help.

It has to be admitted I have yet to experience George’s ‘help’ ever being ‘helpful’ – but maybe, one day.

He’s managed to rip down the slip rail between the horse barn and the small dairy, so the only thing stopping him walking through is a large plastic pipe slung on string that dangles in the way, at a height such that he has to duck to look under it and can barely get his enormous nose over the top. The idea was that it filled the gap between the slip rails and the metal beam over the top of the doorway, so nobody would pole-axe themselves on it.

I had a rabbit upside down in my arms, examining its undercarriage to determine gender, when he ducked under the barrier and simply ambled straight in, pipe bouncing melodiously along his back and banging the sides of the opening as it went. Cue screams from me of ‘George! No! Back!’ as he nearly walked over the quail cage, wearing an expression of amiable curiosity.

He stopped, looked at me, then reversed meekly back under the pipe and into the horse barn. Huge sigh of relief on my part, as I put the bunny into a cage and went to give him a treat for being so good. I walked back to the rabbit cage and he came straight after me!

This game of fairy’s footsteps went on while rabbits escaped in all directions, chickens squawked and bounced over scampering bunnies, the quail cowered in their cage and George went ‘two forward, one back, what another one? Alright… treat… and forward…’ like some gigantic furry line dancing class!

Eventually I managed to recapture the rabbits, reassure the quail, the silkies went to sulk in the hay away from scurrying furry things and then I pushed George back into the horse barn and did a ten-minute session with him on staying his side of the barrier.

Every time he put his head under the pipe, I told him ‘No! Back!’ and then when he stood meekly in the barn again, I clicked and gave him a nugget and heaps of praise. Eventually I walked past him to one of the empty breakfast buckets and poured several handfuls of treats in, then made my getaway out of the bans altogether while he was guzzling happily. If I’m not there, he seems to have no interest in the small dairy or anything else down that way – if I’m there, he’s a-coming too!

It’s nice that he wants to be with me, but he is a mahoosive crick in the plans sometimes! I still have 7 rabbits to sex and photograph and somewhere in the melee I mislaid a pair of glasses… just as well I have spares!

It’s also a reminder, though, of how far we’ve come. When he came I couldn’t have sent him backwards through a barrier just on voice alone, he wouldn’t have accepted me telling him off and he wouldn’t have let me walk past him to a bucket to put treats in it for him! He stayed perfectly amiable and unoffended all the way through – no sign of stress on his part, even if the rest of us had plenty!

Amazingly, my hoof trimmer got in touch last night to say another of her clients has just bought a Suffolk gelding! He’s Holbeache Luke, 7 years old and known as Orion – which means he’s probably related to George within a few generations, as George’s sire is Holbeache Iggy. Odette kindly put us in touch with each other and we’ve traded pix on messenger – Luke is a very handsome fella with no white markings at all, but a similar blonde forelock to George’s. I’m looking forward to getting over there and meeting him some time – he’s not been broken to harness, apparently, and I’ll happily take some harness over and help them get him started.

Tomorrow I need to be at the croft waiting for Rhapsody to arrive most of the day, so I’ll shut the herd out in the field, get the slip rails back up securely and then muck out. All day…

No apologies. Climate change is such a massive challenge now and we should all be squaring our shoulders and doing our best to face up to it – and do what we can.

As part of my efforts in that direction, I’m a member of a Facebook group called Horses For Future, which is a place for horse owners to get together and do what we can, though the lands out horses graze, to improve carbon sequestration, build healthy soils and improve biodiversity on every level, from microscopic to large mammal and back.

Some of the group live in Australia and have been under fire threat this year – in places where fire has not visited in living memory or more – and reading their posts in the group has brought their climate change emergency – the sudden, unprecedented fire hazard – right into my house, too. Facebook has its drawbacks, but it does bring us together across the world in an extraordinary way!

Without further discussion, then, here’s the first part of Heather Binns’ three blog posts on how she and her family, including horses, have faced the fires this week.

https://horsemagic.blog/2019/11/10/waiting-for-the-enemy/

If you have horses, or have friends who have horses, then search FB for Horses For Future and sign up! We’re trying to make a difference.

