Never Say Never

Navajo was born at my mother’s place in Newfoundland in 1995 and lived there until he was seven. As seniors, my mom and stepdad Frank couldn’t keep him till the end of his life, assuming he would become a senior. As one ages, you run out of the physical ability to look after horses. Mom kept his mother Royal until she was 22. Royal was rehomed in Nova Scotia, and after six months in her new home, she came to me.

My hubby Wayne and I didn’t intend to own horses, nor did we have the property to house them. We searched for suitable homes for Royal but found nothing that met what we were looking for. As a senior, we wanted her to have lots of space to roam, graze, and be somewhere where she could be a horse without the expectation of work. We gave up the search for a boarding facility and decided we all needed to live together. So we started looking for a different home. One for all of us. We found the ideal spot after about a year and a half of searching. By the time we moved into Stage Road, we had Royal, two other horses and a donkey. All four leggeds were either boarded or living with their original owners until we took possession of our new property. Just one was missing. Navajo. 

It bothered me that I didn’t know where he was, if he was dead or alive, healthy or not. I frequently told Mom, “If I could ever find Navajo, I would have him here in a heartbeat.”  She has said that each time I uttered those words, her heart would hurt a little, as she’d thought of the impossibility of it.

On January 4, 2019, when I called Mom as I do every day, something about her was off. I could hear her muttering to Frank in the background. He wanted her to tell me something. She was reluctant. “Mom, what is it? What’s wrong? What are you not telling me?”

At first, she said nothing. But I pressed… using that tone I sometimes use to communicate: I’m serious, don’t mess around with me, spill it! She told me when they were out on New Year’s Eve, the man who owned Navajo‘s father approached them and told them he thought he saw Navajo for sale on a Newfoundland buy-and-sell website.  

Well, now you can imagine how my ears perked up. “I don’t want you to do anything about it,” Mom said. Of course, I lied and said, “I won’t.” In the meantime, my fingers were flying across the keyboard, and I was looking up the website. There he was. I don’t know if there’s a word that goes for the emotion that I felt. Joy, anxiety, trepidation, surprise, and hope were all wrapped up together. She was concerned that I would inquire. Mothers sometimes think they know what’s best for their offspring even when the offspring are almost senior citizens themselves. We lost Royal a few months prior and had adjusted to being the owners of three horses and a donkey. Three, because Wayne bought another one. Mom didn’t think we needed to take on the extra work of a fourth. Again.

Wayne and I both work from home and sometimes we need to get in the car and drive to shake off the events of the day. We often park somewhere beside a river or the ocean and have a conversation without telephone or computers in our immediate space. We pulled into the Tim Hortons just off the highway in Windsor. It goes without saying that I needed to make the telephone call. So, in that parking lot, I called. A woman answered the phone. I asked, “The big horse in the pair you have for sale is his name Navajo?” She said yes. The flood of emotion took my breath away. I couldn’t speak. I started sobbing into the phone, and eventually, all I could get out was, “I’ll have to call you back.” And I hung up. Imagine. I hung up. Never before in my life have I had to hang up like that. 

God bless Wayne. He really is a saint. He just held space for me till I cried it out right there in the front seat of the truck in the Tim’s parking lot. I caught my breath and called her back. I gave her the whole backstory about Navajo being born to my mom’s horse and leaving when he was seven. This current owner had him for about three years. He was really overweight when she got him and she worked hard to get him back to an optimal weight so as to prevent equine metabolic disorders. She was selling him with his pasture mate and wanted them to go together. A local couple had expressed interest in buying them. She told me because of his history with my mom and me, she would be prepared to say no to the other folks and yes to me. I told her I needed to think about it. I wasn’t prepared for two, especially since the second horse was only five years old. I didn’t want to bring a young horse to Nova Scotia and have to sell him to somebody else if we became too old or infirm to look after him. After a day, I told her I wouldn’t buy them. That broke my heart. Understatement! It felt like I was turning my back on an answer to prayer. The notion of having Royal here, which was never intended, her passing, and then four months later Navajo is available, and I have an empty stall just seemed impossible to ignore. But we did. We said no. I asked if something fell through with the sale to the other interested party, would the owner please contact me. She agreed. 

Later in January, I was bound for Arizona for the final portion of a program to become a certified EPONAQUEST Instructor. EPONAQUEST was founded by Linda Kohanov and is an organization that offers, in addition to other services, educational programs where people work with horses to explore and learn about life skills such as leadership, assertiveness, personal empowerment, relationships, intuition, and emotional fitness. Linda is a wonderful teacher, author, and speaker, who is internationally recognized as an innovator in equine experiential learning. My being there was a dream come true. 

While in Arizona, I was particularly bothered by Wayne’s and my decision not to buy Navajo. I was sharing accommodations at Reveling Ravens Retreat with a dear friend, Sarah Barnes, author of She Who Rides Horses. Sarah is a wise and knowing woman with tremendous intuition, insight and vision. As I relayed Navajo’s story, she said, “It’s not over. This is not over.” Somehow, I found that settling. 

