Journal Spelunking: Feeding Time

When the idea I originally had for this post sputtered, I turned to my friend Lisa Hase-Jackson’s library of poetry prompts on her Zingara Project website. I’m not a poet, but I’ve kept journals for decades, and the “Journal Spelunking” exercise resonated—although I disobeyed the instructions and meandered down memory lane. My adaptation of the concept is prosaic in every sense of the word, but it elicited a reflection on one of the daily rhythms that orients life up in these here hills at this time of year.

January 27, 2020

….At just after 6 in the morning, a light streak on the eastern horizon, edged with a tine of ruddy cloud, like an angry scar. Days getting longer. On the a.m. end, it means that if I lay in bed too long, light chases me out. On the p.m. end, it’s the start of the annual battle with Moondo, who has determined, over the course of these shortest days of the year, that dusk is the agreed-to metric for feeding time. He is not willing to come in while the sun is still above the horizon. The horses have been edgy for a couple of days (I went and fetched M with a loop of baling twine the other night; night before last they were standing next to one another out in the middle of the field and refused to move…and I refused to go get them). Last night, they were up at the fenceline on the top of the ridge, where they can see all the way down to the barn. It’s where Jake was standing on Friday last when I fed in the morning; I could see his head turning back toward M, who was out of sight, and then toward me—toward M, toward me—until M appeared and, I’m guessing, checked to see if the sun was up at the feed tanks before coming in. Last night, they looked up when I whistled, but didn’t budge. F— it, I thought. I put out the hay and set out on a short walk down the road to get my pedometer over my 3-mile target for the day. M watched me very carefully and I imagine I saw him glance over his shoulder at the sunset and think, Okay, yeah, it’s about that time, then started sauntering in. I think he thought it all worked out about right, but I am not a fan of feeding taking an hour.

Moondo keeping an eye on his pasture from the one of feed tanks.

We had to put Sweet Moondo down seven months after I wrote this passage, and I’m sorry to report that our boy Jake is no longer with us, either. Revisiting that note gave me a chance to think of them, and to wonder anew at their relationship. It’s still common to think in terms of hierarchical herd dynamics when it comes to horses; I know better, but still catch myself doing so regularly. To characterize Jake as “dominant” because he could (and invariably would) steal Moondo’s grain and push him off a hay pile ignores the nuances in their interactions. Moondo was one of the least food-motivated horses I’ve ever known, while Jake was a bully around all things edible. Yet when something put Moondo on alert and he refused to leave the perceived safety of the Big Pasture and its long sightlines, Jake stayed. He neither tried to harass his companion toward dinner nor left him for it.

In Jake’s mind, he was the boss. but Moondo was always the one making the decisions about where to go when.

Harper is, these days, Boss Mare. Although she often wields her authority in a manner I don’t agree with, she does adore a schedule. When 5 p.m. rolls around, she is waiting, and Dunlin, her new pasture-mate, is patiently standing nearby. There may be days when Harper’s in a snit because I’m running ten minutes late or the two of them are running laps up and down the fenceline, bucking and farting in the wind, but I have not had to go fetch horses since Moondo died in 2020.

Doug feeds in the mornings, which sounds like a raw deal considering winter weather, but we don’t feed hay in summer, so he gets five or six months off. I feed “grain” every night (these days it’s soaked timothy pellets rather than corn and oats, but the excitement elicited by the appearance of the feed pans is the same), year-round, and have been doing so for more than twenty years now.

For sixteen of those years, the chore could be complicated or extended by Moody’s mood. For twelve of those sixteen, I had to either stand guard over Moondo or lock him temporarily in a stall to ensure Jake didn’t take his grain. Since Sweet Moondo always took his sweet time eating, feeding time took about forever.

Jake inhaled his grain portion as if he was perpetually training for an equine speed eating event, so when Harper arrived I continued to run interference. House rules are that stealing the other horse’s grain is forbidden, but once the feed pans get picked up the horses are left to negotiate hay shares on their own. Jake insisted on sampling every pile and switched which one he ate from constantly. He and Harper could be very sweet together, but come winter they were less tolerant of proximity. Unlike Moondo, who would circle resignedly to another pile of hay when Jake barged at him, Harper took to pivoting on one heel to stomp away at the last possible moment, whipping her head around to snap at his prodigious rump as she brushed past.

Harper and Jake on top of their world.

This year, for the first time in, well, ever in this adult phase of my horse-addled life, feeding time has become almost serene. The winter pattern has settled in and the girls—ours is now a little herd of mares—have negotiated terms with one another. They finish their pans at roughly the same time. There are, inevitably, scuffles, and times when something has one or both of them on anxious alert. The other night, the clatter of frozen poop balls landing in the wheelbarrow sent them flying. They are prey animals in a wildland environment, and I would be concerned if they didn’t retain some healthy reactiveness. For the most part, though, the routine of feeding time is currently…routine.

There are even moments when it’s almost meditative. I throw out hay and set down feed pans. While they slurp their mash, I check the water in the tank, hang hay nets, and record the weather. When I collect each pan, we do a nose-to-hand check-in, and I bid them good night. They return to munching hay—a cliché, but apt—while I’m increasingly inclined to linger for a few minutes. The grinding of horses’ jaws has been the soundtrack of contentment for most of my life. In a few weeks, I’ll be listening to it as the sun slides toward the horizon, its rays angling under the shed-roof of the barn to bathe the three of us in watery mid-winter light.

Dunlin Meets Harper. There was drama. There always is.