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Description

For those not in the know, this is for the

(1) Mandatory: Reference
(2) Mandatory:Introductory Image
(3) Optional:Resistance
(4) Optional:To The Lorries
(5) Mandatory:Groundwork/First Steps
(6) Optional:Learning To Lead
(7) Mandatory: Mishap/The Fall <------
(8) Optional: The Journey Home
(9) Optional: Quarantine
(10) Optional: Travel Buddies
(11) Optional: Grooming Session
(12) Optional: A Step Too Far
(13) Optional: First Saddle
(14) Mandatory: Backing
(15) Optional: Hacking
(16) Optional: Trust

Edit: We won!

(Please remember that this is fiction and that if this happened in reality, he'd have probably got a terrible infection and died but this is HARPG so he can cheat death just because I say so, lol Also, this was supposed to go up yesterday but dA kept having an 'unknown error' every time I tried to upload it and after several hours of trying I just put the PC off XD)
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The days passed quickly at the quarantine yard and Toa was coming on leaps and bounds - very often literally. He had shown a great willingness to learn, but was prone to random bouts of skittishness, usually whilst Nikolai was trying to get him used to following his directions through the leadrope. It wasn’t confusion, more likely frustration, as he seemed to understand perfectly well what he was being asked to do, but just lacked the enthusiasm. This probably wasn’t helped by the conditions – the already churned up dirt made worse by three days of near constant downpours which turned the ground in the pens to a thick congealed mass of mud and dung. The sooner they got home the better, thought Nikolai, as he led the horse around the pen for the fourth time, clicking with his tongue to encourage him forwards, hooves and boots alike making uncomfortable squelching sounds in the mud as they trudged. At least there they had a couple of arenas with decent drainage to work in if the fields were bad.

‘Hey, Niko, d’you have a minute?’ David’s voice came seemingly out of nowhere, and Nikolai turned to see his friend approach the pen, brandishing a mobile phone in one hand. ‘I’ve found someone who knows what happened to Toa!’

The Russian raised his eyebrows and quietly brought Toa back down to a standstill before releasing the leadrope from his halter and letting him walk free, with a gentle pat on the neck.

‘Who is it? What happened?’

‘Her name is Brooke Davies and she’s a journalist with one of the local TV stations – I saw some reporters during the muster and wondered if any of them might remember seeing an injured roan over the years and lo and behold, one did! She was covering the muster a few years back and saw it happen – I haven’t heard all the details yet but I thought it’d make more sense for us both to hear it from her directly so I called her up. She’s on the line right now if you’d come a bit closer, I can put it on speaker...’

They got introductions out of the way fairly swiftly and Brooke launched into her story.

‘Okay, so it was a good few years ago now, maybe four, and I’d been asked to do a piece for the local news on the muster, talking to the stockmen and the helicopter pilots and so on. Anyway, we got some good shots of the yards and all the people, but we thought we should get some footage of the herds being brought in from the best view possible – in one of the helicopters themselves. They’re really tiny things, so we split up and took a camera up in each ‘copter. The pilot of mine – Riley, had been helping with the musters for years, and knew all the best places to find the horses and chase them back down to the yards. I got some great shots of some in the distance and was about to ask if we could go towards them for a panning shot when we spotted a little band of horses we’d not noticed before. There was a stallion and a couple of mares with foals and if it wasn’t for the height advantage we had, with the varied geography of the place, with all its little hills and valleys, we’d never have spotted them from the ground.

Anyway, Riley got the ‘copter round them and got them pointed in the right direction – it’s incredible just how effective they are for herding them, like big flying sheepdogs! – and they all set off at a gallop. The stallion tried to make a break for it, but we swooped in and set him back on course and we thought all was well...until, well I don’t quite know what happened, we didn’t see the fence until it was too late – I reckon it was a bit of old sheep pen or something, with that horrible thin wire – but he just galloped right into it, the wires caught around his legs and he came crashing down like a ton of bricks.’

Nikolai paled. He had suspected that the injuries might have been from an encounter with a fence but he hadn’t expected it to have occurred during a muster, and certainly not under those circumstances. He leaned back against the fence as Brooke continued.

‘It was awful, he was thrashing around, trying to free himself, but all he was doing was making things ten times worse. There was blood everywhere and the sounds, oh god, that sounds he was making nearly broke my heart.’

Her voice broke and Nikolai could tell that she was crying.

‘From the look of him, a quick shot to the head was the only humane option and there was nothing we could do from where we were. There was nowhere for us to land nearby so Riley radioed the yards, who in turn got some of the army lads to come round from the base nearby in their vehicles. We still had herds to muster, including the group he was with, which had scarpered as soon as he went down, but we couldn’t just leave him there on his own, not in the state he was in, so we just stayed put. Because of the terrain it took a while for them to get there, and by then the poor horse had stopped moving. We were so sure he’d bled out or was close to death, so you can imagine our surprise when he got to his feet as the vehicles started to arrive.’

