Drinking from the Trough Page 3

  I was comfortably residing in Tom’s house, and I’d finally found a job teaching physical education in a Fort Collins elementary school. The teaching job was only one day a week at first, but I earned enough to pay nominal rent to my mother, plus I worked as her agent for the bungalow property and to help finish up settling Tom’s estate.

  Thanks to her brother, Mom had a little more money for herself and could come out to Colorado to visit me. We decided to drive up to the ranch so Earl could show off Franny.

  We headed north on US 287 in Uncle Tom’s AMC Javelin (technically Mom’s car but left in my care; it was the last of the pony cars, and I drove it when I wasn’t driving my VW Super Beetle). This two-lane highway is one of the most gorgeous roads anywhere. It runs from Texas to Montana, and the Fort Collins to Laramie section is spectacular.

  This stretch of Highway 287 is a hazardous, undivided highway with curves, straightaways, and a two-thousand-foot increase in altitude in the last forty miles before the state border, but it is amazing, with pronghorn, mule deer, cattle, and eagles dotting the mountainous countryside. When we crossed the state line into Wyoming, the clouds seemed low enough to touch.

  It was sixty-five miles to Laramie from Fort Collins, then a turn west to the ranch, about another twenty-five miles or so. It was clean and beautiful, all brilliant blue skies, bright sunshine, and vivid green grass.

  There, in a field on the ranch, was a small red horse with no white on her. She was tiny, only fourteen hands tall, the smallest height to still be a horse and not a pony.

  The way horses are measured for height is in hands. You put your hand with fingers sideways, and one full width of the four fingers (not the thumb) pointing east to west is a hand. If the horse measures 14.2 hands, or “fourteen two,” it means fourteen hands plus two fingers going up the horse’s side from the ground to her withers (the highest part of her back, just above her shoulders at the base of her neck). It’s not very scientific, of course. My fingers do not equal the width of a ranch hand’s fingers. But generally, a hand is considered four inches, which means that at the top of her withers, Franny was fifty-six inches tall—fourteen hands.

  Mom enjoyed the ranch, the monumental steak lunch from one of the Greenes’ cattle, and all the horses, especially the two fillies. She laughed when Marcie put her teeth on the car, biting it. Mom thought Marcie was trying to eat the Javelin. We had a great day and went home with the two fillies on hold for Earl.

  After Mom went back to Highland Park, it was time to bring the fillies home. Earl had made arrangements to have them trained to be ridden and worked with at Steve and Mike Bowers’ ranch. We were so excited to finally get them to Fort Collins.

  It would be wonderful to say that on the ranch we haltered the youngsters, took the lead ropes, and asked them to go into Earl’s trailer and that they went in calmly—but no such luck. What Franny and Marcie saw was a big maroon monster on wheels attached to a three-quarter-ton pickup truck. No way were they going into the Chamber of Doom.

  We literally pulled them off the ranch. Marcie went into the horse trailer after much equine arguing. That’s fair: she was a three-year-old baby, and she didn’t know how to get in. She would have to learn later. After a struggle and a bloody bang to her forehead, she finally bolted in.

  One down, one to go—halfway there!

  Lawrence Atkinson, a gigantic ranch hand, looked sideways at little Franny, who was starting to get upset watching what was happening. Lawrence stepped forward, wrapped his arms around Franny as if she were an oversized dog, picked her up, and deposited her in the trailer. That massive man actually picked up a horse!

  Fortunately, the ninety-mile ride downhill toward home was without any mishaps. We drove from the Greenes’ ranch back into Colorado and directly to the Bowers’ ranch in Fort Collins. Steve and Mike Bowers, identical twin brothers who had done just about every horse-related job from jockeying to training, spent the month of August teaching Franny and Marcie to have manners, to be ridden, and to be loaded into a horse trailer. They even trained us how to ride “the girls.”

