I give them 36 hrs . . .

Now I know that I don't talk about the girls enough on this trip so today that is what I am doing.

They have been truly amazing on this journey of mine. I know that they would prefer to simply graze all day long and travel about 3 miles a day, preferably in a circle, near the barn and their stalls. All that aside, they have been troopers. Both doing amazing on the road, nothing bothers them, trucks, tractors, motorcycles, log trucks, you name it, unless its a duck, they just don't care. Mystic goes just about everywhere I send her, she might hesitate, but with only a small amount of prodding on my part away she goes and normally Delightful is right behind (with notable exceptions being ditches and gulleys, nearly unseating me sometimes when she puts on the brakes). For being 2 replacement horses, I really lucked out. They are great girls, really, except. . .

If they were ever set free in the wild, I give them at most 36 hours to live. There is not a whole heck of a lot of "Street" smarts in these two, well I should say, Back Road Smarts. We have on several occasions been riding along to find a large rattle snake barring our path and both of them choose to ignore the threatening rattle and try to just walk over the top of it, seeming somewhat annoyed when I stop them or take the round about path past the nice poisonous snake. Delightful loves to try and go and touch any animal she sees, cows, calves, deer, elk, porcupines, skunks, I am sure Bear or Mountain Lions too. And the capper for me was yesterday, when I moved the girls off the ranch to a 3 acre pasture in town that has a large creek running through it and no water trough because of that. I put them in the pasture and headed back to the library to pass the day online and returned about 8 hrs later to two very thirsty horses. They came trotting up to me, nickering, followed me across the pasture to the creek, where I watched both of them trying to get a drink, stretching their necks as far down as they could. Failing to reach the waters surface 18 inches below the bank, they both snorted and came trotting back over to me, as if to say "Please help us, we can't reach the water, we are sooo thirsty." Smiling at their dilemma, I walked down the bank to a place where the bank smoothly met with the creek and called mystic over. It took her 15 min and my pulling her to the spot, then leaning down and splashing in the water, 3 times, before she gingerly crept to the flat spot and stretched her neck down, legs shaking to get what was obviously her first drink of the day. Delightful, seeing her mom drinking, came trotting over to us, and attempted to reach the water from the higher part of the bank, legs shaking, knees buckling . . . It took every once of self control I had not to shove her into the water, I have never wanted to do something so badly in my life, and it wouldn't have been hard, she was really off balance. I refrained and as soon as Mystic had drank her fill, I showed Delightful where to go to get the illusive water she required.

They are wonderful horses and when Delightful is sold at the end of this summer she will make someone a fantastic partner, as long as they don't expect her to survive in the wild, cause after 36 hrs, she would probably be dead.