Bobby

When I passed through the front yard and into the back I saw Bobby in the barn harnessed ready to work. He’s big. He weighs 2400 pounds. His body seemed to fill up the entire barn. His neck is thick as an oak tree, his body is as wide as a rhino’s, and his hooves weigh as much as anvils. Being around him feels more like being around an elephant than a horse. And all of that mass turns into heavy draft power when he works in harness.
So we unhook him from the tie-off rope and clip him into the farm implement called the disc. The farmer sits on a seat above the discs while the horse pulls both farmer and implement down the furrows. The discs are positioned in such a way that when Bobby pulls the discs cut into the earth leaving a loose bed of soil behind. Klaus, my mentor in horse driving, lets me ride the disc so I can feel how bumpy it is but he keeps a hold of the reins and drives Bobby on foot. Bobby not only pulls me and the disc but he also has a tremendous amount of drag created from the discs continually cutting into the soil. We go up hills, down hills, and through the garden beds and he does it with little noticeable effort. The work seemed easy to him. When we finish we unharness Bobby and let him out to pasture. Bobby and I became friends that day.
Bobby dies three days later.
Klaus told me over the phone that he died from colic. He did everything he could to nurse him back to health but nothing worked. His death didn’t make sense to me. An animal so massive seemed like it shouldn’t just die from a gastrointestinal problem, a blockage of some sort. As far as I was concerned he would have to eat a car tire in order to even begin being concerned about blockage. But I guess he too had an Achilles heel. Not even Bobby, a monster of an animal, could beat death.
Klaus told me a couple of days later that the loss of Bobby wasn’t like loosing a tractor. “When a tractor breaks down you might be frustrated that you just lost time and money but you lose something more when you lose a work horse. Bobby was my friend and work companion. His loss hurts.”
I guess with my desire to get away from everything mechanical and work more with the living world subjects me to the hard human experiences of losing a friend and having to make sense of death even when it seemed so distant.