Friends, there are very few absolute truths in this world. Most of them include things like gravity pulls things down, water is wet, mosquitos have no purpose on this earth except inflicting pain and suffering – stuff like that. In my travels, I have found that if there is one little known absolute truth, it is this: horses are complete geniuses. Unfortunately, they have all unanimously decided to use their divinely bestowed intelligence to challenge themselves to achieve any level of idiocy that has yet to be discovered. So ubiquitous are their imbecilic tendencies, that they have forfeited any chance they had to be the dominant species on earth, and I am convinced that they were on God’s short list.

A few years ago I had the unique opportunity to work with a group of these brilliant beasts at a Boy Scout camp in Nebraska. There were many great animals in that herd. Leo was a noble steed who would put up with anything but would always let it be known that he was not enjoying himself. Diamond was a beautiful equine who loved kids and was up for any job while Aphrodite always looked like she just did a line of coke and then spilled the rest of the bag on herself. Other memorable ones include Melvin, a bitch of a miniature horse, and Jenga, our admirably horny Appaloosa, but none were so memorable as one beast by the name of Oz.

Oz was a retired cattle horse like many of the others, but he was a particular flavor of smart that was not matched by the rest of the herd. He had a knack for finding situations that made me and my comrades stand in awe scratching our heads.

One day, we were driving down from the hill where we worked and lived to get some dinner. It had been a long day, but the horses were fed, the tackle was locked up and our thoughts were now turned in the direction of our stomachs. As we were driving past the paddock, we were joking and obnoxiously singing the lyrics to the single Fall Out Boy album that we had, when a voice piped up from the back of the van: Naomi. She was a small person, but normally wore a broad, cheery smile. The kind that scrunched up her eyes to nothing but slits and made people believe there was good left in the world. Not this time, though. She now bore a look of astonishment and urgency as she kept repeating “Guys, Oz is swimming!” And pointing toward the paddock.

The van’s tires immediately stopped spinning and we all jumped out as the vehicle continued to slide down the loose gravel road. My crew and I ran up to the large water trough in the middle of the pen, and for a good minute, we all stood there in shock trying to comprehend what we were seeing. Oz, a 1200 lb animal, was sitting before us with nearly his entire body inside the trough – right half completely submerged and his left hooves hanging off the edge of the trough.

He looked at us. We looked at him.

He looked away. We didn’t.

Then my boss walked up. Walter was an older man, about 65 I think, and had a huge pot belly that was constantly supported by his excessively large belt buckle.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” he said as he hobbled up to the water trough, “do something, dammit! Nick! Do something! Get his feet back in the trough!”

Now I had no intention of being kicked by a horse that day – or any day for that matter – and I was not entirely opposed to simply ignoring my boss. But as I looked at the faces of my comrades, it was clear that Walt had not chosen me for this task by mistake. I seemed to be the only one that found humor in the situation, so whether in an attempt to teach me a lesson or by observing a lesser amount of panic in my gaze, I was assigned the job of getting this brilliantly dumb behemoth out of the water.

I honestly had no clue what to do. As I approached the trough, it was clear that Oz had made attempts to get out but did not have the strength to hoist himself out of his awkward predicament. It was also apparent that he had been sitting in the trough for a significant amount of time as the water was muddied with quite a bit of poop.

I stopped just outside his kicking radius as he once again tried desperately to remove himself from his stool soup. When he stopped he looked again at the crowd of wranglers that remained standing around him. I moved forward talking to him as I went, and lacking a better plan, I started shoveling hooves into the water trough so that he could get on his feet. This turned out to be a mediocre idea at best because as he stood in the trough, he began panicking and relieved himself in full. At that point, we had a scared horse on a slippery surface standing knee deep in his own feces. Technically we had made progress, but every time he regained his footing, he would try to step out of the trough, and every time he would slip and fall back in creating tidal wave after tidal wave of poopy water. Eventually, we led him to the edge of the trough where I began picking up hooves and placing them outside of the trough. The front two came out without a hitch, but I was not so lucky with the back two.

This particular water trough was narrow, maybe three or four feet wide at best — space easily filled by the back end of a quarter horse. The only way to pick up the back feet were from behind the horse, a place where one generally doesn’t want to be in the first place. I stepped inside the trough already, drenched in Oz’s excrement formula, and picked up each foot with great trepidation. As I set the last foot down, I found my head at an uncomfortable distance from Oz’s hooves and was praying that he would not decide to kick.

Oz didn’t kick me that day. He trotted off quite rudely without any expression of gratitude or remorse for the situation, and as he sauntered away, I stood in his wake — disheveled, ankle deep in horse pee, covered in poop, and my comrades still calming themselves from the panic. As I was being helped out of the trough, one of the more unhelpful trainees ran up with Oz’s lead rope and handed it to me as he asked where the horse went. He was later fired (with no major objection from me).

The rest of that day was pretty boring. We went to evening formation and dinner, and wherever I went I was surrounded by a four-foot bubble where no one would dare venture due to my stench. I genuinely feel sorry for the poor souls that sat next to me that night at dinner. My shower that night was one of the best I’ve ever had.

 

-Nickel