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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

The Rural Life
On the Threshold

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: July 11, 2005

When it feels like time - no matter what the clock says - I walk the horses 
down to the night pen from the pasture where they've spent the day. Our 
habits mingle on that walk. I whistle when I open the gate. Their heads 
turn abruptly to the sound. I rattle the grain in the bucket, and, if they 
show any reluctance, Remedy the gelding begins to drive the other two 
horses toward me. Ida makes a feint toward the pigs in their enclosure, and 
they dart in circles round and round, barking and snuffling as they go. I 
lead the horses down the drive and into the corral, never looking back to 
see whether they follow or not. It's part of the contract. They trot the 
last few steps and settle over their sweet feed.

This is the fly time of year. We spray the horses, and some days they wear 
mesh face masks to keep off the flies. I look out in the pasture, and there 
are our horses, strangely disguised as if for some long-ago game show. But 
nothing really keeps the flies away. On the bad days, I walk into the night 
pen just ahead of the horses, and the flies that have enveloped them 
suddenly envelop me. I swat them away, thinking all the while that it's a 
case of mistaken identity. I'm not a horse, I think. But at a moment like 
that, the distinction is academic. To the flies, I am a horse, a 
particularly pale, thin-skinned, succulent one, and lacking a horse's 
ability to quiver its skin in just one spot. In that moment, the sense of 
human separateness slips away.

It happens again and again here on this farm. Every day, for example, I 
make a point of sitting on the threshold of the portable pig house in an 
effort to make friends with our two young Tamworth gilts. We're going to 
breed them, and we want them as tame as they can be before that time comes. 
Every day, they ease up to me a little sooner. Yesterday I could touch them 
on the forehead. In a month, they'll flop on the ground to have their 
bellies scratched.

There is still an elemental distrust in their eyes. They stand broadside to 
where I sit, looking sideways and a little backward toward me, as if they 
were positioning themselves to breeze right past if I made a sudden move. 
But they turn and rub their wet, flat noses against the knuckles of my 
hand. They glance at me and then drift away, grazing as they go. I sit and 
watch them, hoping to find the grain of their domesticity, the way to 
enlarge their trust. But I can see in the look they give me - the almost 
human gaze - that they are studying me too, waiting to discover how 
dependable I really am.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/opinion/11mon4.html?