The weather has broken nicely this year, and we are having a lot of
warm sunny days with light breezes. The horses are out 24 hours a day
and loving it, the pastures are greening up and soon the hay feeding
routine will be over until the fall. The barn seems somewhat derelict,
as the last layer of clean sawdust waits for a horse to arrive.
    The cats are enjoying the peace and quiet, and Snaffle has taken the
opportunity to have her kittens. I haven't seen the litter yet, but it's
probably four again, judging by Snaffle's size. Sadly one did not make
it and I found a small body in Alex's stall the morning after the birth,
a tiny kitten whose eyes will never open. A small service was held
behind the barn and that little soul was commended to the great
recycling bin in the sky. Her life will continue, not as a cat, but
instead spread out over generations of growing grasses and romping
horses to come. Our horses will have a little cat in them.
    Since unburdening herself Snaffle has become kind of lazy and much
inclined to snoozing on warm concrete. She will open an eye if a swallow
zooms over her but her prime concern is getting in some good naptime and
having a thorough stretch every few minutes.
    Echo and Lynn have acquired the basic cat skill of sitting and
staring at doors until someone opens them. Up till now they would run
away before the door was opened, but they are bolder with each passing
minute. Or maybe they are just getting tired of playing Knocky Knocky
Nine Doors.
    The barn swallows are back, and I think they are they same ones we
had last year. They served notice of their arrival in the usual manner
by doing a Mach 2.3 pass six inches over my head. By the time you look,
they are gone. But they will often perch atop the stall partitions and
chirp and chatter away at me in a very friendly manner. One pair has
already got hatched nestlings in the garage rafters and the other pair
is sizing up Bailey's stall as a nesting site. That's where a nest was
last year, but we took it down after the hatchlings left. The swallows
are not amused. I think they wanted to re-use it. For now, they are only
arguing about reconstruction plans. I bet they start building soon,
since they did raise a successful brood last year.
    The catlets are of course electrified by the high speed, low
altitude aerobatics of the swallows. But they haven't a hope of catching
one. One might as well swing a butterfly net at an F18. But they want
to. You can see it in their eyes. They want a swallow. They want one
bad. R-e-a-l bad.
    Out in the paddocks Joey is still holding number three spot in the
pecking order against the evern more determined challenges from Alex, the
stallion of two summers. For those who are interested, the pecking order
runs like this:
           1. Pendragon, gelding, 16 yrs.
           2. Bailey, mare, 14 years
           3. Joey, gelding, 4 years
           4. Alex, stallion, soon to be gelding, 2 yrs.
    So it's a simple age sequence at the moment, but it's not a stable
situation. This pecking order has to be respected by humans. If you feed
them in the wrong order, or turn them out in the wrong order there will
loud complaints from the offended parties and much nipping of behinds
and other misbehaviour that can end up in a handler getting run over.
    Cinnabarre, Pen's owner, showed up and decided to do some training
with Joey, who is pretty green, although a bright and eager-to-please
student. She was trying to teach him the basics of longe line work. The
idea is pretty simple: you put a horse on a long rope and you put
yourself on the other end. The horse walks, trots and canters around you
in circles and you work on voice commands, pace transitions and
generally excercise the horse. Joey thought it was a very good game, but
thought it a bit silly to run around in circles when he could trot up to
the handler, frisk him for a carrot and get a nose rub.
    Meanwhile Lynn's curiousity at all this got the better of her, and
she started gliding over from the barn, crouched so low to the ground
all you could see was her ear tips. Cinnabarre was not using the full
length of the longe line and there was a pile of slack line at her feet.
As Cinnabarre moved around, so did this pile of slack line, which must
have appeared to Lynn just like the bits of baling twine I dangle for
her to play with in the hay room. And there is only one thing a cat
wants to do with a piece of string, right?
    She froze. Her tail twitched at the tip. She launched like black
lightning and landed in the pile of line in full attack mode. Lynn
was totally preoccuppied with her attack, Cinnabarre was equally
engrossed in her horse work, and neither noticed the other until
Cinnabarre took a step back to tighten the line on Joey and her foot
landed squarely on Lynn, still in attack mode.
    Cinnabarre later told me she was confused by the ensuing sensations.
With her attention still fixed on Joey, she thought she had stepped on
a piece of particularly nasty barbed wire or something. It was only when
said barbed wire started climbing her leg and actively attacking that
she noticed she had one royally P.O.'ed pussycat attempting to consign
her to a wheelchair for life. Lynn is a small cat, but you'd never know
it by the impressive hieroglyphs she carved in Cinn's calf. Fortunately
for Cinnabarre's future riding ambitions, Lynn broke off the attack and
headed for the barn before inflicting permanent damage.
    Joey just stopped his circling cold and stared with his usual
bemused look at his bouncing, twisting, cursing and limping handler. I
swear he was desperately fighting an urge to fall to the ground
laughing. That pretty much ended the training session for the day, and
the twelfth attempt to instill Joey with some shred of a work ethic
failed as miserably as the rest. Like Charlie Chaplin, life just always
seems to go his way.
--- Maximus 3.01
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