With apologies to my sister Beth, lover of horses and all things horse-y.

If you enjoy this post, head on over to my other blog, Foolery, for some old barn photos. Hurry, though; I don't think the barn can stand much longer.

The horses are back.

Last year my dad leased barn and corral space to a guy who boards Canadian Standard Bred brood mares for the winter. A new group of pregnant mares arrived the other day, about 25 in all. They have access to pasture right now, but Chas has already started feeding them hay.

Once a day Chas takes the girls and walks over to the dairy, through the idle and deteriorating barns out to the west pastures and hay barns. Sunday I went with them in the late afternoon and took my camera.

Here's the hay . . .

. . . and here's some more . . .

. . . and here's a cut bale to load by the armload into the back of the pickup.

The pickup. Ah, that's a good place to set my camera and sunglasses while I'm throwing hay, except that Chas locked it. Chas? Why did you lock the pickup? Can I have the keys?

The keys. Here they are . . .

. . . and there they stayed. Usually Chas loads the flakes into the pickup, then drives out into the pasture while the girls kick and throw the flakes onto the ground. No truck, *sigh*.

Chas monkey-climbed to the top of one stack and threw down three bales to the waiting horses below. The girls and I stayed on the ground, hauling armloads of hay to the front of the barn. 3 1/2 bales makes a pretty big stack of flakes.

The horses were getting pretty hungry by this time. They're extremely nasty to each other, and a lot of kicking and snarling was going on. It did make things interesting walking the hay out to them, one armload at a time. I finally made the girls stay in the barn because I was sure they would get kicked.

See any ears flattened back? There were a lot of hungry, pregnant, bitchy horses with bad attitudes that afternoon.

There were some terribly curious and jealous cows just across the fence as well.

Everyone calmed down and it was time for us to go home to our own dinner.

We watched out for meadow muffins, too. There are so many after only a week that it was hard not to step in them.

There. My requisite horse post for the year. Now I can get back to cows and chickens.