Mar 27 2009
A Holiday for Jem
At the beginning of March, Jem went on her holidays so that the weaning process could be done. It was quite a difficult thing to do as I was used to having her around and I was worried about both her and Sigurd’s state of mind. A horsey friend about 4 miles or so away, over the hills in Evie, had kindly offered space in her large field along with her Shetland Ponies and two bigger horses.The field overlooks Aikerness beach and Eynhallow Sound.
The night before, I decided to keep the Hobbits inside so that I didn’t have to worry about catching them. The horsebox was backed up close to the stable door and Jem was quickly led out of the stable, Sigurd left in. To my utmost surprise, she leapt up on to the ramp and walked straight into the horsebox. Hubby quickly put the ramp up and I tied her up. There were a few frantic neighs between her and Sig, but it wasn’t too bad. Jem tried to turn herself round in the box, so I decided to cross-tie her, that is, put another rope on and tie it on the opposite side. We then immediately set off to Evie over the hill road.
There were a couple of neighs on the journey. On arrival in Evie, Jem trotted out of the box quite the thing. She neighed a couple of times but was generally fairly calm. She joined two ponies, no sign of the bigger horses. Now, quite often, when ponies meet each other for the first time there will be nips and squeals and possibly kicks. Jem and the two black ponies greeted each other with sniffs and only one squeal. I thought that, as Jem can be feisty, there would be many squeals but the ponies accepted each other. This was a great relief to me as I was worried that the trauma of leaving her foal would be too much… little did I know what was to come!
We watched her for a while and she headed off to graze. We fired up the car and headed home as we had hay to fetch, and I had a Gregorian chant class in the afternoon and a Dungeons and Dragons sessio in the evening… a lot to pack into one day! We headed straight to get the hay from a farm in Sandwick, then headed home to unload. I let Sigurd out of the stable and put him in the field with Thorfinn. There was a lot of nuzzling, and then Sig realised mum wasn’t about. He ran around for a while, neighing and looking rather sorry for himself. He then decided to ‘attach’ himself to Thorf… not too sure if he was keen on being suckled by an upstart little foal though!
Sigurd was a bit subdued for a few days, but he wasn’t going to starve as I was pretty sure Jem was dry of milk (not that I know much about milking a mare!) when we relocated her. Sig is now very attached to Thorfinn and even shares the stable with him at night.
So, that was that… until a couple of days later, the friend left a message for me on a social networking site. Ummn! How embarassing… and incredibly impressive…
It turns out that not long after we had left Jem, she jumped a 2′6″ wall to follow. Luckily she ended up in someone’s garden and thankfully proved easy to catch again. Now… think on this, Jem is only 35″ tall at the withers (just behind the neck) so that leap must have be quite something!
