GYPSY

GYPSY

By Tom Gumbrecht

Originally published in Horse Directory,  May 2013

It seems that where there are horse barns, there are feral cats. We started out in 2000, the year we
built our barn, with two, rescued from beneath the stairs at Samantha’s elementary school; they
were in dire straits as their mother was no longer there to care for them. Bottle-fed, neutered and
vaccinated, they became the first residents of the barn at Dreamcatcher Farm. Over the years others
wandered in from time to time. Despite several effective plans to control their “multiplication”, a
new cat still occasionally shows up and blesses us with her litter.

Gypsy and friend... the two moms.

We do what we can. The population is transient, and after our first two lived out their lives, I had
never named another feral. Never, that is, until a very special cat came along who we eventually
named Gypsy. Gypsy tested the waters for a few weeks by coming into the barn for seconds, then
minutes, at a time. Sensing safety, before long, she was sitting alongside me as I had my morning
coffee in the barn. That was the sum total of our interaction until one evening when she made the
unfortunate decision to traverse our backyard which is competently patrolled by our three large dogs.
Most cats can easily outrun our dogs but something had slowed her down on this occasion. I pulled
her out of the mouth of one of our dogs, and by her condition, was shocked when she bolted away,
not to be seen again for several days.

I caught a fleeting glimpse of her behind the barn, literally dragging her hind end around behind
her. As she collapsed, I could see that she was giving birth to what turned out to be a stillborn litter.
Attempts were made to patch her up and trap her, but she would always elude them, and disappear
for days at a time. I assumed it was because she was too sick, and knew it. When she didn’t appear for
several weeks, I said a silent prayer while looking out into the woods.

Lola wants to be a mom to the kittens also..

One day, while I was having my coffee in the tack room, the still unnamed feral unceremoniously
walked in, looking healthy and alert, and took her familiar place by my side as my jaw dropped in
awe. It dropped even further when some months later, she had another litter after it had been
deemed medically impossible. Of all places, she chose to give birth in a corner of the stall belonging
to Bella, our Arabian mare who had perhaps the least tolerance for small furry things as any horse in
the barn. Sensing danger, I carefully moved them one by one to a prepared bed in the tackroom. And
one by one, she brought them back into Bella’s stall. Not once but twice, and the next day I no longer
saw them there and feared the worst. My routine took me into the stall of our large paint horse,
DannyBoy and I saw the tiny kittens on the side of the stall of this 1,200 lb. giant who chased felines
around the paddock regularly for sport. And yet both horses had made sure that the kittens remained
safe. Later, the mother moved the kittens one by one onto the top of a high cabinet in the tackroom,
and ultimately back to the bed I had prepared. She accepted my offer, though on her terms, and
earned the name “Gypsy”.

Surprise! A drawer full of kittens!

The kittens were not well, and did not survive past a couple of days, and she mourned their passing
but not for long. Two other kittens whose mother had passed while giving birth were found in the
woods by Gypsy and brought back to the tackroom where she raised them as her own until they were
adopted out. And so Gypsy’s career as a surrogate mother to any and all who needed her, began.

She would go out and patrol the surrounding woods and bring back anything feline in need of a
mother. The remarkable became routine, until one day it became incredible. A feral wandered in
and had a litter on a stack of saddle pads, and then abandoned them. Gypsy stepped up and waited
for me to prepare a bed, which she assumed I would, and brought them one by one into the safety it
afforded. With a “mother” unable to nurse, we assumed that this would be a bottle-fed litter, but the
kittens’ mother had a change of heart and came back to check on her family. Far from being cause for
a “custody battle,” Gypsy saw it as a chance to become a mother’s helper.. . furnishing warmth, love,
mothering advice and support while the natural mother provided milk. Often the kittens are wedged
in between the two “moms,” who have become inseparable best friends as well.

