Horses (2)

Out of all the horses we rode, Lucky who belonged to my middle sister was most probably the best horse of all.  He was reddish in colour and not that tall, which made him ideal for younger children to ride.  I often rode behind my middle sister, holding onto her around her waist.  We would walk around the farm for hours in this manner.  My middle sister loved him and would bend over and lie with her arms around his neck and her face alongside his mane, breathing in the wonderful horsey smell of sweat.  Apart from Cress, the Shepherd's horse who was blind in one eye and needed a stick of dynamite to get him going, Lucky was the most gentle horse we had.  Any visitors to the farm were always given the safest horses to ride, and he was there right at the top.

Life is full of twists and turns and most of the time these happen quite out of the blue.  One such event happened while we were away at boarding school and we only got to hear about it on our return home for the holidays. 

One of the farm workers was riding Lucky whilst herding cattle from one camp to another.  One of the oxen ran into a huge patch of aloes, which grew at the corner of the property, diagonally opposite the old broken down trading store.  He was quite unaware that by riding into the aloe patch after the ox, he was signing Lucky's death warrant.  Unbeknown to him there was a large bees nest nestled at the bottom of one of the dried out stumps of aloes, and poor old Lucky's hoof tramped right into the middle of this.  In two seconds flat, thousands of angry bees swarmed out of the nest and attacked him.  The farm worker jumped off and ran for his life, but Lucky on this occasion was not quite so lucky.  By the time my father reached him, he had been stung so many times all over his face and in his eyes, that the kindest thing to do, was to shoot him and put him out of his misery.

When we arrived home from school for the holidays, we were told the whole sad story.  My middle sister, who was devastated went to inspect the place where Lucky's body had been burnt.  She picked up a number of his charred bones and placing them in a small box between two pieces of cotton wool wrote a note which said " Here lies Lucky, gone but not forgotten"