'Snow'
~
We found him –
her – in the snow. A mare with child, struggling to birth it, heavy with pain
and her unborn burden.
My father raises
colts into show horses for a living, and he’d begun grooming me to do the same.
It was because of this that I managed, struggling, to guide the mare back to
our stables. Her high whinnying pierced the black icy air as I reined her in.
She lay taut and
struggling on the fresh hay I’d hastily spread over the stable floor. Here the air was warmer, moist with the remnants of past births (and a few deaths).
I sang to her childish songs my late ma had cradled me with when I was a babe.
Slowly she lost her strange fear; slowly she warmed toward me as I stroke
her back, her belly, coaxing out the foal within her.
Even now
through the fog of age, her eyes pierce me. I remember her gaze too clearly.
The sharp, sentient, desperate eyes. She seemed to be helpless in her
pregnancy. Which is unusual; all animals are born knowing how to spill forth
life from their wombs. Humans wander into it fumbling and second-guessing, but
not beasts.
I had barely a year of experience in my unskilled hands. So I did my best: I cradled her, sang beneath my
breath, held her firmly and reached between her kicking legs as the final
throes arrived and her neighing reached a crescendo.
I was not
prepared for what happened next.
* *
For what seemed
like an hour I sat there limply as everything I knew – about horses, about birth, about life
– whirled dervish-like in the cooling air of the stable.
The mother’s
eyes fluttered close; the slender body curled up limp and exhausted on the
bloodied hay. Its offspring looked up at me with limpid eyes. A single
snowflake landed on its perfectly formed nose.
It seemed there
was nothing left for me to do.
I looked down at
my suddenly-useless hands. This was nothing I’d ever been trained for.
Finally, I got
up and wrapped the foal in a blanket. Whatever this creature was, it was a baby
and needed shelter. That was when I heard it.
“Leave him with
me.” A clearly human voice, heavy with post-natal fatigue and fading into slumber.
I knew better
than to do otherwise.
They’d be gone
by morning. When daylight came, they would be swept away with the wind, like a
snowflake not meant to be caught by mere human hands. I had had a peek into
something I was not part of; that I and my kind would never be a part of.
So I left the
colt with its changeling parent. I stumbled blindly back to the familiar warmth
of home, leaving this dream-like vision behind: a beautifully formed man,
shivering just slightly despite his nakedness, embracing his newborn child – a
beautiful, dove-grey, eight-legged foal.
~
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