Theophany freeze

There's a Russian expression about there always being a hard freeze right around Theophany, which is when in some parts of the world Orthodox observers hack a hole in the ice of the nearest body of water and throw in a cross, inviting the dimmer-but-more-macho types to dive in to retrieve it. I'm evil enough to wonder whether this isn't a way to get rid of some of a community's more irritating youngsters, or perhaps just to get them to sharrup for a while. Anyway. It's cold now and getting chillier, though when I look at what's going on in the Midwest and how that air is heading this-a-ways to make sure Mr. President-Elect Obama feels like he never left Chicago, I get cringy.

Speaking of chill, what do you do with horses when the temps drop? Pierre of the North, the inimitable leader of the trip I did up in Canada this summer, is something of an expert on the subject, and he had a lot of interesting horsemanship tips, some verging on genius and others on the weird. He admitted that he was largely self-taught, coming to horse life in his 20s as a pickup jockey on the harness-racing circuit (I looked through his pics, and hoo boy, nobody knows the mullets I've seen), so in a way he may've become a better horseman than he would have otherwise; he had to figure out everything from first principles.

Keeping horses in an area where it snows up to the eaves of a second-story house in one go presents obvious challenges. Horses stay warm in the winter not so much by growing insulating hair (though that helps) as by digesting high-fiber hay, so it's key to make sure that they get enough to eat. If the horses are turned out in a pasture with deep snow, they don't keep all the area neatly flattened down any more than we would. Instead, they tend to make and then use paths to and from food, water, salt, and shelter; given a single site for each of those, they may let the paths get narrower and narrower, to the point where the horses can barely move as the snow deepens around them. Suboptimal. Pierre's solution is a total PITA for him, but it works for the four-feets: Every day, he takes the hay to a different site, crushing down the snow a bit and also forcing the horses to keep a variety of paths open. He rarely feeds in the barn, although as he put it in his fantastique Quebecois accent, "Sometime I know it's a bad storm coming, because the horses are all standing by the barn door with a look: 'We are not staying out there tonight, Pierre; are you nuts? It's gonna be cold!' So then I let them in. But otherwise no."

The other problem that can keep horses from getting enough to eat is herd dynamics: boss hosses can try to exclude lower-level herdmembers from the food until the higher-level horse has finished eating. Pierre's approach to that particular issue is to teach his horses that most interhorsinal debate tactics are fair game (though he does pull horses if it escalates to serious kicking), but that everyone gets to eat. It must work fairly well; we never saw his horses even flick an ear at one another, though like all herdmates they must have occasional differences of opinion.

Given that as perspective, it's wimpy of me not to ride tonight, when it'll be in the balmy 20-degree range. But I'm snorfling still (though my lymph nodes have stopped pulling their Willy Loman "attention must be paid!" routine) and would be much a-grouch, so Pat advised me to stay home and have a hot date with some tea and a blanket. At this rate the national strategic tea reserves will be exhausted within a week.