Mum saw the specialist geriatric psychiatrist on Wednesday and we now have a formal diagnosis – it’s Alzheimer’s Dementia. We should be hearing from a community psychiatric nurse next week to get advice on managing the disease on a day to day level, and there will be a prescription for a drug to try and slow its progress in a couple of weeks. She’s not to drive again and should turn in her licence forthwith.

This, obviously, was a very nasty smack in the face for Mum, who has successfully lived in denial for months now, but she took it bravely – even if she then forgot it overnight. I had to go through it again with her yesterday and she took it bravely again, even asking me to give her something to read on Alzheimer’s so she could learn what it is. I gave her my laptop with the Alzheimer’s Society webpage on it and she read as much as she could take in. After that we had a sensible discussion about the future with Mum facing up to what’s going on and thinking about it clearly for a change.

We also had a meeting with Jacquie from the social care team yesterday and that was helpful. Jacquie’s own parents both had dementia so she knows exactly what we’re going through and was able to suggest some good things, from a one-cup boiling water dispenser (at some point yesterday Mum filled the water jug with tea – and it’s a glass jug!) to referring us to the council’s telecare team, who can supply us with a falls detector and will set up electronic monitors on the internal and external doors so we’re alerted if Mum goes wandering in the night. She’ll also get the occupational therapist in to advise on stuff like trip hazards and how to shower safely (it might even get Mum in the shower again – that’d be a fantastic result!) and I’ll be getting a carer’s assessment in the near future, too, to see if they can offer anything to help me out. I doubt if they can do the mucking out for me but they may be able to get someone in to sit with Mum on a Sunday so I can get back to the shooting club! I’m in very serious danger of having my firearms licence withdrawn at the moment, since I haven’t been shooting regularly enough in the past year.

On a less painful note, I had to play hide and seek with George yesterday – he wanted to play with me, and I needed to hang hay nets! Every time I found a different way into the barns, he came looking for me – and of course he got his attention and treats when he tracked me down, which just encourages him to carry on! He’s such a cuddle bug, though, that I’m not going to ignore him when he shows up and gives me his huge ‘I found you!’ sigh-snort and a big, happy, pricked-ears smiling face!

On my way home last night I had to stop for a very beautiful fox crossing the road. That’s the first fox I’ve seen here, not a quarter mile from the Croft, so last night I made sure the breeze block was securely against the hen house door and the geese were pushed, protesting, in with the ducks before I shut the door on them all for the night. It may be an unwarranted curtailment of their liberty (which was clearly Hannibal’s opinion as I herded them in with That Dangerous Little Duck) but it’s better than inviting trouble by providing easy meals for foxes! Once a fox knows you leave chicken dinners, or duck dinners, available, you can hardly blame them for picking up a takeaway on a cold night and coming back for a regular meal in the future. Better by far to head off the issue before it can take root – so I’ve locked up my geese. I may still lose some to daytime predation, but at least I can ensure they have a fighting chance of surviving the night.

 

I asked for another hay delivery last Thursday, when I was getting down to the last few bales. Nothing happened, so I texted again on Saturday morning. I’m on holiday, please try my dad, came the reply, along with a number, so I called it, explained the situation and asked for a delivery urgently, as by then I had no hay at all. Fraser’s dad said he’d get a delivery to me first thing Sunday, so I took the trailer over and picked up 8 bales to tide the herd over.

Sunday came, but the hay didn’t. I called again. Oh, it’s been hectic, it’ll be tomorrow for sure.

Monday came. No hay delivered. Last of the hay scraped off the floor and fed to the horses. Phone call.

It finally arrived this morning, so I had to wrestle empty hay nets past the horses (they were trying to retrieve the last few strands from the nets in passing!) fill them up and hang them before I dared try taking bales through to stack in the big dairy. George decided hay from the net wasn’t as good as human to play with, so he came through and stood in various places hoping for attention (all of them, coincidentally, right in the way!! Huge hairy monster….) but apart from cunningly standing on the trolley in passing once to pin me in place, he accepted head rubs and talk rather than demanding treats or trying to prevent me going back and forth.

