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Show /02 howl and me grind my teeth, the most loveless sound in the universe, so loud he made cakes fall on neighboring farms. The mares hated him and in or out of heat would have killed him, except we didn't give them the chance. Dad kept him in a special corral, fed him oats as if he were sultan over them, and every once in a while brought him a mare for his delectation. Then back to his special corral like some primitive priest, or fertility god. We called the beast Phil, or Old Phil, for no better reason than that his former owner had. Now when I think of Philip of Macedonia and all those King Phillips of France and Spain, I wonder if that man, whom I don't remember, had a sense of irony. Or was he straightforward -- Philip means "lover of horses"? Or was he cultured and was Phil not Philip at all but short for Philistine? That fit all right, especially after his bestial assault upon Beauty. At first he was only assaulting our work mares, with our help. We had built a special breeding corral, round so that the mare couldn't back into a corner and high so that in desperation she couldn't jump over it. Then Dad learned that the jack would never survive a session in there, let alone perpetuate himself, and so we built a stall against one side. We led the mare into it, up until her chest was against the cross pole, dropped another pole down over her neck and tied her lead rope to a solid post so she couldn't rear. We slid another pole across behind her hind legs so she couldn't kick that jackass silly, or dead, and thought we were ready. But Phil was too short, he couldn't get up to it, so we took the jack back to his special corral, took the mare out and dug a pit for her hind feet. Her rump was still too high, so we separated the lovers again and got planks and built a platform for him to stand on. On a farm you learn as you go. I'd thought in my virgin innocence that reproduction was a simple matter, a brief act, a little wriggling and there was the future. And I still didn't know thatjthe coupling is the simplest part of it. Now when I think of the Jj'fy.lPX^ necessary for a successful birth, when I contemplate |