BEAR, THE WEE LADDIE

First, let it be said that Bear, our three and a half year old Appaloosa gelding, is a pee-squealer.  He’s always watching you out of the corner of his eye; looking for any opportunity.  An opportunity for what you ask?  Anything!   Among other things, Bear is our safe cracker – he’s learned to open gates.  Many gates.   And if he can’t get it open with finesse, there’s always hooves.

As a foundation Appaloosa, his lineage is certified as descending from original Appaloosa stock, bred from away back.  Almost 100 percent, but not quite.   There’s a tiny percentage of something else in his heritage.   We didn’t discover what until recently.  We didn’t look him up on Ancestry.com.   No, it was a less scientific but no less certain a method. 

It all began when my friend Kelly Just recently visited from Seattle.  Now Kelly had horses as a child and is no stranger to mucking – the original cross fit exercise program.  Shoveling horse poop builds core, leg, arm and back muscles – not to mention its fine character-building properties.

Kelly jumped right in to help muck the corral and stalls where our six Appaloosas spend their evenings.  She introduced herself to all six and spent some quality time scratching their itches and generally loving them up.  But on about the third day of her visit, she was out visiting with the horses.  And she was wearing an eye-catching, plaid shirt. Plaid. Scottish plaid certainly.  That plaid shirt drew Bear like a siren’s song – it sang to his very soul.

Bear sidled up to Kelly, giving her his sideways eyeball and before she could react he had latched onto a corner of that plaid shirt.  It was a bug-tussle, Kelly pulling, Bear holding on for dear life.  They danced around the arena – both locked onto Kelly’s shirt.   Eventually strength, energy and hard teeth won the day.  Bear came away with a perfect square of the formerly beautiful plaid shirt. 

He chewed, he salivated, he rolled that piece of fabric around with his tongue like a big wad of 24-hour bubble gum, sucking every bit of plaid goodness he could find.  Concerned the fabric might get stuck in Bear’s throat, Kelly tried to retrieve the scrap, even valiantly (maybe foolishly) sticking her fingers in his mouth to fish out the sopping, scrunched up former piece of shirt.  To no avail.  A victorious Bear continued to dance around, tossing his head and mouthing that scrap like the delicious trophy it was.

Kelly and I continued to have a lovely visit, but eventually she had to return to Seattle.  Still we’d found no sign of that square of shirt.  I vowed to keep a lookout high, low, and in piles of poop for any sign of the stolen piece of plaid. 

Then the other day when I went out to muck, there in a corner of the arena I found a small present.  A small, wrinkled, dry, non-poop-covered square of fabric.  Clearly Bear had been hanging onto that little piece of plaid all this time.

And we finally have an answer to our earlier question.  That other tiny bit of Bear’s heritage?  Clearly, he's Scottish Highlander.