David raised his eyebrows. ‘How on earth did he manage that? Surely he’d have lost too much blood?’

Brooke laughed mirthlessly. ‘I wish I knew, it was like something out of a movie – he just seemed to pull himself up by sheer willpower alone. He was still tangled up in all the wires though so it wasn’t like he was really going anywhere. He wasn’t completely upright anyway, the fence posts had him trapped, but he was making a serious effort to escape.

The next thing we know three land rovers were coming up across the hill and well, this horse took one look at them and started writhing around until half the wires were off and he just had the ones round his neck holding him down. It was a bloody miracle they didn’t go through his jugular actually, now that I think about it, but he must have been in so much pain. Thank the gods it wasn't a barbed wire fence, that's all I can say.’

‘So what did the army men do?’ Nikolai asked, suddenly. ‘Did they cut him free?’

‘Oh, no, they didn’t really get a chance’ Brooke replied ‘They didn’t even put their engines off when they stopped, they were in such a rush to help him, then a bunch of them got out and assessed the situation. Obviously they didn’t want to distress him any more than they had to, so they kept their distance, and they couldn’t get too close in case he lashed out in pain and hurt someone else, or himself.

We were still hovering above, so we moved round to see if we could gauge a better place for the guys to approach him from and I don’t know whether it was the helicopter, the men on the ground, divine intervention, or what, but he suddenly hauled himself up again and this time managed it. The wire was still round his neck, but it had detached from the fence post – probably rotten wood I expect – so he was able to pull himself free and just stood there for a moment, sides heaving, with blood all over his neck and legs. The wire must have just torn through the flesh and skin, as although he was bleeding, there was no spurting, like from an artery or something so he got off lightly, all things considered.’

‘Then what?’ David cried, ‘What happened next?’

‘Well, he backed off pretty sharpish and we could see that he’d obviously not damaged any tendons or major ligaments as he was moving well enough, then he just took off! The army guys leapt back in their big land rovers and went after him, and Riley turned the ‘copter round and followed suit but he really didn’t plan on stopping. The last we saw of him, he’d headed into some nearby forest and we never saw him again. The trees were too low and dense to allow the vehicles through and we couldn’t see anything from the air so it was deemed a bit of a lost cause. They sent various people out to track him down over the next week or so but they found nothing – not surprising, given just how far the forest stretched - and assumed he’d died of his wounds or something. ‘

Nikolai nodded to himself. It wasn’t so much the injuries themselves that had traumatised Toa, but the negative association he’d formed with the presence of motor sounds and pain. If the vehicles hadn’t tried to follow him when he ran, he may not have developed such a crippling fear of them as the chase, combined with his pain and adrenaline must have triggered an extreme flight response. It definitely explained why whenever a lorry had driven past the muster pens he fled to the furthest reaches of the paddocks and bolted for safety. It was no one’s fault, not really, just a terrible situation all round, but he was grateful to the journalist for sharing her story with him as it would make dealing with Toa’s sources of stress that much easier now that he understood where it all came from. He smiled a little as Brooke finished her tale.

‘A few months later though, I got a call from Riley, saying that he’d been taking some tourists out in the helicopter to see the horses and he spotted the roan again, perfectly fine and back with the herd, but covered in scars from the experience. I was so pleased to hear he had survived as we all assumed he'd have come down with an infection of some kind as I never saw him at any of the musters since, not til this year. I was afraid he’d have gone for slaughter when I saw him in the muster yards last week so you can imagine just how happy I was to get your call and find out he was going to have a home after all! What are you planning on doing with him? Not a show horse, obviously, haha, but will he be alright, you think?’

David chuckled. ‘No, I think his showing days are over long before they’ve even begun sadly. Most judges might overlook a little scratch or minor field-scar depending on the show but I don’t think Toa can really get away with ‘subtle’. As for what we’re going to do with him, well, I think I’ll leave Nikolai to answer that one himself. Niko? Thoughts?’

The Russian shrugged. ‘I do not wish to force him into anything, just develop a partnership with him and if he shows any particular interest in something then we will pursue it, however I have no preconceptions of what kind of a horse he will turn out to be so, ah, I think we will just have to wait and see.’ He smiled, despite himself as Toa had picked up the leadrope from where he had left it, draped over the fence, and shook it, only dropping it when the end knot splashed through the mud and splattered him in the face.

‘He is still very nervous and lacks confidence in certain situations but his true personality is beginning to show through and I think I am really going to enjoy working with him. He makes me smile just by his very nature.’

-------------------

Lines drawn traditionally, then coloured in Photoshop. References are my own.

