The Grey Horse

— Chapter Three —

Snow

…or…

The Billy Goat

“What is this?" the grey horse asked, examining another clump of cold, wet, powdery, white stuff. He’d seen piles of it on the ground before, but those had been either too far up or too far down the hill to study. Here was a clump right under his nose. He sniffed it. It smelled like grassy sky. When he pawed it with a hoof it made a soft pumpfing, scrunching noise, crumbled a bit, got a bit flatter, and shrank. He licked it. It melted on his tongue. Exciting. His tongue went numb. Odd. 

“It’s snow,” said the nanny goat.

“What’s it for?”

“Decoration,” said the black snake, looking down from the goat’s back.

“It’s what happens when rain gets dry,” the goat said drily.

The horse was impressed. “How does rain get dry?”

“Someone forgets to water the clouds,” the snake said. If he’d had shoulders he would have shrugged them.

“Who?” the horse asked.

“Whoever’s supposed to.”

The horse looked squinty-eyed at the snake. Being squinty-eyed is a way to determine if someone is pulling your leg.

“I don’t have a leg for you to pull, which leaves you at a disadvantage,” said the snake. He could have said “touché” too but, due to their forked tongues, snakes have difficulty with lispish French words.

The horse had no idea what the snake was talking about. He was learning that being understood wasn't necessarily something of concern to the snake. Most of the snake's jokes—if indeed they were jokes—were for the snake's amusement. The horse turned his attention back to the snow. “Rain you can eat. Now I’ve seen everything,” he said.

The snake rolled his eyes disparagingly. No one noticed. His eyes were small. “Even the hills haven't seen everything,” he said quietly.

“That's because they don't have eyes,” the nanny goat said, winking one of hers. The snake hadn't expected to be heard, thereby exhibiting a common prejudice, being: the older you are the worse your hearing is, which is often true but in the nanny goat’s case—an exceptional animal—not so.

“What is that?” the nanny goat asked quietly. She was afraid she knew what that was, although she could see very little of it. Her stomach crawled.

Had the grey horse not stopped to examine the snow the nanny goat might not have noticed, hidden by bushes and a scraggly tree a small distance down the hill, a huddle of fur, a fluffy lump that could have been mistaken for one of the countless mossy, mottled rocks that lay all over the place doing not much of interest to the more animated entities that passed. It suits rocks to have their activities go unnoticed by all the poor beings that operate on rapidly accelerated, and thus, to rocks, mind-bogglingly brief, time scales. The average lifespan of your average bacterium is 12 hours, half a day. Compare this to your own lifespan of approximately 30,000 days. Barring horrendous diseases, car crashes and meteor strikes you can expect to live 60,000 times longer than the bacteria in your nostrils. Barring earthquakes, volcanoes, and humans assigning value to them your average rock can expect to live around 60,000 times longer than you. This is far from exact as there is no such thing as an average rock, and for this and other reasons calculating average lifespan for rocks is tricky. Rocks can afford to think very slowly and deeply. Should a rock, average or otherwise, be inclined to observe your life it might look like the flare of a match.

The fluffy lump in the snow seemed unsettlingly familiar to the nanny goat who was gripped by the urge to turn away and carry on up the mountain. Of course if characters in stories turned away from discomfort and foreboding stories would be dull, so, watched by her companions, both of them uneasy, the nanny goat made her way down the incline toward the fluffy rock-like whatsit.

The grey horse bit his tongue and held his breath. The black snake couldn’t see what was going on and didn’t ask.

The fluffy lump was in fact three fluffy lumps, all of a huddle. A dead nanny goat and two kids. The mother wore a smile that the nanny goat decided meant death had been peaceful and not too painful.

The still living, if long of tooth, nanny goat turned with a tear on her nose and a sniffle inside it. She moved back up the hill, passing the the grey horse and the snake. “Dead,” she said. The grey horse went to look.

One of the baby goats moved.

That's not a very dead thing to do, thought the horse. 

The grey horse nudged the kid with his nose. It meeped dolefully and sneezed.

“Highly inappropriate,” said the horse.

Hearing the meep and the sneeze the nanny goat hurried back. “Oh my!” She said. “It's alive! We must feed it. We must help it. We must take it with us.”

