Burying a Horse

Sometimes events come together in remarkable coincidences.   Good friends had a horse, Wylbur, who has been frequently sick. The five children and some of their friends were quite attached to him. He had colic, his intestines all tangled, and died this week. Everyone was worried how the children would take it, especially Willow, the 7th-grade daughter. They decided to have a funeral for Wylbur, and a few people from outside the family attended.  Getting a hole big enough for a horse is a project, but the Dad shares a backhoe and a hole was dug. 

We hadn't heard anything, and worried what was up. One of our sons saw the children at youth group on Wednesday and asked how they were doing.  They didn't get what he meant until he asked about the funeral, whereupon they started laughing about it telling him. Shortly before the scheduled funeral, they realised that no one had figured out how to get Wylbur INTO the hole. Where he was lying wasn't that close. So the Dad looked it up online and found that someone had successfully lifted a horse with ratchet straps.

So he ratchet strapped the horse to his tractor. Then he drove for the hole.

"The parts of the horse that were ratchet strapped came with it, but the rest of the horse just dragged behind." The children started screaming because it looked like Wylbur was going to lose his head, but Dad kept going and managed to get all the horse into the hole. The children decided afterwards that this was all really quite funny and have enjoyed telling the story. It's probably a bonding moment they will share on holidays when they are old.

 

Today at the library program one of the last NH commercial fishermen gave a talk about his new book of reminiscences. One of the best ones was bringing a net with whale goo all over it to the dump, which tried to refuse it. I thought immediately of the Dave Barry story about the exploding whale and associated it with dragging Wylbur across the landscape. As I was wondering what I was going to do about all of this, Earl Wajenberg sent a bunch of new links from his site which included...Dave Barry's story about the exploding whale. I am not linking to it here, but you will be seeing it presently. If you have any other funny stories about dismembered animals, now's the time.

I am including the film of the exploding whale here, because putting it in Earl's list from Wind Off The Hilltop would distract your attention from everything he put there, including some serious writing.