Chapter 6

Drama on the farm

A handsome grey donkey with markings of black around his eyes and down his neck, Dusty arrived at the farm several months earlier, a surprise gift from the outgoing manager of the large farm next door that had just been sold. Worried about where he would end up, the young cattleman had simply moved him into one of my adjoining paddocks, knowing I wouldn’t have the heart to do anything other than let him join the herd. What no one knew, but we were about to learn, was that Dusty was a self-taught Houdini, a donkey more than capable of opening gates even humans had trouble with. The only way to keep him secure was to tie a rope around the closed gate and adjoining fence post, to make sure he couldn’t get through, even if he picked the latch.

All went well for the next few days, with Diane driving out to check on the two yearlings early each morning. Then came the call every horse owner dreads, the one from a neighbour that goes something along the lines of: ‘That chestnut filly of yours has jumped the fence and is in my paddock.’ Roxie was on the tear.

Teenage son in tow, Diane flew through town and over the river to catch Roxie, who had, it turned out, not really jumped as much as clambered over the farm’s oldest border fence, the last remaining strand of barbed wire anywhere on the property, incurring superficial cuts to her chest and front legs in the process.

After cleaning her up, Diane decided the safest course of action was to move the two fillies and their chaperone away from the scene of this excitement and into the middle paddock that runs around the base of the hill, providing them all with a more lush and shaded environment. This would mean her yearling couldn’t try the same silly stunt again. They were closer to the older mares and donkeys too, and could get to know each other over a different, kinder fence. Hours later, when all was quiet and they were settled in, Diane drove home. All was right again with the world, at least at Picayune.

She returned the next morning to feed them, only to find everyone in the one paddock. What I should have foreseen and warned Diane about was that, for Dusty, having the mare and two fillies move closer to his gang in the front paddock, without him being able to reach them, would be too much to bear. What this donkey hated more than anything was being kept away from the heart of the action, especially if it meant being separated from any of the mares he had adopted as his own, let alone any new arrivals. In his mind, he was the man of the land. A working donkey used to spending much of his springs and early summers teaching the bull calves to walk on lead ropes and accept human handling, he often found his newfound retirement at Picayune boring. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t find another farm that needed a donkey to work at such a traditional, old-fashioned task.

So here was Dusty, with time on his hands and nothing else to do but focus on the thrilling arrival of the two yearlings, no doubt frustrated that he couldn’t be with them as soon as they moved into the next paddock.

It is safe to assume that—as the smart grey donkey watched the trio move about that paddock with the gum trees on the side of the hill—he became determined to bring the two herds together, no doubt spending hours working on the wire tie that held the gate chain in place, untwisting the loop I had (wrongly) assumed was tamper-proof before pushing back the gate and … we will never really know what actually happened next. Or when, exactly.

But Diane certainly sensed something wasn’t quite right when she looked into the paddock. It wasn’t just that the mares were mingling with the two yearlings. Rosie, always the first to whinny a greeting and start trotting towards any visitor, was immobile, not even looking her way. And as she drew closer, she saw why. A large chunk of flesh had been torn from the filly’s neck, a hole almost down to the bone and deep enough to fit a fist in. Blood was dripping from under her mane onto the yellowing grass. She was clearly going into shock. Gently, Diane put a halter on Rosie and led her slowly into the smaller front paddock. She then called the vet. And me.

She trudged back to get her pick-up truck that was loaded with feed for the fillies and drove around to the front of the property, where they were now standing together under the shade of a row of old poplars.

And then she waited, trying to get the little bay with the smudge of white on her forehead to eat at least some of the grain and molasses mix both fillies usually wolfed down.

And waited, stroking Rosie’s head to keep her calm as the already warm summer morning grew hotter. And waited, eventually getting back in the truck, but talking to the filly resting her long nose on the car window all the while, her good friend Roxie never leaving her side. Eventually, as the hot day dragged on, the chestnut lay down in the sun for her morning nap.

‘It wasn’t good because I could see Rosie slipping further into shock,’ Diane told me later. ‘But I knew the vet would come as soon as he got out of surgery, so all I could do was hang on in there.’

