Well, the campaign has ended, and I’ve moved my desk contents back up to the Bremers’ house. My duties have become a little more varied. For instance, I got to work one day last week to find all the Shetland sheep in the driveway on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. I herded them back down the driveway with my car until we reached the gate to the riding ring, where they piled against the gate, waiting for me to put them back in. When they got out again later in the day, I found the hole in the fence where they were getting out (because two of them put themselves back the same way they’d gotten out) and tacked the hogwire back in place.

This morning I opened the front door and nearly ran into Duncan, who was barrelling outside. “Looks like we’ve got a foal!” he exclaimed and rushed out to the paddock. I followed, and sure enough, there was a small scale horse on the other side of the fence. Michele was feeding, and she told me to grab a halter and put Abbey in the riding ring. When I got finished, Michele was telling Duncan how to imprint the foal. “Put your arm around its neck and your other arm around its rear end. Don’t let it go! Hold it for a few minutes. We’ll have to do this several times a day to get it used to being controlled by people. Do we know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

“I think it’s a girl,” said Duncan. They examined the foal’s backside. “Yup, it’s a girl.”

Michele told me to go get some Betadine and a narrow container. She filled the container with the Betadine and had me hold it under the filly’s belly to soak the end of her umbilacal cord. The filly jerked and jumped at the cold liquid on her belly, but Duncan held her still. She calmed down. Her momma Cadeau came over to check on her baby and then went back to eating the grain Michele had poured into the manger for her.

Once Michele was satisfied the filly had been held long enough, she instructed Duncan to wait until the filly was absolutely still before letting her go and to walk away from her, not let her walk away from him. The filly looked around a bit and then went over to her mother, nosing around her hindquarters and belly before finally figuring out where her two nipples were. Then she started making slurping sucking noises and dribbling milk.

Duncan found the placenta up by the barn and brought it down to the yard to spread in the grass. It’s important to find the placenta and make sure it’s fairly complete. If there’s any left in the mother, it can rot inside the uterus and make the mother very sick. The placenta was huge, full of wide veins and arteries. It was attached by the umbilical cord to the sack, burst like a popped balloon. There was also a weird brown chunk of tissue, about 6 inches long, 3 inches wide, and half an inch thick. “It’s the consistency of sweetbread,” said Duncan. He and I wondered if it were a stillborn twin. Duncan waited until Michele could examine it all before putting it in a plastic bag and putting that in the fridge.

Michele called everyone involved in Wings Like Eagles year round and told them the good news. She stayed on the phone for I don’t know how long with someone talking about names. To name a horse, you take the name of your ranch and then add something about it’s lineage. Of course, you don’t actually then call a horse by its real name.

Between phone calls, she asked me to feed up at the barn. I put some hay over the fence into the pasture for everyone out there (who were happily grazing in the tall grass from this unseasonably wet summer) and put some on the ground in a dry spot for Cadeau. I called to her, and she came over, her new foal following her as tightly as her own shadow. The foal was didn’t know what to think of the hay. I stroked her neck for a long while, and she seemed to like that.

I started to work at my desk while Kelly kept calling to talk to Michele, who was, of course, on the other line. “What does she look like?” Kelly asked.

“She has one white hoof!”

“Is her coat dark or light?” Kelly asked, unsatisfied with my answer. Uh… “What color is her mane?” she demanded.

“Uh, it’s dark… I think.” I mailed Kelly a picture as soon as I could so she’d stop asking me questions.

Finally, Kelly called and said, “Um, we’re here, and the foal is lying on the ground in the sun.”

“Great! Go say hello!”

“But the foal isn’t moving!”

“Well, it’s a baby, it’s going to sleep a lot. I’ll be right there.”

“Okay, we’re up at the barn.”

I walked up through the paddock and found Cadeau munching on weeds with the foal passed out next to her. Kelly and her brood of Beedles were on the other side of the fence. Kelly’s been around horses most of her life, but this was her first foal experience. It was mine too, but I’d just had a crash course that morning. “Come on!” I said, kneeling down and caressing the foal, who woke up and after several tries rose up on her wobbly legs. Nicki arrived with her two girls, and Cadeau decided there were too many people around and led her offspring down to the other end of the pasture. I caught her around the neck to keep her still so the kids could examine the foal.

The foals coat was unbelievably soft, especially her mane. Kelly’s eldest picked up one of her tiny hooves. The frog was full of hair!

The kids all had ideas about what to name her (her nickname, that is). Kelly wanted to name her Talitha (little girl) and call her Tally. Nicki wanted to name her Reepicheep. Kelly’s daughter thought we should name her Shelly.

Duncan and Michele are going to Wichita for the weekend, and the Harmons are housesitting. Michele asked me to show them the placenta and how to tell if it’s all there. So I drug the garbage bag out to the backyard and emptied the by now rather muddy placenta onto the grass and spread it out showing them the three big lobes and the broken sack. Michele said she had talked to the daddy’s owner Jean, who said that one in every 50 or so births includes the weird sweetbread tissue. There’s a scientific name for it (which she couldn’t recall right off), and no one knows what it is. How weird is that!

I was pretty proud of the kids all gathering around the huge placenta genuinely interested and not showing a single sign of disgust. When we had finished examining it, I threw it all into the chicken coop, although the chickens didn’t seem very interested. I tossed the sweetbread in too. “What’s that?” asked Kelly’s youngest, Ruthie.

“Nobody knows,” I told her.

“I think I know what it is,” Ruthie said. “It’s a little pillow for the little baby’s head to sleep on.”

That sounded as good an explanation as any.

Yes, check out the pictures in Photographs –>