Dancer came and stood in the doorway so I had to give her quite a lot of ‘over’ practice to get through. Another monster! Poppy and Abe were, as usual, perfect angels.

I had to persuade the ducks to leave the bales alone on the drive before I could load the trolley, too – including picking up the white one, Blondie, who produced some plaintive little chick-cheeps and worried his mother, who tried hard to look fierce but only achieved concerned. I put Blondie back down next to her, out of the way, of course.

At the moment they’re going through 4 bales a day, since the weather’s been wet again. It’s dry and sunny today (though there was snow overnight which I scraped off the car this morning) so hopefully they’ll go out and graze for a bit.

 

 

I looked out of the kitchen window this morning and all the waterfowl were in the field! That’s the first time I’ve seen the geese out there, though the ducks have been taking themselves out every day practically since they arrived. I suspect the geese went because the ducks did – and for once I’d left the gate open so they could go through it, being much taller than the ducks!

The horses have been in and out most of the day, though George seems to have the knack of being in every time I think of mucking out and standing himself in the way – clearly he doesn’t think I should muck out! They’re all quite cheerful about stomping over the waste hay I’ve put down in the first bit of mud, so I’ll push on with putting more waste hay and straw along the walkway to soak up the mud.

I’ve found new homes for Copper, Nightshade, Tiger and one of the young does, probably Nightshade’s castor daughter – a breeding home looking for an established group. I need to cut back on the bunnies because I simply haven’t the time to look after them as well as I like, with my mother’s problems, so finding new homes for them all is becoming a priority. I might keep a couple of the youngsters just as pets, but if I do I’ll move them round to the other side of the house and give them a little hutch and run arrangement so they don’t need so much mucking out and feeding… particularly the mucking out!

The silkie chicks are getting good at roaming about inside the dairy sheds, though they’ve not gone outside or into the horse barn yet. They still get bullied a bit by the hybrids, but as the cockerels mature I’m hoping they’ll all settle – if not, the silkies will also get a hutch and run arrangement round the other side of the house! They’re fine inside for the winter, but once spring arrives they should be outside in the sunshine more, for their own health, though they’ll always need more shelter than the hybrids, being even less waterproof than the average hen!

I don’t discuss the esoteric aspects of life much here, for some reason, but they do play a huge part in my life amongst the animals, and between the various animals themselves.

I started studying karate in my teenage years and though I never quite made it to black belt, I did come across the beginnings of energy work as a 1st kyu (the last grade before black belt) and I happened on various other forms of energy work like chi gong along the way.

Then I started training as a shaman and wallop, there’s a huge amount of energy work in there! I also began training in reiki, which is a form of energy healing. I’m currently an initiated and working shaman in a native British tradition and an Usui Tibetan Reiki Master Teacher.

As you can imagine, that means I’m very aware of the energy of the Croft, which is partly the Place and partly the various creatures living on the Croft, both wild and domestic – including me.

It’s still sometimes considered a bit ‘out there’ and ‘New Age’ to talk about this kind of thing, but we (meaning Shamans, New Agers and other ‘out there’ folk) have always known that trees talk, that animals talk, that Places have Spirits and awareness, that crystals have their own agenda and sometimes a human’s place is to tug one’s forelock politely and ask how high. Now science is catching up – studies have shown that trees talk to each other via the mycorrhizal network linking their roots, that they can see without eyes, that a species of little songbird in North America can predict the coming season’s hurricane activity long before NOAA’s supercomputers do (and adjusts how many eggs to lay as a result!) and, generally, that Chief Joseph was entirely right when he said ‘every animal knows more than you do’.