What had happened, I asked, aghast, too far away in my office in Sydney. Had she run into the branch of a tree?

‘It looks like a bite to me,’ Diane replied. ‘I reckon one of those mares has had a go at her, and she hasn’t got out of the way in time. There are teeth marks at the top of her mane, so she’s got a fair dinkum hiding. She’ll need a good few stitches.’

This made some sense. Having led a happy, pain-free life to this point, it would not have occurred to Rosie that any one of the mares would actually seriously put her in her place, let alone that any harm could come to her. It was a foreign concept. And the mare who had taken the disciplinary action was probably just as surprised as she was when she actually made contact and got a grip, expecting the filly to slip away from her.

Three-and-a-half hours later, two of the three vets from the local practice arrived, to make sure they could handle my filly with minimum trouble, under sedation if necessary. Initially, they weren’t convinced the wound was the result of a bite, and both felt it could be cleaned and stitched. But then they had a better look.

Closer inspection revealed the wound was too deep and too wide to pull together, let alone stitch closed. All we could do, they advised, was keep it as clean as possible and give Rosie antibiotics to stave off infection. On the positive side, the vets assured Diane that the wound hadn’t torn the neck muscle, although it had gone pretty close.

By the time I arrived later that afternoon it was an overcast, grey afternoon, with a light drizzle falling as I got out of the car. Rosie was standing at the top of the paddock, head down and shaking. And nothing anyone had told me over the past few hours prepared me for what the wound looked like.

It was an oozing, gaping hole, with a couple of teeth marks at the top of her mane framing the damage. At least she could still move her neck, lifting it slowly up and down from the ground. This was not part of the plan, I thought, as I stood in the rain with my injured filly, her trembling head resting on my shoulder. She did not deserve to be beaten up like this, nor did my dreams for her need this kind of pounding. I wondered how it would affect her, physically and emotionally. How far would it set her back on the road to the racetrack?

As I comforted Rosie, I also wondered which of the mares had done this. Not her mother, or Express; bossy dowager she most certainly was, but she was also the kindest of souls to young ones, a nurturer. It could only have been one of the other four and the most likely candidate was Molly, a former resident of the stud next door who had never had a foal, or been around many yearlings in her adult life.

She had probably tried to assert her paddock rights when Rosie got too close. All the possible culprits were gazing over at Rosie and me from the other side of the poplars, keen to be involved with whatever my sudden arrival heralded.

The longer I stood there talking to Rosie, coaxing her to eat at least a little of the lucerne hay I had brought for her, the more convinced I became it had just been an awful accident. More significantly, Rosie’s wound needed constant attention, which meant I had to stay with her until she was out of the danger zone of infection. For the next couple of weeks I would have to juggle work and yearling nursing duties.

It was a learning experience unlike any other.

That first weekend alone, I watched in dismay as a good 10 kilograms disappeared from Rosie’s frame, dissolving her solid condition into a less impressive, lighter frame. Then the relatively fresh wound became a squirming, thick mass of white as maggots set about cleaning through the puffy, red flesh.

After taking anecdotal advice on how long nature’s little helpers should be left to work the wound, I tried to sluice them off with lukewarm salty water in a syringe a couple of days later, to no effect. On the vet’s advice, I switched to an eye-drop solution, and this did the trick, the curling white throng leaping almost as one from the cavernous chunk of missing flesh once it was dripped in. Within a couple of days of repeating this treatment they were gone, leaving trimmed pink skin in their wake. Clearly healthier, the wound started to close, centimetre by centimetre, and as it did, Rosie’s equilibrium was restored.

Six days after being injured, the filly’s sense of wellbeing was such that she was refusing to accept the antibiotic paste that I had been giving her each morning, which meant it now had to be mixed in powder form into her feed. This became more complicated than it should have been as she and Roxie still shared every meal, no matter how hard Diane and I tried to persuade them to eat from separate feed bins. This meant I had to come up with a crafty manoeuvre, whereby the medicine went into a bucket with a handful of yearling prep and chaff that I held in one hand for Rosie to eagerly gulp down, as I wrestled an indignant Roxie on a lead rope with the other.

