Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Mag ups his game

Tell me what could be worse than a white horse who loves to roll in mud every time the dirt is wet. I swear he's the inspiration for that Texas band Dirty White Horse.

But today it got worse.

Mag discovered the fire pit. 

Try as you might, you cannot imagine how disgusting he is right now. I touched him with an index finger and said, "I won't be touching you again."

The last 2 days I burned all our scrap wood around here. It took me 12 hours. 6 hours per day. We had so much crap wood from finally buying 72, and I have been waiting all this time for perfect weather conditions to hide the fact I would have an illegal burn. Finally I got it - drizzling rain and thick fog for 2 days. No one could see where the smoke was coming from.

I burned and burned and I know you guys would have made shorter work of it, but I had trees all around at a distance of 5 meters, so I was conservative. Hence the 12 freaking hours. It was a very low, but hot fire. 

Yesterday I had the dreaded task of sweeping the huge burn pit for metal. Cuz we threw broken old gates on there, and countless posts with screws and nails and even barbed wire wrapped around them. 

Two full hours I spent with a strong magnet in a bucket, preening the fire pit of metal. Raking, preening, raking preening. Knowing all the while I'll never get them all. It kept me awake at night, the thought of so much metal that I will never fully uncover.

But Mag and Bellis both went directly to that burn pit and rolled, at least twice. 

I witnessed it once only after I'd scattered large stones in the pit, to discourage lying down. Bellis said, "Screw your stony work, I'm rolling here. Ash suits me."

Mag was black with soot. He had that look in his eye, "I know you're mad at me but I have no idea why, I'm innocent."

Have you ever had a horse purposefully filthify itself like this? In what, exactly?

Sorry no photos - I cannot think of it when he's that nasty.

4 comments:

TeresaA said...

Is it wrong that this made me laugh?

JenK said...

Oh no! I feel your white horse pain!! My Arab will roll in anything moist. Dirt is his preferred mode of filth, but he doesn't shy away from cow piles, a compost pile ( that was a fun one to clean off ) or freshly cut wet grass. Nothing like a horse wearing brown, black and green stains in his otherwise white coat. I secretly think he likes to do it just to get a shower and massage from me scrubbing his coat clean again...

lytha said...

JenK, if your horse likes the sauna experience, does he repeat his filthifying experience immediately after, to perhaps earn another bath? Your horse likes the cleansing process? I'm with you. It's 28C and I'm gonna go try to shoot the ash and coal off my horse with a hose. Right now he resembles a chimney sweep. No offence to chimney sweeps, they come to us every 4 months and make sure we don't accidentally burn ourselves to death by using our wood stove. Another cultural difference between America and Germany - just so ya know: )

JenK said...

Hi Lytha, YES! He will. I have to put him up in a stall to fully dry and then let him out again when his lot has dried out otherwise he just repeats the need to be a paint horse cycle.