Yesterday evening, the horses were frantic, spooking and snorting at something they saw or heard in the woods. Because horses seem to enjoy getting worked up over nothing, I mostly ignored their antics for a while and continued to do my chores.
By the time the barn was mucked and swept, the water troughs were filled and the riding ring was dragged, the horses still hadn’t calm down. The duration and intensity of their panic had gotten me spooked by this point because the horses really seemed sure that something was terribly wrong.
In the past, similar behavior on their part had indicated the presence of packs or feral dogs and coyotes and, on one frightening occasion, a rabid raccoon. With trepidation, I decided that I would have to venture across the field and into the woods to try to figure out what was going on in there.
My whole body was shaking as I walked through the near darkness of late twilight and approached the woods. The horses were still giving loud, sharp warning calls every few seconds and staring intensely into the woods right near the spot I was approaching. Even though my senses weren’t warning me of any danger, I trusted my horses’ extra keen vision, hearing and smell enough to know that there was definitely some sort of intruder in the woods.
Then, before I could even register what was happening, I found it. I startled, then laughed. I had almost walked right smack into a half-deflated helium balloon that was hovering a couple of feet off the ground. It was the kind of balloon that little kids get from the kiddie corral at the grocery store–it even had a string attached with a child’s wrist-sized loop at the end.
As I led the balloon back across the field and past the horses, they looked at me as if I had supernatural powers. Their eyes were so wide open that they looked like giant frog eyes bugging out of the horses’ heads. Snorting and bug-eyed, they kept approaching me hesitantly and then turning around and bolting away once they got within about thirty feet of me.
I just kept walking back to the house, knowing better than to try introducing them to the alien object when they were already so frantic. Once I got back to the house, I tied the balloon to the handle of our trash can in full view of our patio door. The balloon bobbed happily at half-mast there and proceeded to terrorize the dog for the rest of the evening–it turns out that she’s terrified of balloons too. Or maybe that particular balloon was just trying to make trouble. You never know.