  It seemed like forever, but we got the horses back to Earl’s place after their month of training. After riding them in the corral for a few days, we decided to go for a trail ride in the mountains. Earl was riding Franny, and I was up on Marcie using an old saddle. I was hesitant to ride Franny. She was so quick she scared me a little.

  Our judgment had been questionable in choosing where to take them for our first ride. We hauled them in the trailer to the Arthur’s Rock trailhead at Lory State Park, a beautiful area of grasslands, foothills, and mountains only ten miles from home.

  We saddled up the girls and rode on a tenuous trail to the top of a ridge. That was a fine ride. The fillies did well, even though the trail was really for more experienced horses. We had no blowups in behavior, no spooking at birds or the wind. It was lovely. Nothing smells as good as pine trees on a trail, especially when mixed with the odor of horses.

  After we crested the trail, we wanted to ride the full loop back down to the trailhead, not just go back down the way we came. Going down the other side, the trail was steep and narrow, with a harrowing drop-off close by. Pebbles from the trail skittered down the mountain-side, never to be seen again.

  I didn’t have a back cinch on my saddle, and because it was so steep, the back of the saddle tipped straight up in the air, depositing me on Marcie’s neck, with my feet in the stirrups and my arms around her neck. I hung on for dear life—if I slid off her neck or if Marcie got off-balance or upset, we would disappear down the side of that precipitous mountain—but Marcie was very mellow about it. We eventually made it back to the trailer in good shape.

  A year later, when the girls turned four, we took jumping lessons every Friday night and participated in local equitation competitions. Our jumping instructor told us to switch horses to better match the sizes of the riders and the horses, so I began riding Franny, and Earl rode Marcie.

  Every time Franny and I came around the corner in the ring to where Marcie and Earl waited outside, Franny whinnied loudly at Marcie from the riding ring. She wanted to be with Marcie, not all these strangers. Definitely not cool in competition to have a screaming horse trotting around in a circle.

  Natalie had sent me her old English riding clothes and ancient knee boots. When I rode Franny in a competition, I wore Nat’s hand-me-downs.

  When Earl rode Marcie in these jumping competitions, my Wyoming man (actually a fifth-generation Coloradan, but he wouldn’t admit it, so much did he love Wyoming) absolutely refused to wear the froufrou English attire.

  He wore his grubby old cowboy boots, chaps, and a helmet designed for cross-country riding. Snooty mothers complained that a man dressed that ridiculously should not be allowed to participate. But Marcie blew the other horses out of the ring with her enthusiastic and excellent jumping form. Clothes do not make the champion!

  We rode the girls everywhere, at Rocky Mountain National Park, at Lory State Park, in the city’s natural areas, and through the streets of Fort Collins to get to fields.

  The only thing wrong with our relationship with the girls was that they couldn’t be separated from each other. We had to ride them together. They had gotten to the Greenes’ ranch at the same time and were best friends as well as blood cousins, even though tiny Franny had been the boss mare of all the horses on the ranch.

  One afternoon, I tried to ride alone. I got Marcie all tacked up with English equipment and rode through the streets to a field. Everything was copacetic. We rode around the field a little. Then we stopped for a moment before turning back.

  All of a sudden, while standing still, Marcie bucked just once, and I flew off into outer space. I landed straight up and down on the top of my head. The rest of me flopped to the ground. I was going to get up but decided to just wait a minute and find my senses. I looked up at Marcie, who was wondering why I had turned into a crumpled body; then she bolted and ran off through the streets of Fort Collin
s.

  As I stumbled out of the field, a kind man stopped his car. He had seen a running saddled horse without a rider and figured there must be a human around somewhere. Not caring that he might be a serial killer, I accepted his offer of a ride to Earl’s house.

  I called Earl at his clinic and wailed about what had happened and that I couldn’t find Marcie. He came speeding home in his maroon Chevy pickup, the one that pulled the matching horse trailer we used to haul the girls.

  He found Marcie at the side of the barn door, placidly eating hay. Long before I got there, she had run back to Franny.