I tend to leave the poultry and rabbits to just be poultry and rabbits – though I’m aware that they have complicated relationships, that the geese are very happy to have the Muscovies around and are not entirely sure that the white duckling (the one we call Blondie and who is invariably the last one to notice anything happening, the one left behind when the others head off and the one who falls over anything in the way!) isn’t really a gosling. They would have liked their Egg to have survived and they would have loved having goslings to bring up – and I hope very much they’ll manage it next year. It’s not really my business, though, unless or until they invite me in. I get somewhat more involved with the ferrets because it’s extremely difficult to be anywhere around a ferret and not get dragged in by being used as an assault course, snuggle provider, mobile ambush site to leap on other ferrets from, place to stash the latest ‘my precious’ or whatever their inventive little minds come up with next – and indeed one of the ferrets, Angus, is one of my familiars. I didn’t expect it and I didn’t ask him to join in, but he invited himself along one time when I was journeying to do healing work on someone and he is exceedingly skilled at hunting down energetic entanglements and killing them, amongst his other talents, so now I always ask for his help when I’m dealing with such things.

Mostly, though, I’m working with and around the horses, because they need so much more working with and around! That, of course, means I’m in and out of their energy fields, their auras, all the time. George has also turned up when I’m doing shamanic work, though at the moment his talents are largely directed towards what he calls ‘squash!’, which means looming up at anything unwanted or malicious and – yes – squashing it. He enjoys it very much and he’s very good at it!

A moment of clarification; yes, I talk with and listen to animals. No, they don’t wander around speaking English aloud like something out of Disney – but once a human shuts up their own mind long enough to learn to listen, every being – whether animal, vegetable or mineral – can communicate when they want to, silently, mind to mind and heart to heart. It can be subtle – and I’ll come to Abe in a minute! – or it can be very unsubtle indeed, as when I stumbled the other day, caught my balance by thumping an unexpected hand on a dozing George’s flank and he leapt out of his skin and kicked out hard, twice, before turning around, seeing it was me and accepting my apology for scaring him! Because humans are vocal and have spoken languages, our minds tend to translate what others communicate into words – but work on it with determination and an open mind and you can share the feeling of sun on a full summer canopy of leaves, or the delightful sensation of a leap of water over a rock in a stream. This is slowly creeping into science at the moment – a study a few years back ‘taught’ horses to ask to have their rugs taken off, put on or left alone – and the horses concerned became extremely eager to tell their humans! I should think they were leaping up and down in glee shouting ‘hey, they know how to listen! At last!!’

I had an incident with George last year when he explained very clearly that he didn’t want his rug on, thanks. I just needed to listen.

One of the first stages in working with any being is, of course, to Ask. Before I touch, I reach out a hand and pause, asking ‘may I touch?’ (for trees, this is best done before you step under the tips of their branches and I tend to ask ‘may I come in?’). Wait and listen. They will let you know if you’re welcome, tolerated – or not. ‘Bugger off’ is a perfectly valid answer and one to be respected!

In a sense, everyone with any sense does this around horses, because one of the first things you’re taught is ‘speak to your horse before you touch them, don’t come up and startle them’ – the added bit here is that I stop and listen to the answer, and respect it. I don’t like it when someone handles me without my consent, and neither does any other being!

Studies have shown now that horses recognise and react to human emotions – yes, something else we’ve known for centuries that’s now been ‘discovered’! – and one of the ways they do this is through our energy. Like dogs and cats, horses have always been credited with ‘second sight’ and the ability to see ghosts, and that, too, is energy work – though science hasn’t yet confirmed that one. It’s important when I’m around the two youngsters, Dancer and George, that I’m completely calm, accepting and free of angst – otherwise they pick it up and throw it straight back at me. When Dancer bum-hitched at me the other day, I could have responded by shouting at her, thumping her or the like and she would have learned that violence begets violence. This is the lesson George learned before he came to me – and even a mini Shetland is far stronger than any human so it’s really not a good place to go! Instead, I totally blew her little golden mind by turning it into a dance, almost like a hands-pushing exercise between us (for those who’ve done T’ai Chi Chuan). She couldn’t figure out how to deal with it at first – she’d warned me off with a bum-hitch and some aggressive energy, and now I was glued to her ribs and she couldn’t reach me going backwards, or sideways, or forwards – I just stayed there, like an unswattable fly that hovers by your eyes and won’t leave! Then she realised it was actually fun, her pinned-back ears came up and we moved together, with her discovering that I wasn’t throwing energy back nor letting her energy get at me, I was just skating her energy off mine gently and moving with her – and, by golly, she could move with mine! Yippee! What started as an attempt to bully me turned into a lovely friendly waltz together.