Description

For those not in the know, this is for the

(1) Mandatory: Reference
(2) Mandatory:Introductory Image
(3) Optional:Resistance
(4) Optional:To The Lorries
(5) Mandatory:Groundwork/First Steps
(6) Optional:Learning To Lead
(7) Mandatory: Mishap/The Fall <------
(8) Optional: The Journey Home
(9) Optional: Quarantine
(10) Optional: Travel Buddies
(11) Optional: Grooming Session
(12) Optional: A Step Too Far
(13) Optional: First Saddle
(14) Mandatory: Backing
(15) Optional: Hacking
(16) Optional: Trust

Edit: We won!

(Please remember that this is fiction and that if this happened in reality, he'd have probably got a terrible infection and died but this is HARPG so he can cheat death just because I say so, lol Also, this was supposed to go up yesterday but dA kept having an 'unknown error' every time I tried to upload it and after several hours of trying I just put the PC off XD)
------------------
The days passed quickly at the quarantine yard and Toa was coming on leaps and bounds - very often literally. He had shown a great willingness to learn, but was prone to random bouts of skittishness, usually whilst Nikolai was trying to get him used to following his directions through the leadrope. It wasn’t confusion, more likely frustration, as he seemed to understand perfectly well what he was being asked to do, but just lacked the enthusiasm. This probably wasn’t helped by the conditions – the already churned up dirt made worse by three days of near constant downpours which turned the ground in the pens to a thick congealed mass of mud and dung. The sooner they got home the better, thought Nikolai, as he led the horse around the pen for the fourth time, clicking with his tongue to encourage him forwards, hooves and boots alike making uncomfortable squelching sounds in the mud as they trudged. At least there they had a couple of arenas with decent drainage to work in if the fields were bad.

‘Hey, Niko, d’you have a minute?’ David’s voice came seemingly out of nowhere, and Nikolai turned to see his friend approach the pen, brandishing a mobile phone in one hand. ‘I’ve found someone who knows what happened to Toa!’

The Russian raised his eyebrows and quietly brought Toa back down to a standstill before releasing the leadrope from his halter and letting him walk free, with a gentle pat on the neck.

‘Who is it? What happened?’

‘Her name is Brooke Davies and she’s a journalist with one of the local TV stations – I saw some reporters during the muster and wondered if any of them might remember seeing an injured roan over the years and lo and behold, one did! She was covering the muster a few years back and saw it happen – I haven’t heard all the details yet but I thought it’d make more sense for us both to hear it from her directly so I called her up. She’s on the line right now if you’d come a bit closer, I can put it on speaker...’

They got introductions out of the way fairly swiftly and Brooke launched into her story.

‘Okay, so it was a good few years ago now, maybe four, and I’d been asked to do a piece for the local news on the muster, talking to the stockmen and the helicopter pilots and so on. Anyway, we got some good shots of the yards and all the people, but we thought we should get some footage of the herds being brought in from the best view possible – in one of the helicopters themselves. They’re really tiny things, so we split up and took a camera up in each ‘copter. The pilot of mine – Riley, had been helping with the musters for years, and knew all the best places to find the horses and chase them back down to the yards. I got some great shots of some in the distance and was about to ask if we could go towards them for a panning shot when we spotted a little band of horses we’d not noticed before. There was a stallion and a couple of mares with foals and if it wasn’t for the height advantage we had, with the varied geography of the place, with all its little hills and valleys, we’d never have spotted them from the ground.

Anyway, Riley got the ‘copter round them and got them pointed in the right direction – it’s incredible just how effective they are for herding them, like big flying sheepdogs! – and they all set off at a gallop. The stallion tried to make a break for it, but we swooped in and set him back on course and we thought all was well...until, well I don’t quite know what happened, we didn’t see the fence until it was too late – I reckon it was a bit of old sheep pen or something, with that horrible thin wire – but he just galloped right into it, the wires caught around his legs and he came crashing down like a ton of bricks.’

Nikolai paled. He had suspected that the injuries might have been from an encounter with a fence but he hadn’t expected it to have occurred during a muster, and certainly not under those circumstances. He leaned back against the fence as Brooke continued.

‘It was awful, he was thrashing around, trying to free himself, but all he was doing was making things ten times worse. There was blood everywhere and the sounds, oh god, that sounds he was making nearly broke my heart.’

Her voice broke and Nikolai could tell that she was crying.

‘From the look of him, a quick shot to the head was the only humane option and there was nothing we could do from where we were. There was nowhere for us to land nearby so Riley radioed the yards, who in turn got some of the army lads to come round from the base nearby in their vehicles. We still had herds to muster, including the group he was with, which had scarpered as soon as he went down, but we couldn’t just leave him there on his own, not in the state he was in, so we just stayed put. Because of the terrain it took a while for them to get there, and by then the poor horse had stopped moving. We were so sure he’d bled out or was close to death, so you can imagine our surprise when he got to his feet as the vehicles started to arrive.’

