The Blizzard, continued ...
By now, the gale had wheeled from east to southeast. This
wrecked my plan for sheltering the geldings. I knew that we shouldn't
put them with Coquetta and Vashti. There wasn't much free space
in the hay shed. The geldings might injure themselves by breaking
something while roughhousing. Or Coquetta might get fed up and
beat the tar out of them, and they would tear up the shed trying
to escape her wrath.
My plan was to fence them into the main horse barn. It was
entirely open on the side facing south-southeast, but a stretch
of horsewire would fix that. The theory for the open side - which
the locals recommended - was that this encourages range horses
to go inside. As for the direction, south-southeast maximizes
solar energy. The Pueblo Indians orient their doors and windows
to the south-southeast, and they are the ultimate old timers.
We also had sited our home and barns out of the wind in a
valley, just like the ranch across the road. I thought we had
it all figured, a way to shelter from the worst a storm could
throw at us. Just then it occurred to me that the Pueblo Indians
all live further west where mountain ranges hold back the worst
of the blizzards, and at a lower altitude, where it's warmer.
And there we were, sitting out on the western edge of the Great
Plains and this cold wave was curling around the bottom of the
Rocky Mountains and screaming in at us from the southeast.
As I thought about the situation, the gale wheeled further,
howling dead out of the south-southeast, directly into the barn.
I trudged up to the house. The thermometer now read three
above zero. I noticed that our Volvo station wagon had almost
no snow on it. My husband, John, must have driven somewhere while
the rest of us were busy.
John was in the kitchen. He said, "Remember those skinny
horses?"
Oh, yes. They lived about a mile and a half away. We saw them
whenever we went into town. Their ribs showed and their coats
were scruffy. They had nothing to break the gale except the barbed
wire fence that penned them.
"I drove to their home. The gate was padlocked. I taped
a message there warning that their horses could die unless they
got shelter."
I told John about the problem with our geldings. He said he'd
block off part of the front of the barn with the horse trailer.
I doubted that he could move it there. Drifts were building fast.
Oh, well, I figured that if worst came to worst, once he hooked
the trailer to the station wagon, we could load up the geldings.
We might not get much grooming done, but they would be out of
the blizzard.
John hustled out and hooked the trailer to our Volvo. I opened
the gate into the pasture, which fortunately was downhill from
the driveway. John revved up and tore off, bursting through the
drifts. He skidded safely through the gate and careened to a
halt exactly in place in front of the barn. OK, what about getting
the Volvo out of there? Those geldings were guaranteed to put
hoof prints into it. John got up some speed in a wind- scoured
patch of pasture and flew through the drifts back through the
gate and up into the driveway. Whew!
I strung horse fence across the remaining gap in front of
the barn. It was a good bet that otherwise the geldings would
run right back out, to heck with the blizzard. Just as I finished,
Valerie and Virginia materialized out of the whiteout leading
them. We groomed them dry and gave them hay and extra rations
of sweet feed.
Finally, everything was under control. I went inside to dry
off and warm up.
John was phoning around asking for leads on who owned the
skinny horses. He finally found their number. A man answered
John's call. John told him, "This is a stock-killer storm."
The man said he'd shelter them to the lee of his home.
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