When she nipped my behind later that was a bit beyond the pale, though, and she did get a gentle bristling on the bum from the end of the yard brush to scoot her on her way. I may not be up for violence begetting violence, but she does need to know that actions have consequences!

This afternoon I needed to bring in bales of hay past the full herd in the top barn, and George was right in the doorway to the small dairy shed, so I had to get past him with the others around, with a noisy trolley laden with a bale of hay. It’s not a situation I normally walk into because he can be very possessive of me and then he’ll try and herd me away from exits and other horses. He was eager to talk to me and asked for treats, and I had to make a choice about how to deal with it.

I could shout at him, try to push him aside – but he doesn’t like raised voices and tends to get defensively-angry about them, and pushing a ton of unwilling horse is a hiding to nothing in my book. Instead, I placed my hands gently on his head, one on his cheek and one on his forehead, and just said quietly, “I love you but I need to bring in the hay just now, please.” He swung his head away, then came back and I repeated it. He thought for a moment, his nose hopefully wiffling against my chest, then sighed, stepped back and walked over to the haybox to stand with Abe. I was able to bring 6 bales of hay right past his back end without him doing anything but chew steadily, and believe me I thanked him both coming and going each time!

Poppy and Abe are far too secure in themselves to get upset by whatever mood I’m in, though I try to be polite and not dump my emotions on them. Poppy is still mostly wrapped up in being a mother and she’s spent a long time without humans really connecting with her – ‘just’ a brood mare! – so she’s still quite pleasantly surprised when I want to spend time with her and takes a moment to tune in sometimes, but mostly she maintains her own little bubble of space and – provided George doesn’t come into that space – she goes on with what she wants to do quietly.

Abe, on the other hand, is a master magician. If you look at the herd dynamics in terms of ‘hierarchies’ and ‘dominance’…. Abe’s the tail-ender. He’s the last one in at mealtimes, he’s the one everyone pushes around, he’s the one who gets all the buckets, haynets and carrots…. hang on a minute!

Yes, he has the equine equivalent of a black-belt in aikido! Push him and he gives way, slides aside and gets what he wants anyway.

I started watching how he does this a while ago, when I noticed that the herd’s apparent low-rank boy actually sneaks into everything quietly. He comes across as very low-energy, very docile and laid-back, but he’s an expert in camouflage. He has what I call his invisibility cloak, which lets him slip right past the others and not get kicked out of Poppy’s space or George’s bucket or Dancer’s haynet – at least until Poppy suddenly notices she’s sharing something with him and hoofs him out smartly! Humans who know him sometimes describe him as ‘he has no character’ – though he has bags of character once you really get to know him.

He’s a trickster, an expert in getting his own way no matter what and leaving you wondering how that happened, all in the gentlest, most subtle way possible – and he’s doing it by manipulating his own energy to slide through the other horse’s energy field without disturbing them, watching closely as he sidles towards his goal and carefully adjusting his energy again, until his nose is in the feed bucket and the bucket’s rightful owner is wondering how that happened again!

I’ve been using what I’ve learned from him with George and Dancer – that soft, accepting energy state that lets the other one think they’re in control but actually just takes whatever’s thrown and skates it aside harmlessly. It’s immensely useful with George in particular, who reacts very defensively to anything that seems to be ‘against’ him – George is, in many ways, the proverbial hammer and it’s important not to look like a nail! On the other hand, he can be charmed by someone who accepts him totally, gives him choices and asks, rather than tells, him what to do, and once he realises you’re giving him a voice in the discussion he’s delighted to offer his opinions and find ways to achieve what both sides want (mostly food on his side, though neck scritches comes a close second). He’s also not good at handling confusion – when I ask him something new he can be quite grouchy until he understands what I’m asking, but if I apologise to him for not explaining properly, he’s willing to have another go. What he won’t do is accept being told he’s wrong – that puts his back up in a major way!