David raised his eyebrows. ‘How on earth did he manage that? Surely he’d have lost too much blood?’

Brooke laughed mirthlessly. ‘I wish I knew, it was like something out of a movie – he just seemed to pull himself up by sheer willpower alone. He was still tangled up in all the wires though so it wasn’t like he was really going anywhere. He wasn’t completely upright anyway, the fence posts had him trapped, but he was making a serious effort to escape.

The next thing we know three land rovers were coming up across the hill and well, this horse took one look at them and started writhing around until half the wires were off and he just had the ones round his neck holding him down. It was a bloody miracle they didn’t go through his jugular actually, now that I think about it, but he must have been in so much pain. Thank the gods it wasn't a barbed wire fence, that's all I can say.’

‘So what did the army men do?’ Nikolai asked, suddenly. ‘Did they cut him free?’

‘Oh, no, they didn’t really get a chance’ Brooke replied ‘They didn’t even put their engines off when they stopped, they were in such a rush to help him, then a bunch of them got out and assessed the situation. Obviously they didn’t want to distress him any more than they had to, so they kept their distance, and they couldn’t get too close in case he lashed out in pain and hurt someone else, or himself.

We were still hovering above, so we moved round to see if we could gauge a better place for the guys to approach him from and I don’t know whether it was the helicopter, the men on the ground, divine intervention, or what, but he suddenly hauled himself up again and this time managed it. The wire was still round his neck, but it had detached from the fence post – probably rotten wood I expect – so he was able to pull himself free and just stood there for a moment, sides heaving, with blood all over his neck and legs. The wire must have just torn through the flesh and skin, as although he was bleeding, there was no spurting, like from an artery or something so he got off lightly, all things considered.’

‘Then what?’ David cried, ‘What happened next?’

‘Well, he backed off pretty sharpish and we could see that he’d obviously not damaged any tendons or major ligaments as he was moving well enough, then he just took off! The army guys leapt back in their big land rovers and went after him, and Riley turned the ‘copter round and followed suit but he really didn’t plan on stopping. The last we saw of him, he’d headed into some nearby forest and we never saw him again. The trees were too low and dense to allow the vehicles through and we couldn’t see anything from the air so it was deemed a bit of a lost cause. They sent various people out to track him down over the next week or so but they found nothing – not surprising, given just how far the forest stretched - and assumed he’d died of his wounds or something. ‘

Nikolai nodded to himself. It wasn’t so much the injuries themselves that had traumatised Toa, but the negative association he’d formed with the presence of motor sounds and pain. If the vehicles hadn’t tried to follow him when he ran, he may not have developed such a crippling fear of them as the chase, combined with his pain and adrenaline must have triggered an extreme flight response. It definitely explained why whenever a lorry had driven past the muster pens he fled to the furthest reaches of the paddocks and bolted for safety. It was no one’s fault, not really, just a terrible situation all round, but he was grateful to the journalist for sharing her story with him as it would make dealing with Toa’s sources of stress that much easier now that he understood where it all came from. He smiled a little as Brooke finished her tale.

‘A few months later though, I got a call from Riley, saying that he’d been taking some tourists out in the helicopter to see the horses and he spotted the roan again, perfectly fine and back with the herd, but covered in scars from the experience. I was so pleased to hear he had survived as we all assumed he'd have come down with an infection of some kind as I never saw him at any of the musters since, not til this year. I was afraid he’d have gone for slaughter when I saw him in the muster yards last week so you can imagine just how happy I was to get your call and find out he was going to have a home after all! What are you planning on doing with him? Not a show horse, obviously, haha, but will he be alright, you think?’

David chuckled. ‘No, I think his showing days are over long before they’ve even begun sadly. Most judges might overlook a little scratch or minor field-scar depending on the show but I don’t think Toa can really get away with ‘subtle’. As for what we’re going to do with him, well, I think I’ll leave Nikolai to answer that one himself. Niko? Thoughts?’

The Russian shrugged. ‘I do not wish to force him into anything, just develop a partnership with him and if he shows any particular interest in something then we will pursue it, however I have no preconceptions of what kind of a horse he will turn out to be so, ah, I think we will just have to wait and see.’ He smiled, despite himself as Toa had picked up the leadrope from where he had left it, draped over the fence, and shook it, only dropping it when the end knot splashed through the mud and splattered him in the face.

‘He is still very nervous and lacks confidence in certain situations but his true personality is beginning to show through and I think I am really going to enjoy working with him. He makes me smile just by his very nature.’

-------------------

Lines drawn traditionally, then coloured in Photoshop. References are my own.