The See

Nelson is a small grey donkey who has chosen a seventeen-hand horse called Hector, and if he ever loses him, it could kill him. Vets mean that literally. They have a name for it, a treatment for it, and a rule about leaving the body in the field. Donkeys do not have friends the way horses have a herd. They pick one. They graze nose to tail with it, stand flank to flank in the rain with it, doze in its shadow, and if it is led out of sight for ten minutes they lift their heads and let the whole valley know. Nelson does all of this with a retired cavalry horse three times his size. The bond can last thirty years, and it is the quietest, most stubborn love on any farm. When the other half dies, the one left behind may simply stop eating. It does not pace or call. It goes still, ears slack, head low, standing where the two of them used to stand. Donkey people have a saying for that look: a dull donkey is an emergency. They are right, because of how a donkey was built for the desert. A donkey that stops eating starts drawing fat out of storage to keep its organs going, and the signal that should turn the tap off never properly comes. Fat floods the blood until a sample in a tube comes back cloudy as milk, and the liver and kidneys go under. It is called hyperlipaemia. Once it takes hold, between 60 and 90% do not come back. So the people who know donkeys best keep rules that could have been written for a hospice. When one has to be put down, its companion is brought to the body and left there, an hour, three hours, as long as it takes, until it has sniffed, nudged, stood guard over its friend and walked away of its own accord. If one goes into hospital, the other goes in the trailer with it. After a death the survivor is watched at every feed for three weeks, because the grief can take that long to land. The ones that come through are given somebody new, introduced slowly, over a fence, the way you would bring anyone to a house in mourning. For 7,000 years we have called this a dumb animal. It is an animal that has to be given a funeral to survive one. Nelson knows none of this is written down. He is where he always is, half a length off Hector's shoulder, keeping an eye on things.