The foundering

To give way, to become submerged, to encounter misfortune

At the end of the leadline, Cookie hung back. “Come ON,” I said, tugging on the rope. I was in a hurry, rushing through the sliver of time between the start of school and the start of the workday. She reluctantly increased her pace. Once in the barn, I led her to her stall and slipped her halter off. “Lazy girl,” I said, patting her neck.

The next morning, I went to get Cookie out of her stall, and she refused to walk. She’s a good girl, the type of good girl you can put a baby on, that my kid rides bareback and barefoot in the summer. After a bit more insistence, she obediently stepped forward, and I immediately knew something was terribly wrong.

There are a lot of ways a horse can get sick, some of them more obscure than others. But, even as a child, you know there are two things you don’t want your horse to do: colic and founder. Colic—the generic name for gastrointestinal distress—is probably going to happen at some point, no matter how careful you think you are. It can be your hay, your grain, a drop in atmospheric pressure or, sometimes, nothing at all. You’re constantly watching for the signs—not eating, not drinking, standing in a certain manner, lying down in a certain manner, staring at their stomach intently. It’s not good, but there are medicines that can help, and if they don’t, there are vets with long gloves and the fortitude to reach their arm into a horse’s intestines. Then, worst case scenario, there’s surgery. So it’s bad, but there’s a path forward.

Foundering is not like that. Foundering is another word for laminitis, which is a hoof condition that happens to grazing animals if your grass is too sugary, if your animal eats too much of it, or gains too much weight. The short of it is that it causes the animal’s hoof to detach from the foot bone, which causes the foot bone to go through the hoof wall. That’s bare bone on dirt. That’s a death sentence.

I’d never seen a horse founder, for all of the cautionary tales I’d heard, but deep down, I knew. As we waited for the vet to come, I tried to keep my hope intact. It was the end of the grazing season, the pastures were low, and I only let her go out on the grass every other day. How could it be?

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When I was in middle school, our barn full of horses—18 in total—contracted strangles, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes abscesses to form in the head and neck. It was horrific, impossible to process—the open wounds, the knowledge that despite our best efforts they would likely all fall sick, one by one. One horse, TJ, had it particularly bad, with massive abscesses beneath his jaw. For days he stood in his stall, turned away from the door, unmoving. You could call to him, offer him the sweetest green alfalfa hay, and he would still remain motionless. Up close, his eyes were dull, unseeing, as if he had traveled somewhere deep inside of himself.

For three weeks, Cookie stood in her thickly padded stall, in shavings up to her knees, wearing her own her far away eyes. She didn’t seem to be getting better, and I wore her sickness like an invisible weight around my neck everywhere I went. “How are you?” friends asked me in the school pick-up line, in the gym lobby, at work. I fumbled with my answer. I’m trying to figure out how to tell my son, I thought. I’m trying to understand how I’m going to say goodbye.

But then, one morning, three weeks after she got sick, I went down to do chores, and I could see her brightly shining eyes before I even crossed the threshold. I slipped her purple halter on (my son’s favorite color), and she stepped from her stall slowly, but with purpose. I walked her out to the pasture, patting her all over. Good girl good girl good girl.

“Well,” my farrier said, straightening up from cradling Cookie’s small white hoof in his hand. “I think she’s going to be okay.” He said to imagine getting a blood blister under my fingernail and then multiply that times 1,000. That’s what it felt like to her. I thought about the shard of garlic that had pierced the skin beneath my fingernail once, how I found it hard to sleep for days from the pain. She’s likely to do it again, he told me before he left. “If you’re not careful.” I stood in her stall with my arms around her neck. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

All of our horses recovered from strangles, TJ last of all. We put away the iodine wash stations outside the barn doors, pressure washed the barn with bleach, then lingered at the gates watching the horses cantering, eating, wrestling with each other. Living. We didn’t speak of it again.

Twenty-five years later, I push a wheelbarrow full of hay into our one grassless pasture in the dark. I know every dip and rut in the ground, so I don’t bother with a flashlight or headlamp. I like to hear the sounds the horses make as they swirl around me. I walked along, pulling out armfuls of hay and dropping them to the ground. In the pristine darkness, I hear the hard exhale of a horse defending their hay pile and then, ringing out against the frozen ground, the quick beat of Cookie’s trotting hooves, sound and sure. Good, good girl.