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Show 164- breeding corral had more horseshit than otherwise. Donald Best would lead a mare into it, one of ours or some other farmer's for a stud fee, and fifty yards away in his own private living quarters the jack would smell her, and after a while didn't even need his nose, juat saw the mare enter the corral and he would start to go crazy, starting that horrible braying, which changed for the worse when he got excited, and the mare would hear him and go a little crazy herself. We learned to get her into that stall and pin her down good before we brought the jack anywhere near her. He would ha enter ready, elongated and swinging: he didn't pull hay mowers or anything else, he just loafed around eating oats and getting potent, and I think he would have tried to jump that seven-foot fence to get at the mare, as if that would have done him any good. Because to top ^it all he a was a clumsy oaf with less savoir faire than a virgin sixteen-year-old boy. Even with the mare practically immobile, with pits and platforms, with hikx him mounted and love-biting and grunting with passion, even then he couldn't always find his way. He couldn't wait either, and like some high**fcschool lover he rubbed himself off on the mare's haunch. "Hey."' said Dad, shocked to see all that expensive, oat-fed semen dribbling away down the mare's leg. He believed the second charge could not ka make as good a colt as the first and so thereafter he did not leave love up to the jackass alone: to bring it all to the pay-off he stood there in attendance, pulled the mare's tail out of the way with one hand and ivtU kit *f*V l*.*«4 when the jack mounted,iygrabbed-the4 prick and guided it into the mare, directed the blindly seeking head up to the waiting womb. He earned the mules and the stud fees he got all right. Still, I remember the year before we got that donkey when Dad first wanted mule colts, he t took one of our mares to some other jack stud, the mare didn't take, and because a conception was guaranteed or your money back, that » jack's owner soon showed up at our place with a brown wooden case and in the case a syringe and a vial of donkey semen. No one asked him where he got it. He |