“Is it an it?” said the black snake. From this distance he could just about see the two and half corpses. “Perhaps it's a he or a she? Or don’t goats make up their minds about such things until they're older?”

The nanny goat announced, “It's a boy.”

“A billy goat!” enthused the grey horse.

All tiny shivers and chattering gums the billy-goat was trying to get long gone warmth from the belly of the mother it had been close to joining in Whatever Comes Next. A nudge from a nose and the warmth of the breath that came out of it had begun to clear the fog. The billy goat realised it wasn’t alone. “Maybe it’s one of those big cats come to have me for its dinner?” it thought. It wouldn’t mind being eaten. It was cold and hungry and mum was dead and baby brother wasn’t fun anymore. “If I can make half a meal for a hungry mountain lion I’ll have served a purpose. I can’t very well fend for myself. Mum died before she got the chance to teach me anything. I can’t run very fast. I don’t know which animals to trust. I don’t know what’s edible. And besides, only two of my teeth have come through. I fear it’s curtains for me.”

“You’re far too young to be so melodramatic,” said the nanny goat. “Really?!”

“I d-d-don’t know what m-m-m-melodramatic is? You don’t look like a m-m-m-mountain lion. You look like m-m-m-mum. Or grandma.”

“Well thank you very much,” the goat sniffed, feigning offence, deciding she liked the billy goat’s cheek.

“My chin’s very n-n-nice as well,” the billy goat said. If he didn’t freeze to death in the next half hour his chin, days or at most weeks hence, would be furnished with a goatee like the one his mother sported. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“Why? Is it going to fall off?” the grey horse asked.

“W-w-what?” said the billy goat.

“Your chin. Is it going to fall off?”

“Erm?” said the Billy goat. “I suppose it might in this weather. But no. I don’t think so. I’m growing a beard to cover it up. A goatee. I’m a goat. You see?”

“Oh,” said the grey horse. “Yes,” though he didn’t. “Right you are. I’m hungry.”

The nanny goat took the billy goat in its mouth and started sucking the cold out of him. The four animals set off to find something to eat and a place to sleep.

The baby billy goat’s caramel brown fur was soft and tasty-looking. Not three weeks previously a young farm-girl with pig tails and a lisp not only licked the fur of the billy goat but sucked it a bit for good measure as well, learning thereby that the billy goat’s fur tasted, not like cake and caramel, as she had hoped and expected it would, but like old socks, stale bread and wormy dirt. Covering half the billy goat’s head was a patch of white fur which made him look like he was wearing a pillow case for a hat. If you’ve seen pictures of European peasants in the Middle Ages you might know what I mean. European peasants didn’t take photos of each other, they made detailed sketches which they left lying around in stone jars that got buried in hillsides and piles of manure for archaeologists to find hundred of years later when all the peasants and their great-great-grand-children’s children were dead and the Middle Ages were forgotten by everyone except professors that no one paid any mind to. In these pictures the peasants drew each other wearing pillow cases on their heads. Proper hats were expensive. Perhaps when a peasant got tired she filled her pillow case hat with straw and lay her head on it.

Being very young the character and personality of the baby billy goat were as fickle as wind and as malleable as clay. At breakfast he might be fierce and brave and tireless and enthusiastic, at lunch time he might be contrary and sullen, and at dinner he might fancy himself to be wise, or any variety of clever that he’d recently learnt was a good thing to be. Being very young he hadn’t learned much but he learned quickly and had all sorts of inherent and inherited knowledge and understanding.

The baby billy goat had known only winter. His mother had spoken wistfully of summer which sounded nice and felt nice and gave the billy goat the warm tummy tingles but it was all a bit speculative.