A few days later, a third mom added two more kittens to the communal kitten-bassinet. This one
was a bit skittish, and within a day all but two of the kittens had disappeared. Gypsy stood on
the tackroom countertop with her head down for a long while, depressed, I had assumed, by the
disappearance of her charges. I had assumed wrongly. She had been indicating to me that there
was something amiss in the drawer below. I hadn’t picked up on the clue until I needed to retrieve
something from the drawer, and there were seven kittens staring up at me when I opened it! The
skittish mom had found a way through the back of the cabinet, to create her own feline safe deposit
box!

With a look in my direction somewhere between gratitude and impatience, Gypsy carried the babies
one by one to the safety and comfort of their bed. When the skittish mother cat returned, there was
no admonishment from Gypsy, just an outpouring of love and support.

Miracles, Gypsy has showed us, do indeed happen. A barn is home to many if you’re looking for
them…

Archived previous stories are available at www.tcgequine.blogspot.com
Visit us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/TomGumbrecht
Or on Twitter: @tcgelec.

Charlie Hustle

“Charlie Hustle”                                                                                                                             

 by Tom Gumbrecht                    Originally published in Horse Directory..

Pete Rose, the original "Charlie Hustle"

DannyBoy takes over the title...

Pete Rose was, and is, of course, a legendary baseball player who spent most of his Major League career at first base for the Cincinnati Reds. He seemed to always give 150%, and his nickname, "Charlie Hustle", could only begin to suggest the immense dedication, intensity, motivation, pure skill, talent and athleticism that makes his name synonymous with all of those character traits. On the field, I can't think of a teammate you'd rather have.

Off the field, of course, was a different story. He seemed unable, perhaps unwilling, to stay out of trouble. From all outward appearances a brash, cocky, self-absorbed man, his questionable choices caused the World Series MVP and Gold Glove winner to be deemed permanently ineligible to participate in his sport. Off the field, he may have been a guy who would have been difficult to be friends with. The self-destructive type. But no matter how much shame he brought upon himself and his sport, I include myself in a sizable group, perhaps even a majority, that still reveres his name as the ultimate go-getter, and his talent and motivation as something to be awed.

Recently, I've been back riding my young eventing horse, DannyBoy, after the usual winter layoff due to frozen footing and other cold-weather obstacles. It takes me a few weeks to shake the cobwebs off of him at this time every year, to get his body and mind back on track to compete in the horse trials.

DannyBoy is a natural athlete. He has saved my hide in so many circumstances I've

Look where you're going, Danny, not always at the camera..

lost count. He gives and gives and gives until he just can't give anymore. In a word: exuberant. He loves to work, loves his job. I'm convinced he would walk through fire for me, for us, for the team...he is just so willing and giving that sometimes I get chills at the responsibility of managing such devotion. That is, in the arena...

Out of the arena, he's our little backyard farm's bad boy. He's into everything. Snatching blankets off the other horses backs, running around the paddock with the sweater you foolishly left on tack trunk streaming out of his teeth..until he tramples it...it's all in a day's work. Removing a bungee-corded fire extinguisher from the wall and hurling it into the paddock, nipping at the jacket of an unsuspecting visitor...biting at the flank of a pasturemate...all just a sampling of his off-field persona. With, of course, the requisite "who, me?" look after he's been discovered. He's a bull in a china shop. A goofball. The vet calls him a "goon".
 

In show season, his little antics lessen as his mind is occupied with other things, and when he thinks up some mischief, he might be just tired enough so as to not carry it out. His wonderful demeanor under saddle more than makes up for his antics, which at once seem almost endearing.

In winter time, however, it seems like we get all the bad with none of the good. His youthful exuberance and his devilish ways of expressing it can grow tiring. Just when I think we can't take another day of it, one morning we hear the song of a single bird, then a few more, then the ring starts thawing, the blankets come off and we're back to doing the things that made me love him in the first place.

Well, he's not really Pete Rose. We're not the Cincinnati Reds, and this isn't the World Series. A better analogy perhaps would be of the little league star who gives his all for the team, and when not on the field drives his parents crazy with blowing up stuff, prank phone calls, schoolyard scrapes and detention.