  Earl called my physician father to ask what to watch for in a head injury. My father said, with his typical dry wit, “Death.” I went home to lie down.

  I did wake up the next morning, I am happy to report, and went to teach school. Teaching physical education to elementary students was difficult that day. Staff members asked why I looked so out of touch. In an incidental conversation with my neurologist years later, he told me it is extremely rare in a fall to land exactly vertically on the top of the head. Well, this fall left a hole in the dirt, but by some miracle, I didn’t break my neck or anything else. (I did start wearing a helmet after that ride, though.)

  That was the end of riding the girls separately for the rest of their lives together.

  Earl and I spent a lot of time with Franny and Marcie. We even took them to an elementary school that was putting on special programs, where the girls helped one group of little kids learn about horses. We spent most of our free time riding, growing closer as a couple.

  We were married four years after we brought the girls home from the ranch in Wyoming. As we were honeymooning in Hawaii, lying on a beautiful Maui beach, Earl turned to me and said, “Next time, let’s bring the children.” I smiled. I knew he meant Franny and Marcie. How lovely it would have been to ride our girls on those pristine beaches.

  Franny was such a sweet mare. She loved to be stroked and to have her soft coat brushed. She was truly gorgeous. I loved to kiss her right on the nose. Nothing is softer than a horse’s nose.

  At around five years of age, Franny developed asthma due to an allergy to molds. The major clinical sign is a deep, dry hacking cough, called heaves. She responded well to treatment and had no restrictions as long as we bought premium grass hay with as little dust and mold as possible.

  Over time, heaves leads to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD. Usually, a horse has this for five years or so. Franny lived with COPD for sixteen years.

  Periodically, we would call the ambulatory equine medicine crew to come out and take care of her, usually with a slug of dexamethasone, a powerful steroid. Franny always bounced back to health. We continued to enjoy her and Marcie in all types of horseback riding.

  My classmate Anna and I rode the girls to the CSU Veterinary College anatomy building when we were teaching assistants in anatomy our senior year, on our trimester off. At the time, the senior vet students were on a trimester system, with the student in school two of the three trimesters. One trimester was scheduled with large animal rotations plus elective clinic work, and the other was small animal rotations and electives. The third trimester was not spent in school. Some students went away to work in practices, some went to ranches, some studied dairy herd management, and some got jobs unrelated to school to pay tuition.

  Anna and I won the grand prize: being teaching assistants for the anatomy teachers. Anna got the job because she was a genius on the subject—she later became the vet school’s anatomy professor. I got the job because I was an experienced teacher who loved anatomy. We would set up the lab stations, for learning things such as horse teeth and how to tell the age of the horse, and generally be there to help the students.

  How neat is it to ride a horse to vet school?

  It was fun to ride bareback across the busy street to CSU with Anna, getting quite the looks from those walking or riding bikes. We rode the girls to the anatomy building to let students enter the stalls when they had time, to palpate live equine anatomical structures, such as bony protrusions; locate the jugular veins; and find the “frogs” on the hooves and other structures pictured in their textbooks.

  Some students had never touched a horse before and were frightened. That was fair—I had only touched a beef critter when it was in my Crock-Pot.

  Our horses enjoyed being with people, and their calm and friendly demeanors went a long way toward helping vet students become comfortable with horses. Some days, instead of riding to campus, Anna and I let students, from both our own class and the class we later helped teach, come over to the Carlson corral to palpate living anatomical structures.

  Our little red horse was also really fast for a backyard lawn ornament. She wasn’t a pro rodeo horse, of course, as Pappy had been; she was a pet. But I rode Franny in the barrel racing competition at three of our annual vet school rodeos. (The fourth year, senior students are working on clinics at the hospital and can’t really get a team together.)

  I love to barrel race. The race has a cloverleaf pattern with rules about distances between the barrels. Three barrels are set up in a triangle formation. The rider has to circle each barrel while crossing the line she made. For example, the first barrel is usually the lower right barrel and is taken on the right lead (right front limb is last). Then, you cross over to the other lower barrel using the left lead, crossing that line. Finally, you take the top barrel, using the left lead again, and race for the finish line. Some racers like to take the barrels in the opposite direction, which is acceptable.

