“Easy, boy,” I said, my tone that of father to frightened child.
There at my work station in the blacksmith shop, I shifted forward so the horse could better see me and continued running my hand across his body. Halfway down his left rear leg, I came to a stop when my fingers reached a knobby bulge that shouldn’t have been there. Bending closer, I gently palpated the puffy hock. I’d already scraped out the dirt and turf imbedded around his shoes just minutes before, but this swelling told me to take a second, closer look at the hoof area.
I flipped on my headlamp and gave the horse’s fetlock a tug. In response, he nervously shifted his weight but allowed me to hoist his leg. Crouching forward, I studied the hoof’s surface in the glow of the beam, noting how it was worn on the inside edge. I turned to Trudy, the young teen who stood nearby, arms crossed as she watched.
“I think Patch’s knees are swollen,” she told me solemnly. “The back ones, at least.”
“Actually,” I replied, “they’re called knees in the front but hocks in the back. See how the joints bend differently? A hock is more an elbow than a knee. But you’re right. There’s some swelling here for sure.”
She nodded, absently fingering her own elbow. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have corrected a customer, but Trudy was different. She wanted to know. She wanted to learn. Trudy’s family lived in a neighboring Amish district in Gap, and they had been coming to this blacksmith shop—as had my family and I—for years.
“It looks like the hoof is worn and uneven,” I continued. “I’d say he’s been favoring the inside of his leg.”
“He’s been pulling to the right. Sometimes I think he’s going to take us both straight into the ditch.”
I lowered the horse’s heel to the concrete floor and he tossed his head and nickered. I reached up a hand to remind him with a gentle touch that I was still there, that all was well. On the other side of the shop, my friend and coworker, Owen Kinsinger, was at the forge, pounding a flaming red shoe against the rounded cone of an anvil. The horse rotated an ear toward the sound.
“Is there anything I can do for Patch?” Trudy asked. “He just seems so sad.”
I stifled a smile, thinking how very much she reminded me of myself when I was her age. Like me, she had a fondness for horses and seemed to think of them as more than just a means of transportation. Also like me, she often lingered at the blacksmith shop, watching as the family horse was shod rather than leaving the animal in the morning and returning for it later the way most folks did.
The difference between us, however, was that she usually left once the work was done, while I’d always stuck around afterwards for as long as I could, peppering Amos Kinsinger with a thousand questions about what he was doing and why. For years, I had wanted to be a farrier—an official “shoer of horses”—myself. And now, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, I finally was one, or at least I was well on my way. First had come four months at farrier school out in Missouri, and then I returned home and stepped into this apprenticeship at Kinsinger Blacksmith and Welding. I had already been working here, under Owen’s guidance, for a year. That left one more year to go, and then my apprenticeship would be complete and I could call myself a farrier for real.
I shifted to the horse’s other side. Funny how a person could put off doing something that really interested him, I thought as I ran my hand across his flank. I delayed far too long the switch from building buggies to shoeing horses. But when you grow up in a family of buggy-makers, it’s tough to be the first one to decide to do something different.
Once I did, though, I couldn’t believe I’d waited so long. Sure the work of shoeing was hard—and now and then my back ached something terrible at the end of the day—but I really enjoyed spending my hours working with horses. It also helped that my daed’s buggy business continued along fine without me, sparing me from feeling as if I’d abandoned him and the rest of the family.
When I reached the horse’s hip, I ran my hand down his leg only to find that this hock was swollen as well. A look at the hoof revealed that it was even worse than the other. No wonder the animal was having trouble.
“Same issue over here,” I said to Trudy, who stepped closer as I pointed out the damaged, uneven area along the hoof’s quarter.
I wondered how long it had been since this horse was shod. Surely it had been a lot longer than the recommended eight weeks for a driving horse.
“Where did you say you got him?” I lowered his hoof to the floor and stood up straight.
“He belonged to my uncle’s neighbor, but then Patch started rearing up and not following commands so the neighbor stopped driving him. He just put him out in the pasture and forgot all about him.”
“When was that?”