Charlie Hustle. Everybody knows one. I've got one. An overgrown kid who's impossible to stay mad at.  Truth be told, I love him even when he is being a goon.

The deal: I put up with him, he makes me look good..

Perhaps more....

A Knowledge of Horsemanship?

A Knowledge of Horsemanship ?       

Originally published in Horse Directory,                                                             April 2013

By Tom Gumbrecht

Knowledge is Everything!

No, it isn’t.  Let’s start out with that.

"Circus"- The first horse the author sat.

For a short time, after beginning to learn how to ride at age 45, I believed that I would take a few lessons, maybe a half-dozen or so, and then go off and be a rider. It was such an accident of fate that put me in the saddle that I had no idea how much was involved in becoming what I considered to be a “good rider”. I didn’t even know what that was, but I suspected that it had something to do with attempting crazy stuff on horseback and not falling off in the process.  My innocence and naïveté were probably a good thing then, as a full understanding of what was involved would probably have kept me from even trying.

As I gained a little bit of knowledge and some time in the saddle, I explored different disciplines and found myself gravitating toward jumpers. As I watched from the sidelines I was mystified at how a rider could compel a horse to race around what seemed to be an unbelievably complex course of impossible combinations of fences.  While I thought of, or actually hoped to, one day ride a horse over a single fence, the thought of riding a full course didn’t even make it into my occasionally exciting horsey dreams.

I thought that I would need to find a way to access the secret details of some grand plan, some complex mystery that only the best riders knew and weren’t telling. “They” knew all of the details, but they weren’t sharing them with the likes of me. If only I knew what they knew, I could ride like they rode.

Or, not.

Laura Ruben of Affari Horse Farm taught me that discipline was not a bad word

You see, I was the kid who wanted to learn to play guitar on a music video, but found practicing scales and riffs to be a waste of time. I thought big! Skip the boring parts; let’s get right to the performance!  But then… something interrupted my big thinking. I had the good fortune, through another accident of fate, to have the opportunity to ride with a trainer who brought my big thinking down to earth while keeping my sometimes frail ego intact. A pretty good trick, honestly; it was accomplished by making the little things that I had no time for, fun.  Before I knew it, I was actually looking forward to practicing the very things I had so often shunned: balanced turns, straight lines, low hands, good posture, breathing, counting strides, work without stirrups, eye position, metered canters… basic things that I had been lacking.

Lola knows that jumping the little ones at home makes the big ones easy!

That was the missing element. I thought that I needed knowledge and guts; I wanted to float above the others on knowledge, and then swoop down and overtake them with guts. I was wrong; what was missing was not guts, nor was it knowledge. The missing element was discipline.  That was what “they” had that I didn’t; that was what I needed to find. It turned out that riding a competently executed course of jumps was no more than riding, in turn, a series of competently executed small movements.  Developed and perfected by repeating, observing, feeling, experiencing and improving some of the most simple things in riding. Honing skills as a woodworker sharpens his chisel in readiness for his next job. Put it all together and feel how it feels to experience something with your horse that is much more than the sum of its parts.  Discipline is the bridge between our dreams and our successes.

A point came when I began to understand what my very first trainer had told me once, a bunch of years ago: “Your problem, sir, it that you want to think it, and it will be done. Horses don’t work that way.”

I hate it when people who annoy me are right…

If you like us... subscribe!

Visit us on Facebook: Tom Gumbrect, and Twitter: @tcgelec

S'no Fun!

S'NO  FUN!  

                                                                                                                                             

                                                            Originally published in Horse Directory, March 2013

By Tom Gumbrecht

DannyBoy plowing snow..

The winter storm they were calling “Nemo” was predicted with the normal Weather Channel adjectives such as “storm of the century”, “apocalyptic “, and the now familiar “superstorm”.  By Friday afternoon I had begun to take it seriously. I had moved my grain pickup day to Thursday from Saturday, started the snow blower and generator, and picked up diesel fuel for the tractor; almost as an afterthought, I did as much grocery shopping as one can do at Dairy Barn.