I think I’ve said somewhere on the blog that I work with George with expectancy, not expectation – this is why. ‘I’ don’t set out to ‘Do X’ in any session – because if that’s what I’m fixed on, he gets very upset about it. We set out to Do Things Together and whatever happens is good, if sometimes surprising – and he can accept that quite happily.

The flip side of energy work is boundaries. If you go into anything with energy work and you don’t have very clear ‘this is me, that is you’ boundaries, together with ‘this far and no further!’ lines, you’re going to need Angus’s help disentangling yourself from someone else’s energetic shit – even if the other person isn’t trying to snare you. Abe is brilliant at this, too – Poppy may try to kick him or threaten to bite when she finds he’s insinuated himself into her haynet but that’s her problem! There’s always another haynet so he just shrugs off her opinion (and energy!) like water off a duck’s back (and it’s worth sitting in the rain and observing a few ducks to understand how they do that, too!) and moves on. When I’m watching his energy, he shines like a mirror for an instant, then fades away again – ‘not accepting your shit here, thanks, going elsewhere now!’ He’s always sunny-tempered and easy-going, nothing gets his goat and he’s not taking on anyone’s energetic baggage. The reason he’s always last in is not because he’s bullied or afraid – it’s because he’s being deliberately unconcerned. He’ll turn up in his own good time, thank you kindly – and actually, no, those measly few mouthfuls of food you give me is not sufficient for me to muddy my beautiful hooves for, but if you bring it here I’ll eat it for you…

Anyone doing energy healing needs to learn that lesson – you must not take on someone else’s shit as your own. It does them no good (because they don’t learn to deal with their own shit), it certainly does you no good and it actually prevents you being of any use to them, because you’ll end up giving them back what you’ve allowed them to load onto you – or passing it onto the next person you’re dealing with!

You will also, inevitably, at some point come across someone who actively tries to hook themselves into your energy – the controlling partner, the co-dependent who just can’t do without you, the aggrieved third party who’s peeved you’re helping their victim escape and many, many more, can and will all attach themselves to you – if you allow it! Making sure you’re not allowing any such attachments is an important part of being an effective healer (thank you, Abe, for the demonstrations), and removing them from yourself and others is an important part of any shaman’s job (and skill set! – thank you, Angus, for your tuition!)

For all their energetic tussles, though, the Herd is an entity and each of them accepts and relates to the others and the Herd very securely. A shout from one gets instant attention from all, one horse missing gets quick glances around until he’s spotted in the yard having a drink, and they’re rarely far apart. On occasion I’ve been asked to help someone in healing an illness or an injury and when I’ve journeyed to do so, there’s a huge ball of kitten-knitted energy that needs to be untangled and put in order – the Herd isn’t kitten-knitting; it is a beautiful, deliberately woven Persian rug.

There is another side again to working with the horses energetically, and that is their sensitivity in identifying and working with me has increased. I’m not ‘a human’ – I’m ‘this particular human’ – and if they’re out when I get up George is usually just lifting his head from the grass and walking in to meet me as I’m wondering whether to put the kettle on for a quick brew before going outside!

I left my mother’s last night about nine o’clock (early, for once!) and the car was already frozen shut, so I made sure all the critters had plenty of water, straw and food before I finished for the night! The geese put themselves into the feed room for the night, rather than sleeping right outside, so they obviously have the sense to look out for themselves. As soon as the ducklings have proven they can fly I’ll stop shutting them in at night and then the geese can share the straw there if they want to (and if Hannibal dares face Mother Duck’s beady stares!)

This morning the buckets were frozen over but a quick kick sorted them out, and the hose was frozen, of course, so I used a bucket to top the big water troughs up.

The coal shed is cleared and ready for the half-tonne of ovoids to arrive, whenever that is. I used wood last night and let the whippets into bed with me, so we overheated twice in the night and I had to push Wicket out to cool off!

I got some pix of the critters yesterday – beginning with the ducks, who were inspecting the trailer full of barbed wire when I got up!

A little later they were all sunbathing outside the barn

The mostly-black duck is getting quite spectacular in the sunshine now she has her adult flight feathers!