The two friends would then share the rest of their breakfast from their feeders. A more experienced horsewoman would no doubt have managed things more smoothly; it certainly wouldn’t have taken as long as it took me every morning. But somehow we got the antibiotics into the right horse every day—job done. Things were looking up.

As much as I was learning about animal husbandry on the run, at some point soon I had to go back to my job managing ABC NewsRadio in Sydney. A decision needed to be made about how best to continue to care for the filly. We decided the only way was to leave the youngsters where they were, in the clean and green front paddock. Even though they weren’t under constant supervision, it was going to be more practical for Diane to check on them daily, rather than move them back to her farm.

With more stock on it, her own pastures were low, her yards dusty and at the height of this harsh summer, that dust could lead to Rosie’s wound getting infected. The vet also advised the paddock at Picayune was the safest place for her to be in, as Rosie could keep moving about freely, using the muscles in her neck to eat grass, gradually strengthening the injured area.

On the morning I was about to make the three-hour drive back to the city, I stood on the hill and watched the wind suddenly change, whipping in from the north and sending spirals of dust across the farm, sending cattle, sheep and horses in a sudden scramble for shelter. And I knew that what we had feared would happen at Diane’s property was about to happen right here, in just a couple of hours. We needed a new plan, fast.

‘We have to put them up in the stable,’ Diane declared, jumping out of her claret-red pick-up truck. ‘It’s the only way to keep that bloody wound clean.’

And for the next month, for most of January and the hottest part of that summer, the two yearlings live side by side in two stalls, safe in the stable on the hill, and my desk job moved to the country. My colleagues adapted with remarkable ease, calling me either very early in the mornings, before I took the fillies out to muck out their stalls and exercise them in the round yard ahead of the day’s heat, or an hour or two later, just after I had fed them and was about to have my own breakfast.

It is a crash course in handling young horses and an equally steep learning curve for the two fillies, as they suddenly had to cope with a more confined life, as if they were in training. As back-breaking and sweaty as it is cleaning out those stalls twice a day, topping them up each time with fresh straw, and as boring as it must have seemed to the fillies, it’s quickly apparent that this enforced regimen is actually a good thing for the three of us.

Certainly it’s introducing them to an environment they will eventually spend a large amount of time in. Had these yearlings been bred and reared commercially, this kind of education would have started as soon as they were weaned from their mothers and they would already have undergone at least one intense round of handling and stable life. They certainly would have spent at least a couple of months doing pretty much the same things as they were doing now, getting ready for the yearling sales, a process that would have been in full swing well before Christmas. But stable life is one thing; taking part in Australia’s yearling sales involves a more intense set of manners and skills. Walking in and out of a stall in a steady fashion is just part of this: youngsters up for sale also have to learn to stand outside that stall—in a nearby walkway specially designed for thoroughbred inspections—sometimes several times a day, while various groups of people look them over.

This is difficult work for such young animals, involving a high degree of emotional pressure for even the most mature and intelligent horses. For the majority, this physically and mentally draining attention can start days before the official sale. With these auctions running over five, sometimes six, days, it’s a process that can wear out even the hardiest souls.

How would these two girls have coped with that, I wonder, as I lunge them in the round yard, literally running them in circles for 15 minutes or so to get a sweat up (not hard in the summer heat), and iron out the kinks from standing in the stalls, night and day. By default, Rosie’s accident has led to a similar ordeal, which should add a positive layer to their overall knowledge and experience.

By the end of the first week, I genuinely appreciate Rosie’s robust character. She has adapted well to living in the stall alongside her equally amenable friend, and she has allowed me to clean and dress her wound each morning with a stoicism that belies her age.

Better still, the wound has begun to close over. Slowly but steadily. She is putting back the weight she had lost and held it, a good sign for sure; she doesn’t look quite the picture of health that stepped off the float a few weeks ago, but her coat is starting to get back some shine.

So I start to think seriously again about what to do next with this strong-minded yearling, as she’s almost through an ordeal that could have flattened her, physically and mentally. Instead, she’s come through it with genuine good grace and humour, so remapping her career path is obviously critical, perhaps even more so than before. Now Rosie has even more catching up to do.

All I have to do now is talk to the trainer who has agreed to take her on—and work out what’s next.