My friend, Dave, as a sort of kindly
hobby, nurses sickly calves back to health.
Right now, he's tending six whitefaced runts. He gets them from ranchers he knows along the
Front Range near Augusta. Some of the
calves must be bottle‑fed. Some require
medicine. The ranchers have no time for
them, and their impatient mothers soon abandon them if they seem sickly. So Dave takes them in as pets, more or less.
Dave took me out to see the calves in
their cozy barn. I patted their shoebox
heads and told them they were pretty, though, actually, cattle are oafish and
their shoeboxes mostly empty. Not pretty
at all. Cattle, I think, are as caviar
an acquired taste.
While feeding a handful of alfalfa to
one of the calves, Dave told me about a horse he "put down"
recently. "Horse went loco on
me," he said. "Didn't know up
from apple butter."
Dave is one of those people who never
exactly looks you in the eyes when he talks.
He stares at the ground. He
watches his hands. Whatever. But you'll not find a man more sincere than
he, not in this particular life. When he
gazed at the calf's flank and said, "laying down a horse is the hardest
thing in the world," I knew he meant it.
Purple loco is lupine's cruel
cousin. Lethally toxic to most range
animals, locoweed washes up into patches all along the eastern slopes of the
Rockies, all along the plains. Dave's
horse apparently found one of those patches while out to pasture.
Normally, a horse will not eat
locoweed, and will in fact graze all around the pretty flowers, leaving them
standing alone. But every so often a horse will nip a morsel of loco while
munching through the tall grasses. From
that moment on, the horse's world reverses itself. Having tasted the locoweed, the horse will
forsake all grasses and hays and will forage near and far, often frenetic, to
find more locoweed, more sweet poison.
Sometimes a horse will starve to death while standing knee‑deep in
grass. They no longer hear the red‑wing
blackbirds fluting from cattailed ponds.
They don't feel the wind in their long hair. They feel only loco.
Though you can sometimes pen a horse
that has ingested a small amount of locoweed and nurse them back to our forward
world, if they find enough loco before you notice, they become 'loco' for
good. The best thing then is euthanasia: the happy death.
Dave's horse found plenty of locoweed.
By the time Dave captured and penned
his horse, the damage was done. His
horse had forgotten how to drink water, and would submerge its whole head in
the watering tub, doing nothing. Several times, Dave rushed out and yanked the
horse's head from the water to keep it from drowning. The horse no longer recalled the simple act
of turning around. Anytime the animal
walked itself into one of the fence corners, it remained there, greatly
agitated, unsure of the next move, like a chess player refusing to accept an
obvious stalemate. On a few occasions,
the pitiful creature finally freed itself by falling over backward. Plodding slowly about the pen, the horse
thought only locoweed, its small mind purpled and craving—craving one more
taste of the summer flower's sweet lunacy, craving until Dave gave it a death
like a good wind fanning Timothy and bluebunch wheatgrass.
-- Mitchell Hegman
