The farrier is due to trim and shoe the hooves of our old horses. It’s an essential service. We bring them in from their retirement meadow and walk them down the lane to the stables in the dusty, sunlit corner of the farmyard.
The pony jogs to keep up with the big chestnut mare; unshod, he makes a light tapping on the metalled road that belies his size. The mare clinks along oddly. Having “thrown” a shoe midweek, only three of her hoofbeats ring out, and one of those clinks, rather than clops: the distinctive sound of a loose shoe. It is a percussion that attracts attention: “Lost one, gunna lose another?” asks a neighbour, walking past.
We pull into a gateway to let the bus go by in a swirl of summer dust and hayseeds. Both horses take the opportunity to snatch some hogweed.
The farrier sets to work, carving new moons from the pony’s feet with an oak-handled paring knife. The rhythmic tap and clink of his hammer, shaping shoes over the anvil, alerts the farm terrier, who comes in wagging, licks the farrier’s face and trots off with three crescent moons of keratin in his mouth.
The farrier talks to me through a mouth full of nails, a foot held between leather-aproned knees. Hooves are filed flat and sensitive “frogs” pared.
The frog, a thick, triangular pad of rubbery tissue growing up the centre of the sole, acts as cushion, traction and circulatory pump; it is the engine and contract between the ground and a horse’s beating heart.
We talk of too-wet springs and too-dry summers, the growth rings on the horses’ hooves that record seasonal trends as a tree does. The new patterns he sees now are the cracks and contractions of extreme weather.
With his back folded to the low plane of a table the horse rests her muzzle on, he is intent on reading, diagnosing. His hands are on the pulse of the Earth through the hooves of horses. Weather, grass, horn and heartbeat; electricity. Neither of us names it, but we are talking about climate change. The mare shifts her weight and he bears it.
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