A shiver of terror runs down my spine. “Sorry, to do what?”
“This.” She hands me a thick, long latex glove and makes me kneel behind the mare. “Stick your arm in and find the colt’s hooves.”
I really hope she didn’t just say what I think she said. “What do you mean, ‘inside’?”
“You need to check whether the foal is face-first, which is a big problem, or if you can feel its hooves. If you can, just pull it by the hooves when the mare pushes, to help her get it out,” she explains to me politely.
“And why do I have to do that?” I protest, annoyed.
“Because you have more strength and a longer arm. Come on, we can’t sit around, knocking on mussels before we open them.”
I have other complaints to present with a wealth of arguments, but I can’t bear the mare’s pained neighing. By God, we English may have some deficits when it comes to human relationships, but let it never be said that we don’t care about horses. Or dogs. Horses and dogs arouse an overwhelming tenderness in us.
“Okay.” I breathe in, steeling myself, and with one eye closed and one open, I stick in my arm up to the elbow. “Better my arm than my head ... Aaah! Fuck!”
“What is it? What do you feel?”
“Bad, by God! Bad! I think the mare had a contraction and crushed my arm.”
“You’re such a crybaby,” she grumbles.
“You can say that because it’s not your arm.”
“Come on, stop protesting and tell me what you feel.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I mutter, confused.
“Use your imagination!” she exclaims.
I resist another contraction and try to feel the sensations that come to me. “I feel something hard.”
“Are there any holes? Like nostrils, or a mouth?”
“No.” At least, I don’t think. “It’s knobby ... next to the first there’s another just like it.”
“It’s the legs!” Elisa exclaims. “Thank goodness. Okay, now grab them and pull on the next contraction. As soon as its head is out, I’ll free his nose.”
On the first try, nothing happens. On the second, I risk getting kicked in the teeth. On the third, two dry, oblong hooves slip out, followed by a snout, all covered in a translucent membrane that Elisa tears with a quick gesture.
“Done?” I ask, the hooves still in my hand.
“We still have the shoulders, the widest part. Keep pulling,” she instructs me.
I comply without question, and the colt slides out. The mother welcomes him next to her, smells him, and then bends over him, covering him with her robust neck in a protective gesture.
“She knows it’s her daughter,” Elisa explains to me. “Woe to anyone who touches her.”
I look at the image of the mare and her foal, enthralled. Somewhere in my head, a neuron starts up my mental record player, and I can hear “Love Is All Around” by Wet Wet Wet.
“Now we have to do the enema,” Elisa announces briskly.
“You’re sucking the poetry right out of the moment,” I reply.
She looks at me impassively and hands me an enema bulb. “First the enema, then the poetry.”
“Me again? You could do this part.”
“Meconium—the plug of hard feces formed during gestation—has to be expelled as soon as possible, or the foal won’t eat. Since one doesn’t need particular expertise to administer an enema, you can go ahead—unless you know how to dress the umbilical cord and inject it with a tetanus shot.”