The horses had all applied mud overnight (as usual) but they were in the yard sunbathing through the morning, too.

Apparently it was a morning for grouching at each other (though not me) – Dancer was a little angel with her ears beautifully pricked until Abe and Poppy came to see if they could share some human-time, then she turned into an absolute monster and bit Poppy!

As you can just see, Abe has managed to skin his shoulder somewhat – I don’t know how! He’s had extra cuddles as a result, naturally, and did his best ‘isn’t my nose gorgeous?’ face right into the phone – then tried to nibble it!

Later on Michelle and I managed to very nearly catch up on all the muck, so they’re not up to their fetlocks in shit anymore! The muck heap has doubled in size as a result and should soon be ready to cover and leave for a few months to do its composting in peace.

The walkway is extremely muddy so I’m going to start adding all the waste hay and straw there – the horses will trample it in but as it rots it should improve the soil structure, add various grass seeds and hopefully help to soak up the moisture so the mud decreases (this also sequesters carbon and builds up the soil – good for the environment!) Abe has mastered a wonderfully helpless ‘but I’ll get my feet muddy!’ expression when asked to come in for meals and has had a couple of buckets handed to him in the field as a result. How a horse bred in Derbyshire, raised in Lanarkshire and living in Aberdeenshire has got the idea that he’s a desert prince and shouldn’t have to step in mud, I’m not sure! As long as he doesn’t teach the others to do it…

Dancer got some training while Michelle and I were mucking out – she came and pestered for attention so she has now had lots of ‘back’ practice and learned that horses who nip people’s bums get prickly brushes poked against their bums in return! Abe frisked all my pockets briskly when he joined in, then got shooed off and obligingly stayed shooed – unlike Dancer, who needed brush-poking twice before she took the hint and merely stood by the barrow looking sulky and licking the handles. Michelle’s not much in favour of horse-slobbered handles to grip! Poppy knows all about mucking out and stayed by the hay, eating quietly and watching the youngsters with a tolerant sort of air.

Dancer and I had a little dancing session together yesterday morning – she threatened a little bum-hitch ‘I might kick you!’ at me in the barn after breakfast so I put both my hands on her back, one by her withers and one near her hip, and just stayed there! Whichever way she went trying to get at me, I just went with her – at first she was quite put out and aggrieved about it, since she was trying to bully me, but then she realised it was fun and we waltzed around the barn together for several minutes! I’ve not done much energy work with her and she’s not used to it, certainly not like that – George and I do a lot of energy work together because he’s so powerful he tends to crash his aura into everyone (which is one of the reasons Poppy won’t let him near her – she doesn’t like being walloped with a big chesnut aura like that!). It’s fascinating watching the various ways the different horses use their inherent energy – George is just such an enthusiast in every way that he thunders about the place whacking everyone unless I remind him to tone it down a bit, Poppy maintains her own little bubble of ‘this is me and I won’t be smashed into like that!’ energy, Dancer is wildly variable and veers from ‘sweet little thing letting everything in’ to ‘I’m a big bad horse and I can fling energy bolts at everyone!’ and Abe is a real wizard – he’s so soft with his energy, he can slip right though George’s and Poppy’s auras, duck Dancer’s experiments but still maintain his own integrity. I have to stay soft around George because if I’m not, he gets cross and whacks back harder (or bites!) – but at the same time I need to be respectfully equal with Abe and Poppy and vary my own energy to deal with whatever Dancer’s hurling about! Horses are amazing teachers.

I think once Dancer and I have had a few more waltzes together she’ll realise it’s just so much nicer not to be a bully – and that it doesn’t work.

I managed to keep the fire going all day yesterday, right through the night and all day today, too – it’s banked down with the last of the ovoids at the moment, and hopefully it’ll still be warm when I get up. I’ll have to switch back to logs for a bit after that, though, as I’ve used up all the coal for now. I’ve ordered half a tonne of ovoids to be delivered, since they’re doing the trick beautifully.

