Sad Song | A Colic Horse Story

By: Nancy Swart Michel

One late afternoon in 1977, a few weeks after I entered my freshman year of high school, I glanced outside the livingroom window on my way to the kitchen. What I saw stopped me in my tracks. My Appaloosa mare, Nee Noo, stood in the corral twisting her neck around to bite at her side.

After making a few swipes, her head sank halfway to the ground. I knew something was terribly wrong.

[private]I summoned my mom, who called the vet, and when he arrived he diagnosed Nee Noo with spasmodic colic. Dusk had fallen by then, and the vet could do no more than advise us to walk Nee Noo all night to make sure she didn’t lie down and roll: doing so could cause an intestine to twist, which would be fatal.

My mom couldn’t spend the night walking Nee Noo. Every night she went to the hospital to visit my dad, who’d contracted a rare disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome, just weeks before. He’d been in the ICU ever since, paralyzed from the neck down.

Hurriedly and apologetically, Mom dragged out our barbecue grill and started a wood fire in it. Then she brought me Dad’s sheepskin-collared coat and set out blankets and a patio chair near the fire. I had already started leading Nee Noo in circles around the sycamore tree. Before she left to visit Dad, Mom brought me one more thing, a transistor radio.

The sky grew blacker, and the neighborhood sounds of barking dogs and passing cars gradually ceased as our journey around the corral continued. I was too bent on performing my task to feel anything for awhile, but I did recognize the irony of the situation.

My dad’s beloved Appaloosa, Silver Eagle, had died of colic ten years before.

Devastated, Dad spent weeks searching the state for a relative of Eagle. He finally found Nee Sad Song Nancy Swart.

Noo, Eagle’s half-sister, registered as Wamblette (A Little Eagle in the Apache tongue) in Rialto, CA. Her corral faced an area where pigs were slaughtered routinely, and we always wondered if the trauma of watching the butchery accounted for Nee Noo’s neurotic personality. Of course, her mixture of Arabian and Thoroughbred blood might have contributed too.

In any case, the Rialto ranch was an odd place to find a horse with such impressive bloodlines. Her grandfather, Arab’s Arrow, had once raced against Seabiscuit in the Stars and Stripes Handicap at Arlington Park. He’d come in third, just a neck behind the legend himself.

My twin sister and I were seven years old when Nee Noo arrived, and we soon attached ourselves to the two horses my parents owned. In a few years Kathy started showing the even-tempered gelding Hobbit, who did anything she asked him to, while Nee Noo and I usually struggled for any ribbons we brought home.

After an hour or so pacing the corral, Nee Noo came to an abrupt halt. I looked back and in the dim firelight saw her legs start to buckle. “No!” I shouted. I managed to get her moving again just in time, wondering how I was to keep a 1,000 pound horse from lying down and rolling.

From that point on I walked close to Nee Noo’s head, muttering soothing nonsense, patting her sleek neck, and tugging at the leadrope anytime she tried to stop. At last perceiving how much pain she was in, my initial numbness gave way to anxiety and guilt. How could she understand that I was doing this for her own good? When I considered how stormy our relationship had been (half the fault mine, for my behavior was often as chaotic as her own), a
deep regret stole over me.

Unbidden, memories of bad days and bad shows returned. At one particularly monotonous stage in her training, Nee Noo began turning into the center of the arena, where she’d come to a complete stop. Typically I’d slap her on the behind with my whip, and she’d buck in response. Slap. Buck. Slap. Buck. The equine Jack-in-the-Box-routine would go on until I finally gave up and put her away.

Another time, when she refused a brush jump at a show, I made her repeatedly jump a set of rails in the practice ring, furious that we’d lost any chance to win anything. During the award presentations later, I was shocked to hear the announcer call my name. When I rode up to the judge, he handed me a glistening gold-and-brown ribbon as long as my arm. We had won 12th place, despite Nee Noo’s refusal of the brush jump.

Although we often came home without a prize, Nee Noo thrilled me more than once with perfect performances that seemed to come out of the blue, for they certainly had nothing to do with me.

During a practice session of our mounted drill team, we crashed head-on into another horse. Everyone involved in the accident walked away unhurt except for Nee Noo; as I led her home she limped all the way, favoring one front leg. Although she suffered no permanent injury, I felt tempted to quit the team anyway, because her flightiness during the workouts had so often angered and embarrassed me. But at the competition only a few months later, in a huge and unfamiliar showground, Nee Noo didn’t merely come through for me: she was spectacular.

She glided through the routine, speeding up or slowing down before I even cued her. For the first time, she galloped with her head tucked down to her chest, her nervousness only apparent in her clipped, bounding strides. Our drill team won first place.

Other times, she amazed me with her singular, hilarious intelligence: she would kiss me on command, eat only pink jelly beans, drink wine, and play basketball with my parents, using her rear end as the backboard.

Yet how could Nee Noo know how proud she’d made me, or how much I loved her? She’d have to be psychic, I decided, especially after this night of torment. I had to yank on her halter many times to keep her moving, each time cheating her out of the chance to roll, which she surely believed would relieve her suffering.

For the fourth time that night, John Denver’s “Like a Sad Song” came on the radio. I already associated it with our lonely trek that night, when thoughts of Dad and the way he looked in the ICU last week mingled with my concern for Nee Noo. Now the emotions of that night are packed together and contained in that one song, like bittersweet memories stored in an old trunk one might pause before now and then, but rarely venture to open.

Tired, I thought I’d lie down on the lounge chair for a little awhile and hear the song out, since I had caught it at the beginning this time. Nee Noo stood over me, so miserable that if I moved, she would bare her teeth and nip at my shoulder, her ears laid back flat. Carefully, I got up and continued walking her, wondering if she’d ever forgive me for this torture.

The answer seemed clear the next morning.

When Mom woke from the livingroom couch at dawn, she looked out the window and saw me asleep in the patio chair. Nee Noo, recovered from the colic, was lying on the ground beside me, so close that the leadrope still lay coiled in my hand—as if she’d tried not to wake me.

After that, I had no doubt that she could read my heart, if not my mind.[/private]