Why do people find it so hard to believe that a horse can be a psychopath? Not an obvious, screaming mad psychopath either. A brooding, deceptively quiet sort of psychopath who turns on a sixpence.
I arrived at Tara’s field the other day to find one of the girls with a horse in the neighbouring field wandering about in her field shelter — while she was asleep in it — searching the ground for something.
I’ve told them repeatedly never to go under the wire into Tara’s field and run the gauntlet of her homicidal hooves and treacherous teeth.
But Tara stands there snoozing and smacking her lips sleepily like a harmless old lady in an old people’s home, and they look at me like I’m mean and say: ‘Aw bless her!’
I ran across the field with buckets of feed muttering prayers to all the saints. I could see the murderous ginger one silhouetted in the shelter snoozing as the girl searched, and I could see Gracie, the pony, standing half in half out, her head just underneath the roof, getting as much coverage from the elements as she is allowed to have by She Who Must Be Obeyed.
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In fact, Grace doesn’t mind Tara and the strict boundaries she has to keep to in order to co-exist with her. A scaredy-cat by nature, Gracie likes the fact that nothing and nobody will ever harm her while the red peril stands watch. And as Tara is big on family, as psychopaths usually are, she would never hurt either me or the pony. But I wouldn’t want to risk anyone else in there.
The girl was rooting around the ground and as I got closer I could see that Tara’s face was a picture of lethal intent.
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