The billy goat’s few short weeks of life were insufficient to get medical training under his belt. That the billy goat didn’t wear a belt and medical schools don’t accept goats is beside the point. The long and the short of it was the billy goat knew not what ailed his mother. She’d been hot. She’d been strange. Before she got sick her belly had been snug and safe. A week ago her belly became a furnace and she began to look terribly odd. Her eyes lost their warmth and rolled around in her head like barrels on a storm tossed boat. Her breath became foul. The milk from her teats became sour. She hardly recognised her offspring. The billy goat and his brother wasted no time worrying. They continued to bounce, learning how to better use their legs, getting faster every day, tearing about like fluffy tornadoes. They noticed Mum wasn’t coming after them when they raced over the hill to the places she’d said mountain lions lived, hungry mountain lions waiting for four legged snacks. For want of scolds and well bitten ears they’d run off to the places the lions were rumoured to lurk and race around bravely for seconds on end. Before nerves and terror brought them to the brink of disintegration or deliciously unbearable excitement caused them to explode they turned back, finding Mum where they’d left her, lying on her side, panting and shaking and rolling her eyes. She didn’t make witty comments or soothing noises anymore. She didn’t smile. And after a week of sickness she didn’t do anything at all. She lay still, going cold and hard. The baby billy goat didn’t know what death was but when it arrived in the middle of the night he heard it sing and knew at once what loneliness was. As Death sang her beautiful song the billy goats’ mother made horrible sucking, rasping noises and twitched a bit. Then she was quiet. She didn’t say goodbye. She never made another sound bar the occasional hiss and blap of fetid gas issuing from her orifices. She died at the same time the grey horse was lying half dead in the farmer’s field in the rain wondering if he would ever get up again, or if he’d become part of the earth and food for the worms.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that both the grey horse and the billy goat were found—on their last legs (metaphorically speaking, but, literally, on their sides), at the mercy of bad weather—, rescued and resuscitated by the nanny goat. This may be a theme.

The horse, the snake and two goats settled for the night under a large elm tree at the edge of a field of corn. Sloppy harvesting by disinterested peasants who weren’t whipped properly meant there were still plenty of still juicy ears to be found in the crackling tops of the somnolent corn plants. Being the only member of the party tall enough to reach them the grey horse was dispatched to fetch a few.

The nanny goat made a bed for the billy goat in the softest parts of herself. Even the nanny goat’s softest parts were spiky but the billy goat made no complaint. He sucked, luckless, at each of the nanny goat’s wobbly teats.

“You need to top up,” the billy goat said.

“You’re going to need those two teeth,” the black snake admonished.

The grey horse returned with two ears of corn in his mouth. Three ears was a stretch too far for his cheeks. He dropped the corn on the ground and went back to fetch two more ears and another two after that.

The horse and the nanny goat decided the over-ripe corn was one of the better dinners they’d had. The billy goat, chillinesses banished, spirits restored, brother forgotten and mum fading fast from memory, managed not to choke on the first solid food of his life. “This is bothersome,” he said. The nanny goat had nibbled a few kernels off a cob, chewed them to soften them and put them on the ground in front of him. “Really?!” he said snidely. “No one’s got any milk? I’m three weeks old!”

“Old enough,” the black snake said. The snake, who only ate once or twice a month, caught a rat and joined the other three for dinner. Snakes don't have taste buds, a good thing in light of the things they eat. Also perhaps the reason they don't spend much time in restaurants and cafes, or nibbling crisps. Eating is a practical pastime for snakes, not sensuous at all. The snake wasn't hungry, having eaten a large spider three days before, but he decided joining his friends for a meal and suffering indigestion would be a good way to acknowledge and consolidate the camaraderie growing between them.

Sun gone, bellies full, the three animals lay down to digest their dinners and wait for sleep to come tip-toeing through the undergrowth. The snake, lying down already, adjusted his coils to better suit digestion and settled into himself to enjoy another night of meditating and soul searching.

“You can’t find it?” the horse asked.

“Hmm?” said the snake, equanimously.

“Your soul.”

“I’m searching it. I’m not searching for it.”

“Oh,” said the grey horse, yawning. “I don't believe in lions, you know.”

The snake rolled his eyes.

“Have you ever seen one?” asked the billy goat, indignantly.

“No. Of course not,” said the horse. How could I see one if I don’t believe in them? Have you ever seen one?”

“No, but my mum told me all sorts of absolutely fascinating and terrifying things about them.”

“Pher!” said the grey horse. “Hearsay. Old wive’s tales. What about you,” he asked the nanny goat. “Have you ever seen a lion?”

The nanny goat said she hadn’t and added, none too diplomatically, that she had no interest in being part of the inanity.

“What about you?” the grey horse asked the snake.

“Isn't that the point with lions,” asked the snake, “that you don't see them? I think one nearly stepped on me once.”