by my guest author, Robert B Ward
The senior citizen at the sawmill on the Sweetgrass was named Nina Bea after the Basin Creek School teacher. Her teammate was Dolly Grey. When Dolly died back in 39, the years started catching up on Nina – seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. That’s getting old for a horse, and the last years — well if you were part of a team, you’d know. The last years were lonely. When you’d stabled with your partner on your off side for fifteen years, pulled a wagon with her on the off side, grazed together, keeping the same formation – then things just aren’t the same. Those younger ones didn’t have the memories, weren’t teammates.
So it was Nina went into retirement.
In late fall when the hill pasture was dried up, and the grass was short, the gray mare, now turned white, was put in the small field with better pasture, and then in the hay meadow after the hay was taken off. She gleaned with the milk cows until snow covered the ground, then she had her own rest home in the horse barn with fresh hay every night and a can of ground oats every day. That was the way a horse should retire after long years of service. Bud Ward kept her under special care. She whickered when she saw him and strolled toward the barn door in cold weather. Twenty years plus and heading for more.
She’d been born black. Her father was a Percheron State Champion and a ton of horseflesh. First picture of Bud Ward’s team of mares shows Dolly brown and broad, and Nina, a rich dapple gray, some two or three hands taller. The dapples faded to white, and the white was whiter. That’s the way with dapple gray work horses.
Spring came, snow melting spring, not grass growing weather. Bud let the old girl in the barn and she ate the can of ground oats, walked out of the barn where she wouldn’t cause any disturbance taking her out, lay down flat and breathed her last. That was the right way to go. Bud Ward pulled the pipe out of his mouth and turned away. He felt like he was getting old, too.