  When given the go signal, Franny and I would fly through the air, trying to circle the barrels with as little space between us and the barrels as possible. It was fun to have everyone cheer for us, even though we didn’t come close to winning. But my bright red mare sure looked good. Our class won the rodeo three years in a row, not because of Franny and me but more likely thanks to a classmate who was the New Mexico state roping champion.

  At age twenty-one, Franny began coughing almost constantly, a dry, gut-wrenching cough that made me feel edgy. We stopped riding her. She ate her food and felt fairly well, but when that cough started up, it made me contemplate what would be in Franny’s best interest in the near future.

  As a doctor of veterinary medicine, I treat horrible illnesses of other people’s pets, but I cannot stand to see one of my own unwell. I get a terrible feeling of doom that makes me wonder if I really should be a veterinarian. So I become the client when one of our own horses needs medical attention, bringing in another trusted veterinarian to provide treatment.

  On Sunday of Presidents’ Day weekend, Franny was suffering through an especially rough time. She coughed constantly. She wouldn’t eat. Earl and I could hear her dry hacking cough way up in our bedroom overlooking the barn and corral.

  I burst into tears at Franny’s side. I couldn’t stand seeing our little red mare suffer anymore. Franny was failing. She was no longer happy being a horse.

  Any time one of our pets was clinically ready for euthanasia, I always waited until Earl agreed, unless it was an emergency situation.

  On this Sunday, I was so upset about Franny that I went into our bedroom. Sleeping until noon on Sunday was Earl’s weekend luxury, so he was still in bed. I cried even harder in our room and said that Franny really should be put down. He agreed.

  I have learned over many years of clinical practice that the hardest part of euthanasia is deciding that the time is right, and next, having the actual procedure performed. Since Earl had agreed, I called Dr. Traub, a professor at the hospital who happened to be the clinician on call. She had treated Franny before and knew us and our horses well. We took Franny in to the CSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital, where she was admitted as an emergency, because it was a Sunday.

  It was tough to wait while the students examined the patient and had us sign the permission papers, then watch as the students practiced placing a jugular catheter for the administration of euthanasia solution.


  Dr. Traub had the students use sterile technique. I asked, “Why?” Jeez, my mare was going to die, but it was standard procedure. It took more time and put more stress on us, but the students had to learn proper technique.

  During and after the catheter placement, Earl and I hugged Franny, cried, and held each other. As I always do when one of our animal friends is euthanized, I whispered into her ear, mostly instructions about whom to greet for me on the other side, some prayers for her safe journey, and a thank you for being my friend, all with tears flooding down my face.

  The students put Franny into a padded induction stall used for horses being anesthetized before surgery. The horse is gently guided into a well-padded stock-like enclosure so that when the medicine goes in, the horse will lie down without injuring anyone. No one wants a hoof in the face or an eight-hundred-pound horse falling on them.

  Once everything was set up, I asked Dr. Traub to let me euthanize Franny. She deviated from standard procedure and allowed me to administer the solution. Earl couldn’t watch but waited outside the padded room. All was silent as Franny went down quietly and quickly when I pushed the solution into her catheter.

  Franny’s body went to the necropsy lab, but we donated Franny’s legs to the anatomy department for first year students to learn about equine limb structures. Her head, I learned later, was used for students to practice dental procedures. I don’t really like to think of that too much. It reminds me of the scene in The Godfather when the race-horse’s head is found under the sheets of a movie producer’s bed.

  We didn’t watch the necropsy because the usual room was being remodeled that winter, and necropsies were temporarily being done in the barn. I didn’t want to see Franny’s body spread all over the floor of the barn where I had spent so many happy hours as a student. I did, however, want to see her lungs and the slides of their microscopic structures, so I went to pathology rounds Friday afternoon.