A brief message from Minna

I walked around a corner into the main square of the stable yard.  As I headed down one side of the square that is  mostly made up of single stable boxes around a central set of open corrals, I saw Minna standing at the bar to her box (stable) which is in the corner facing me as I walk. It is summer, so the door is fully open, and only a wooden bar across the gap keeps her in. I could see she was looking at me, so I no doubt unconsciously began the greeting ritual: nodding at her, blowing gently, beginning to raise one down-turned hand etc. As I approached, she lowered her head, put one front leg forward, then the other. Then she put her muzzle on one knee, and then on the other. As I drew close to her, I bent down to look. I noticed some cuts just above the fetlock. I gently stroked down her left foreleg, holding my hand on her knee for a moment. It was then that I noticed that her lips were touching the top of my head, then they were at my shoulder (which was very close to my cheek and neck), and then moving onto the nape of my neck. When I thought about all this afterwards, putting words to the image in my memory, I realised she had touched the equivalent of my "poll," my cheek, my neck and my shoulder. 

This is a basic manoeuvre that I learned early on when studying Horse Speak with Sharon Wilsie. She calls the poll the "follow me button", and the CNS (cheek neck shoulder) is a request (or instruction) to "come with me." If you are prepared to wait a few seconds this gesture invariably has the expected result. I have spent some time with Minna in her stable before, and she probably sees me doing this with other horses when I ask them to come with me around the yard, which is to say that by now she knows that I know a bit of her language. Thinking about it afterwards, I realised that she used the CNS gesture on me, including a preliminary 'follow me' gesture on the poll. But she had asked me to "follow her", not in actual steps, but to follow her communication, her idea. This was interesting because "Follow me," in this case meant "follow my words (gestures), there's something I want to show you or tell you , or that I want you to know." This implies a subject that speaks to an other in order for a message to be communicated.

When I realised she was asking something of me, I looked up. She had raised her head high and was looking across the yard. I stood up and taking up a position next to her neck (I was still outside her stable), I looked in the direction she was looking. It was at an oblique angle across the corrals in the yard – perhaps to the middle of the row of boxes at the top of the square, where other ponies were standing (or possibly she was looking beyond them to the fields behind). She was showing white around her eye, as if in fear. I say: "As if" – but perhaps she was at that moment experiencing fear in the act of communicating it to me. After a few moments, she turned decisively and withdrew into the shadow at the back of her box – as if seeking shelter? – and stood parallel to the wall. Did the act of transmitting the message reinvoke a feeling of fear attached to the earlier experience? 

She seemed to be asking me to decipher and bear witness to something she had experienced. The whole exchange could only have lasted a minute, perhaps two, but it seemed to have the structure of a sentence. I don't know what happened earlier in the day, but I do know that the horses go out into fields together every day, and it's possible that a ruckus had taken place. It happens.