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Show 7 UNHEARD MELODIES 217 two poles across behind her hind legs to keep her from kicking diat jackass silly, or dead, and thought we were ready. But Phil was too short, so we took the mare out and dug a pit for her hind feet to lower her rump. Old Phil was still too short and we had to get planks and build a platform for him to stand on. I'd thought reproduction was a simple matter - and I still didn't know that the coupling is the simplest part of it. Now when I think of the intricate series of events necessary for a successful birth, I stand amazed; when I contemplate that all that man is, and most of his world, depends upon a process so delicate and complicated, I am terrified; when I remember how often it works, I am awed. I feel I can take nothing for granted. I know, for example, that a woman threatening to abort is sometimes given shots of female hormone; then I learn the source of those shots is that magnificent, beautiful and most masculine animal, the stallion. It is his testes which put out enormous quantities of female hormone, which is then strained out of his system by his kidneys and expelled in his urine, and lo, a new Michelangelo could depend upon horse piss. Or another Hider. What price arrogance? Man is the only animal who can and does rape, and which one of us can say for sure he did not start with that ugly and brutal act, or something equally degrading? Only man can arrange a rape too, which is what we were doing in that corral, and whatever else we might have felt, pride had no place there in the dust and die droppings. We would lead a mare down to the corral, ours or some other farmer's for a stud fee, and in his own corral old Phil would smell her and go crazy, starting his horrible braying, which changed for the worse when he got excited, and the mare would hear him and go a little crazy herself. It took Dad and Henry and me all we could do to get her into the stall and pin her down. Then we brought in that brute of a jack. He didn't pull hay mowers or anything else, he just loafed around eating oats and getting potent, and the way he acted I think he would have jumped that seven-foot fence to get at the mare, as if that would have done him any good. Because he was a clumsy oaf widi less savoir faire dian a hasty sixteen-year-old boy, and even with die mare practically immobile, with pits and platforms, with him mounted and love-biting and grunting - even then he couldn't find his way. He couldn't wait either, and the first thing we knew, before he'd entered the mare it was over and he'd spilled all that expensive, oat-fed potency upon her flank. For Dad that was like throwing dollars in the river, and so to top everything off, to bring it all to the pay-off, he had to pull the mare's tail out of the way and with his other hand guide that blind vfjk seeking head to the waiting womb. He earned the mules and the stud fees he got all right And certainly he earned the crisp white Stetson which he wore to town and which in my |
