Koda opening the gate.
The other day, I decided to tackle the long overdue task of smoothing out the sand in my round pen, which I do by hand with a large landscape rake. I never imagined that this mundane and rather plodding procedure would make me an object of equine fascination, but apparently, the sight of mom walking in circles in the place where I normally ask the horses to go in circles was positively mesmerizing. I realized this about a third of the way through the task when all three horses decided to mosey on in through the open gate to check out my handiwork. Kodachrome, my bold-as-brass 5 year old, even decided to “help” me by attempting to take hold of the rake. Though three horses in a 50′ pen definitely made raking a more challenging proposition, I always enjoy their company and figured I could still manage to get the job done.
Well, that idea came to a quick demise when Koda decided that 3 year old Cisco was getting too close to “his” rake, which necessitated a brief but intense high-speed chase that all but destroyed the completed portion of my beautiful, Zen-garden-like raking job. The perfect lines were now dotted with deep hoof divots all the way down to the clay — again. Time to shoo the boys out, close the gate to keep them out, and start over.
I had just gotten about half-way done for the second time when I heard the gate latch squeak as if it were being lifted, and lo and behold, there was Cisco, opening the latch! He not only managed to lift the little handle, but also appeared to have a perfect understanding of the fact that he needed to slide the bolt over to get the gate to swing open. I stood there, flabbergasted, as he accomplished that task with surprising dexterity, but once he had done it, he didn’t seem ready to take the next step, which would have been pushing on the gate itself.
Leave it to his “older brothers” to come to the rescue! With much conferring, bickering over who should do what, and eventual team effort, Koda and my mustang, Hummer, managed to push the gate open. All three horses came in again, and after having witnessed their determination and ingenuity towards that goal, I didn’t have the heart to deny them their triumph. We all just hung out in the pen for a while, and I let Koda “take over” raking, as he seemed to truly believe he was helping me by biting the rake and moving his head around while holding onto it.
Koda and Hummer putting their heads together to figure out how to open the gate.
Meanwhile, Cisco and Hummer looked very pleased with themselves due to their own contributions to the project, and proceeded to add even more lovely footprints to the long-suffering sand. Sure, my round pen didn’t get smoothed out as I had planned, but it was so nice to just be with those guys, especially knowing that they could be off anywhere in their large and varied paddock spaces, but chose to be with me. Sometimes, our horses show us that not accomplishing what we set out to do is the best way to spend the day.