Addendum

Two days since Drifter died. Dakota still calls for him, trotting from one paddock to another looking. Not all the time, just once or twice a day. The others are more prosaic but they didn't know him as long as Dakota. Dakota was born here. He's known Drifter all his life. He lost his mother last year and now, for want of a better description, his uncle. It's only natural that he'd miss him.

One of the saddest things of this episode is knowing that Drifter was trying to get me to help him. All his life, if he was in trouble, he would leave the other horses and come search for us. Once he split his lower lip. We don't know how it happened but it was a two inch slice that separated one half of his lower lip from the other. It needed stitches. He was in the creek paddock when it happened and came to the fence, blood dripping, until we noticed him. He left the other horses to seek help. You can't tell me horses aren't smart. Another time, two times actually, he was stung or bitten by something and had a reaction. He came out in welts and his lips swelled (after the second time we kept a bottle of histantin in the fridge). As with the cut lip, he came to the fence for help. He actually whinnied until he got our attention. So when I went out that morning and he was on his brisket next to the fence at the closest possible point to the house, I know what he was thinking. We'd help him with this pain as we had always done. Well, we did try but this time it wasn't to be.

After Drifter died, I thought I'd try a technique, bibliomancy, I'd been reminded of while reading an article in Mind, Body, Spirit magazine Issue 27 (which is really one big advertisement for Watkins Bookstore in London). In it the author of the article used the Arthur Conan Doyle books as a sort of of psychical communication wit ACD. (Proof of Survival? Elementary, My Dear Watson! by Roger Straughan, page 28). I thought I'd use it in a slightly different way, opening the magazine at a random page and, with eyes closed, placing my finger on a random bit of text. What I got was this: 'The consequence of this is that we come into suffering.' And then, 'We observe that bodies feel pain, suffer disease and die, so we are convinced that we will die also.'

I was suffering, not from my own disease or pain but from witnessing Drifter's. A small thing perhaps and probably if I'd had Womens Weekly rather than MBS, the outcome would've been different but it still rings a distant bell of synchronicity. It wasn't divination as what I may have attempted to avoid had I known about it had already happened but I still think it's eerily appropriate.