Mort/Chapter 4

Mort Hugs

Mort/Chapter4

It was hard to see in the near light just before dawn. Dead weeds poked through the snow, breaking up the stark, gray on gray horizon.
Squinting into the shadows of Mort's shed, nothing moved. No hungry nicker greeted me. No sign of his fuzzy black face hanging over the top rail. The gate to his corral yawned open. So was the gate of the horse who lived next to him.
I stumped through the snow to the back pasture fence. The barbed wire gate lay flopped in the snow. Two sets of tracks headed in a straight northeast line. Mort had escaped again. As usual, he had taken his best friend Sandy with him.
Settling my wool hat snugly over my ears, and grateful for it's itchy warmth in the snot freezing cold, I headed back to the barn for a halter, Mort's bridle, and a can of grain. With luck, they would have stopped to ravage a suburban rose bed along the way. They might still be close enough to catch before my parents noticed I wasn't back in time for school.
If not, the horses would already be at Mort's favorite hangout. The drive-in at Barnes road. That would mean a five mile tromp through the snow. Or sitting in the car with my silent, stewing father. It was never a good idea to make Dad late for work, especially when I was late for school too. His frosty malevolence made a five mile hike in sub zero temperatures seem absolutely heart warming. Invigorating, even.
I had found out the hard way why Mort was kept in a six foot, padlocked run, at the boarding barn I had originally kept him at. He could get out of anything. He could open latches, undo wire, push out corral boards. He would gleefully jump over anything under five feet, and crawl under anything over three. He could untie knots with abandon, and whip through every snap known to man. He would lean on T-posts, tip toe through downed wire, and roll under anything but a five strand fence. If all else failed, he would simply kick things down.
A nearby family had let me board Mort at their barn. A few sheds, some haphazard corrals, and ten acres of field, were mine to share with another girl from my neighborhood. We paid a whopping $5.00 a month for the privilege of keeping our horses within walking distance of our houses. It was great, but it was impossible to convince Mort to stay there.
Not that he wanted to go back to his old stable, mind you. He seemed perfectly content with his little shed, a pasture buddy, and plenty of room to run. He just liked to cruise the neighborhood. Usually in the wee hours of the morning, with friends. Mort wasn't content to simply let himself out. He would let out whatever horse he was currently living with also.
A two a.m. phone call from the local police let me know I had bought the next Houdini within a week after moving to our new barn. I got to know the late night CSPD well that summer. I spent a lot of my riding time replanting flower beds and tamping down divots in the neighbors lawns. Mort became infamous within weeks.
This time I was a mile down the road when my Dad pulled up along side me.
"Lose something?"
"I'm following their tracks." I kept my head down and studied the trail like Dan'l Boone.
"Get in." Dad said. "I think we can still hunt them down from the car."
The sarcasm was hard to miss. The snow was at least a foot deep, and the renegade hoof prints were about jumping out and tripping me.
Once again, we found the horses at the Barnes Road drive-in. Mort had a fascination with the horses that lived in the pasture behind it. It had become enough of a routine that the owner had caught them for me, and had coffee waiting for both me and my Dad.
Mort hollered when he saw me, and as mad as I was, my heart lifted to see him. He was a study in contrasts. His white star shone out of his black face. His woolly dun body was zebra striped, across his shoulders, down his back, up his legs. He looked glorious against the snow.
I went up to him, and he wrapped his neck around me, in his "Mort hug". I buried my frozen fingers in his shaggy coat and leaned into his warmth.
The thin, cold sunlight was creeping across the fields when I swung up on him bareback. We started across the prairie in Mort's huge extended trot, back towards the barn with Sandy towing like a tug boat.
"Hurry up, you won't have time for a shower before I take you to school!" Dad shouted after me. "I'm not giving you an excuse for being tardy either!"
Great. Sister Mary Pious was going to have a field day with this one. One more day being late, smelling like horse, and having hay in my hair. Detention city, here I come.
But the prairie skies were open in front of me, my horse was snorting like a happy freight train, and I was riding, instead of going to History class. The world fell away.
Sandy gave me a yank, and as I turned to pull her back, I saw my Dad and the owner of the pasture standing in the snow laughing. My Dad shook his head, and the steam from his refilled coffee curled around his hands.