By 7:00 p.m. I did preliminary passes with the snow blower on the house driveway until a shear pin broke on the machine. Pelted by sleet and windblown snow, I opted to put it away and fire up the forty year old Kubota 4WD tractor parked under the canopy and warmed with an electric block heater.  It had never let me down, and tonight was no exception.  There was about 4” of wet slushy stuff down already, and now it was being frosted by fluffy white stuff.  I put the tractor away feeling satisfied that I had gotten a head start on the job I would be doing tomorrow.

I guess I know how I'm spending my weekend..

At 9:00 p.m. I walked down to the barn to do night check, and my hard work had already been defaced by Mother Nature.  It was hard to tell where I had plowed not two hours ago. I made the decision to lock my horses in their stalls overnight, something I hadn’t done since the night of Hurricane Sandy;  the last time previous to that, I don’t remember.  A few small branches were snapping already and knowing that to be a sound which to a horse means “run”, I decided to play it safe as the paddocks were already quite slippery.

Mary was still at her job as an RN at a hospital in Nassau County, and at 11:00 p.m. the snow was already a foot deep and our street had not yet seen a plow; I let her know that I didn’t think it was safe to travel. She agreed and set up a cot in her office, sleeping as best she could in the midst of hospital activity. When I awoke on Saturday morning, I was a bit shocked to see the snow almost to the top of the three foot fence outside my window.  I dressed and let the dogs out and they promptly disappeared into the drifts into the back yard, bounding along like rocks skipping on an undulating ocean of white. In their enthusiasm, they didn’t even want to come back in to eat breakfast.  Bundling up, I grabbed a shovel and made my way to the barn, a 30 minute ordeal to go 200 feet. While on my trek, I wondered whether anyone who cares for horses on a regular basis truthfully likes snow.  I’m not sure I have ever met that person.

The tractor "shed" falls to Nemo..

My horses were as happy as ever to see me, perhaps a bit more so due to the unavoidably late breakfast. After preparing their feed, and giving hay and water and mucking their stalls, I set about to plan my attack on the great white tsunami that had inundated my little horse farm.  That would involve somehow freeing my tractor from the collapsed canopy that had enveloped it overnight.  After an hour shoveling snow from the canopy roof,  I was able to crawl in and start the tractor, and raise the bucket to lift the roof off of it. Fortunately I found a post and stood it underneath the ridge pole which allowed me to back the tractor out.  Moving snow of this depth with a small farm tractor is a long process, and as the minutes turned to hours I had to remind myself how at age 13, I would have killed for the opportunity to spend a day moving snow with a tractor.  That thought made my job easier for a while, but ten hours on a tractor in the snow can make even the most enthusiastic smile wane.

Thankful for my 1970 Kubota.4WD tractor.

In all, I spent 17 hours moving snow on the weekend of Nemo, made easier on the second day by friends Joanne and Dan lending a hand for half a day on Sunday.  It occurred to me that while I can sometimes secretly resent the twenty minutes it takes to dig someone out of a snow bank from an ill-advised attempt of driving up our unplowed hill, I have not ever once, felt even the slightest tinge of resentment, despair or exasperation in spending two full days to make it possible to continue to supply the most basic services to my horses.  They wake up to two and a half feet of snow and think, seemingly, “Oh, so I guess that’s what today will be.  Walking around in deep snow; that’s fine”.  They have taught me to begin to think the same way, although I sometimes learn slowly.

I think now that I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to spend a harsh winter in rough board with a leased horse prior to having my own barn. It gave me the confidence to branch off the road of the rider and enter the road that leads to horsemanship. While I may not have reached my destination I’m still travelling that road, and I seem to never tire of the scenery.

Archived stories may be accessed at www.tcgequine.blogspot.com

Visit us on Facebook: Tom Gumbrecht and Twitter (@tcgelec)