The horses have moved to their winter feed schedule – they now get breakfast as well as dinner, though it’s still all fibre. They get a scoop of speedi beet, which is sugar-extracted sugar beet shreds, soaked in plenty of water (the recommended time is 45 minutes but I tend to give it 8 hours!) and then mixed with enough hi-fi lite ( mix of chopped straw, alfalfa and hay) to make a fairly stiff chewable meal. That gets shared out between four buckets – two big heaped scoops for George, one each for Dancer and Poppy, and a small handful for Abe, who appears to be capable of existing cheerfully on fresh air! I share a scoop of hay extender pellets amongst them all – again, half a scoop for George, quarter each for Poppy and Dancer and a few for Abe – and then hand out buckets. Through the spring and summer they’d just had one meal a day, but I decided to shift them to two.

Partly that’s because they’re starting to drop a little weight for the winter – I don’t want to keep them fat all winter, because losing weight and getting a little skinny seems to be important in keeping their metabolism balanced through the year – but I don’t want them to lose too much weight, nor too fast. They still have as much hay as they can eat round the clock and self-regulate very well all round, but the extra fibre helps them stay warm, keeps them ticking along quietly and provides a delicious, interesting break in just chewing hay!

I’m also moving them towards synchronising with my sister’s elderly mare Rhapsody, who’s coming to stay with us on holiday in the next couple of weeks. She’s 28 years old, home-bred (I helped her get to her feet when she was born!) and her teeth are getting a bit worn-out so she doesn’t get hay; she’s also very arthritic so doesn’t get stabled, she lives out on the Isle of Skye 24/7 with a good rug. Until just a couple of years ago she lived with her mother, Gypsy, but her horse-manners are apparently atrocious and when her bluff’s called she caves in and will even let Shetland ponies bully her off her dinner! To begin with she’ll have a paddock of her own next to the Herd’s paddock and we’ll play it by ear from there (though I am definitely keeping a camera handy in case Dancer gets confused by finding there’s more than one bay mare in the world!) At the moment Rhapsody’s getting 2 feeds a day, so mine are now getting breakfast and Rhapsody’s dinner is being shifted forward to meet my lot’s schedule.

I missed a wonderful photo-op yesterday – I walked out and there was a duckling having a good splash and paddle in one of the horse troughs! Quite how she got in there I’m not sure, and I didn’t see her get out, either – I dashed back inside to grab the phone off charge and came back to see them all waddling off across the yard.

Snowball has got his crow totally nailed today and it does sound slightly odd having a proper cock-a-doodle-doo instead of the idiosyncratic versions we’ve had so far!

Last night I lit the fire when I got home at about 10.30pm, then shovelled on a few ovoids. They’re quite big, all the same size – and wet! Clearly the sack isn’t waterproof.

Since they were wet, they refused to light from the kindling, so I chucked in a bit of house coal, which did the trick. I left the fire getting itself going and went out to do the evening round of animals.

I was back in the house about 11 and the fire was going nicely by then. I added some more ovoids and sat down with a cuppa to watch what happened next.

By 2am the fire was still sitting there, burning away steadily, failing to gallop off up the chimney the way the house coal did, so I went to bed.

This morning I was up late, but at 8.30am there were still a few embers left and the radiators weren’t cold. (That might sound like faint praise, but they hadn’t been warm to start with – if the fire had been lit a few hours earlier it would have been a different matter.) The fire got going again briskly with a few sticks of kindling and some house coal and I kept it burning quite fast for a couple of hours before shutting it down and adding a layer of ovoids for the day. The radiators were hot by then and the hope was they’d stay that way.

We popped back after this morning’s nurse appointment for Mum, and the radiators are beautifully hot, the fire is still chugging along steadily and the house is pleasantly warm. I added a few more ovoids and left it for the afternoon – I’ll be back up to feed the critters in another half an hour and can check it, then I’ll be back about 10 as usual to build it up and get a burst of heat into the system before leaving it shut down for the night. With the radiators hot to begin with, we’ll see how the temperatures go overnight – and if I go to bed a few hours earlier, thus getting up a couple of hours earlier, the fire may well still be properly alight!

It’s definitely progress in the right direction.