This will be the third year for this little tale, seems it might be becoming a tradition. ;-)
We sit tonight on the Eve of November, All Hallow's E'en, when the walls between the worlds grow thin and sometimes things slip through.
The story is true, it happened in the spring of 1988 or '89, it's so long ago now that it's hard to pinpoint it. But it’s really a Halloween tale...
When the desert starts to heat up in the spring, the warming air rises and spawns hundreds of little dust devils, or aire molino - ‘air mills’, or 'mill winds', in the local Spanish dialect. They pick up dust or whatever’s light enough, carry it upward and onward, meandering aimlessly until they lose cohesion and fall apart. Fun to watch, these tiny tornados. If you're a human, that is, horses don’t like them at all, they spook and move out of range as quickly as they can.
I was finishing nursing school, living next to a friend’s place and helping her with her horses. Zandy had a little old grey pony named Hobo that she’d bought for her grandson. Obnoxious little twerp, (Hobo, not the grandson). Did you know that ponies can have Napoleon Syndrome? They can, I’ve known several of them, and Hobo did. The big horses didn’t take him very seriously and he apparently considered that deeply offensive. So to get back at them he’d wait until they were laying down, relaxing on the grass in the turnout and eye level with him. Then he’d charge them, ears pinned back and mouth gaping open, from his ambush spot in one corner. The horses would scramble up and Hobo’d peel off his charge, shake his head and mince back to his spot, proud of himself because he’d made them pay attention to him. Little shit.
All grey horses get cancer, melanoma, if they live long enough. It’s slow growing in horses and takes years for the tumors to metastisize and grow enough to cause problems, but those secondary effects are what most grey horses eventually die of. And most ponies are vacuum cleaners when it comes to food and will eat themselves sick if they get into something unsupervised and are able to gorge. Hobo was 20ish, and grey, and he'd already had visible tumors when she bought him, so we knew when I came out one morning to feed and he hadn’t finished his dinner from the night before, that it was probably bad. The vet came out and confirmed it and Zandy sadly told him to put Hobo out of his pain.
The next morning, Zandy and I happened to head out toward the barn, from our different directions, at the same time. As we started over, a dust devil formed in the turnout near the little six stall barn. Not huge, a few feet across and just higher than the barn roof, it started moving down the long side, through the pipe runs attached to the stalls. The horses all spooked and snorted, trying to get away, but there was nowhere to go. Unusual for a dust devil to be that close to a building, but not unheard of. Then it got to the end of the barn and stopped, hesitated there for a second and then turned the corner. The hair on my arms started to stand up. The dust devil moved along the short side of the barn, got to the other side where the runs were, and turned the second corner. Hobo’s stall was the first on that side, I hadn’t raked it out yet, and he’d been shedding his winter coat, so there were still mats of white hair all over. After the little millwind turned the second corner it hesitated again, in Hobo’s run, just long enough to gather all up the white hair, then it changed direction and started moving again, out across the grass towards a half grown tree that Hobo enjoyed standing under. It moved into the tree and dissipated among the branches, leaving a faint white shower of pony hair in his spot. Zandy and I looked across the yard at each other, both rubbing goosebumps. When we were close enough, she said,”I’m glad we both saw that, ‘cause nobody’d ever believe it, otherwise.”
I’m not going to stretch your credulity by saying that an annoying, self important little twerp of a pony managed to gather enough energy to manifest himself, scare the crap out of the big horses one more time and deposit his shed remnants in his favorite spot as a way of saying, ’So long, and thanks for all the carrots.’. After all, it was spring, when the desert starts to heat up and spawns hundreds of little aire molino everywhere.
Happy Halloween