Ivan

 

The first time I saw Ivan I was as big a mess as he was.  A local farm owner advertised for barn help and I jumped at the chance of my first horse job.  All I knew about Saddlebreds was what everyone sees, the huge shoes, long feet, action and rolling eyes.  Through my hunter-jumper friends I’d heard a rumor that they were often good jumpers.  The barn owner was an extremely kind lady who obviously loved her horses.  Physically, they wanted for nothing (except turnout that is).  Nothing but the best feeding and care.   Gradually I noticed that they usually came in from workouts with bloody mouths, which we carefully medicated.  I learned to strap them into the confining tail harnesses at the same time I learned to carefully bathe and cool them out.  I watched unhappily as they were occasionally terrorized in their stalls with brooms  to produce the “animation” desired.

But the barn was a haven for me.  Home life was tricky at best.  Mom and I fought all the time, mostly over my boy friend and lack of “proper” social  ambition, dad was in the early stages of Alzheimers, before anybody knew about the disease.  I just thought he had strange opinions when he’d accuse me and my best friend of being way more than friends, but it cost me that friendship just the same.  At the barn all that just floated away as I immersed myself in the work.  I had the care of the two year olds who were already getting full work outs under saddle.  All except one.  “Keep away from Ivan.  He’s nuts.”  Ivan was a red chestnut with the biggest star I’d ever seen.  The BO had an aerial picture on the wall and you could tell which horse was Ivan, sticking his head out of the barn window with that headlight between his eyes even from thousands of feet up.  Ivan had a foaling stall to himself because he constantly paced and stood by the window pawing a foot-deep hole in the floor.  He wore both pawing chains and hobbles, but still he dug, pressing his nose against the window bars.  Like the others he hadn’t been turned out since he went into training for fear of pulling a shoe or marring that silky coat.  He seemed to feel it worse, though, and he was clearly miserable.  I carefully cleaned his stall as quietly and gently as possible  but it broke my heart to watch him rear against the far wall and try to beat his way out, away from me.  I couldn’t stand to see him so afraid and unhappy so I started taking my lunch and a book into his stall and eating quietly in one corner, as he trembled and fidgeted  as far from me as he could get.  Gradually he began to accept me and it truly warmed my heart when he trusted me enough to lie down for a nap near my feet.  I took over his care, no one else wanted to deal with him anyway because he was still crazy-scared most of the time.  I soon lost my heart to the damaged colt and spent every free moment keeping him company in his stall, but there was nothing I could do to really make his life any better for him. 

Ivan and I both lucked out the next summer when it was determined that he was worthless, not having the necessary knee action for the Saddle Seat world.  His owner let me make payments on him and $900 later he was mine.  I turned him out for the first time in six months and cried as he ran and bucked and slid in an overabundance of joy.  Ivan took to the trails like he was born to it.  I think he was glad to get out of the ring, and his bravery knew no obstacles.  Traffic, dogs, kids, water, it was all fine with him, as long as we were trotting or cantering.  I couldn’t get him to walk, and like many inexperienced riders I put him in a harsher snaffle, sitting his jigging uneasily as his front end got lighter and lighter.  I knew what was coming and a rear was inevitable, but it panicked me into calling around for lessons.  No one in my area was thrilled about teaching someone with a saddlebred but eventually I found an eventing trainer who would take us on.  He put Ivan back in a smooth snaffle and taught me how to send him forward into it to create a flat walk.  He also helped me teach him to jump. 

Ivan proved a talented and enthusiastic jumper.  Soon we were limited only by what I had the nerve to attempt, as cross country jumps went.  Ivan pricked his ears and sailed happily over ditches, logs and streams.  As long as running was involved it was all fine with him.  He was such an enthusiastic jumper that he ran away with me in show jumping at all the horse trials I took him to.  I could control him in lessons, but I guess my nerves got to him at events because he’d haul me around a course at top speed and I was too embarrassed to set him down in front of God and everyone.  He never touched a jump or had a penalty but I have a picture of us jumping that shows the jump crew with their hands over their faces. 

Trailering back from Virginia one time the truck broke down.  I had to spend the night in the little two-horse trailer with Ivan to keep him from screaming for me all night.  I slept in the stall next to him and he was content.  We were a team, and he comforted me in my teenage heartbreak as much as I did him. 

 I was blessed to have Ivan for just two years, his fourth and fifth.  One afternoon in August he coliced and the vet recommended I bring him to the clinic.  Back then I still thought my trainers and their vets were gods and that there was nothing they couldn’t do. They treated him about twelve hours, hoping it wouldn’t require surgery as they told me they’d lost the last two.  This was back when colic surgery wasn’t the more routine operation it can be now.  I watched from the sidelines as they prepped my boy and flipped him on his back, one back leg extended and one tightly flexed.  Unbelievably, the anesthetist had to leave mid-surgery on another emergency and I was drafted to monitor the machine.  I didn’t know what I was doing and  at one point Ivan moved a bit, as his level of sleep became insufficient.  They removed several feet of purple-black intestine and sewed Ivan back together.  He came out of the surgery well, but it transpired that the flexed up leg wouldn’t work and I watched as he crawled around the padded stall, trying to get to his feet.  When he quit in exhaustion the vets wracked their brains trying to get him going again.  I was still on auto-pilot and deep in shock, thinking that if I only kept doing what they told me, everything would be alright.  I’d never lost a horse before and it still hadn’t dawned on me that I was losing this one.  I knew what would get him moving, and I cried as I raised a broom beside him, but fear gave him the  strength to finally gain his feet.  It took me more than twenty years to stop beating myself up for raising the broom to him, but at the time I thought that it would save him if I could just get him to his feet.  I didn’t know that the battle was already lost.  It was just too late.  His insides couldn’t work anymore, the blood had been cut off for too long.   I still can’t look at a purple liquid, the color of the euthanasia solution.  Ivan was my heart horse, but he paved the way for the little chestnut castoff that now inhabits my field and his own place in my heart.