When I returned to Nova Scotia, I had only been home a couple of days when Navajo’s owner reached out to say that the original sale had fallen through and asked if I would take the horses. Wayne wasn’t home, and I knew I could not reach him all day. I asked her to give me until the morning to decide. I spent the day going back and forth, trying to figure out how to make it work. Did we have the space to build an extra stall? Were we prepared to take the five-year-old? Could we afford another one? How would it affect our workload? How would it affect the herd? Could Navajo make the trip? All of my self-management skills were called on to keep me in a state of grounded calmness so I could think. We simply don’t make good decisions when we are stressed or upset. When Wayne came home, I relayed what had transpired throughout the day. We must’ve talked about it for hours and finally decided to go to bed with a prayer that the answer would be available to us in the morning.

In the morning, my first question to Wayne was, “What are we going to do?”  Being the joker he is, he said,  “About what?” I said, “about Navajo.” He said to text her back and tell her we would take him, just him. The words weren’t out of his mouth before the phone was in my hand and I asked him to dictate. He’s more of a diplomat at times and I wanted to get this right. We sent her a message saying that we would take Navajo. We knew it might be a long shot because she really wanted them to go a new home together.  We just could not manage two more. Later in the afternoon, I got a text asking if I could arrange transportation. That was all it said. Well, you know what the answer was.

The task now was to find someone who would trailer him from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. The owner said he didn’t trailer well, so I was nervous about finding someone to trailer him and another so he would not be alone. I started by asking friends and called equestrian barns in Newfoundland. One woman’s name kept coming up, so I contacted her. I did not want Navajo to cross the Atlantic in the winter. I planned to wait until we were on the other side of winter storms to avoid a delay with the ferry leaving Port aux Basques to North Sydney. 

In March, I decided to go to Newfoundland to meet with the woman who would be trailering Navajo and to see him. We hadn’t seen each other in 17 years. I wanted Mom and Frank on this trek with me, so we headed out on a cold, rainy, foggy, soon-to-be spring day. The first stop was to the woman who agreed to bring him over. She talked about travelling on the Easter weekend and, as of then, didn’t have another horse scheduled for the ride. She indicated that if she could not find another equine passenger, she would put one of her own on the trailer so Navajo would not be alone. Then off we went to see my boy. 

The relief at seeing him again was immense. It was quite an emotional experience for Mom and Frank too. Now that he was coming to me, all we wanted was for him to be on my side of the gulf, with me. After Mom and Frank were back in the car, I returned to the field to see Navajo and sent him a visual of where he would live. The image of the land, his new pasture mates and his soon to be forever home was full and vibrant with texture and colour. It went with the silent heart-to-heart message of ‘this is home. I’ll be back for you.’ Once I got back home, I called an animal communicator and relayed the whole story. She told me he would be fine and that he would not be alone. His momma would be there with him. I believe that. I can feel her here sometimes. I believe she orchestrated the whole thing anyway. Of course! Why wouldn’t she be there? 

I asked Wayne if he would drive over and follow the trailer back. I wasn’t sure I could make the trip. While I am pretty good at managing my stress and anxiety, there was something about this that initially had me thinking it wouldn’t be good for me to be there. I did not want my worry to transfer to Navajo as he was about to embark on the final leg of coming home. Somewhere along the way, I changed my mind and knew I had to go. 

I wouldn’t say I like travelling on the ferry. I avoided it for years. There was no other way to get him back. Wayne and I left at noon on the Thursday before Good Friday. We had a midnight crossing. The ferry ride over was one of the smoothest sailings I had ever experienced. One miracle behind us. We encountered snow as we started our drive across Newfoundland on Friday. We were to meet the trailer on Saturday morning.

We arrived at Navajo’s place well before the trailer. I wondered whether this would all come together because the driver was later than expected, and we needed to be back in Port aux Basques by early Saturday evening. The driver was late because she had experienced some difficulty loading one of the other horses who was only going partway across the island. Now, for the moment of truth. Was Navajo going to get on this trailer?

I had not anticipated what was to come next. I was ready for trouble. The woman selling him put his halter on him and led him to the trailer. It was as if he could not get there fast enough. One whinny to the one he was leaving behind and onward to the trailer. He put his foot on the threshold before the second trailer door was fully open. He was ready to go. I was about to become fast friends with a different kind of stress. The new momma kind! My boy, in a trailer with someone else driving. Coherent breathing is a type of breathing that helps us shift out of our sympathetic to our parasympathetic nervous system. The layperson’s way of understanding this is from fight-flight to rest and digest. Wayne and I often use it with the horses when they are heightened and scared. It works. So, I began coherent breathing. A lot.  

One of the horses on the trailer was not making the trip to Nova Scotia. It had been sold to a man who logged for a living. Wayne and I found ourselves following the trailer down this narrow, logging road in the middle of nowhere so this horse could be dropped off. I was not sure we were ever going to get out of there. The trailer ahead of us was so low to the ground I could not believe it was not going to get stuck. And there did not seem to be any space to turn around a Mini let alone a truck and a four slant horse trailer. Navajo was the last one on the trailer, so he had to get out for the other one to get off. As the driver backed him out and handed Wayne the lead line, a man commented about Navajo being the kind of horse he needed to do the heavy logging work. The one he had purchased differed from the type of horse one took into the woods to do logging. She was tall, black, sleek and elegant looking. Clearly she had been a performance horse. She reminded me of a temperamental princess. I wondered about her previous handling that made her so skittish and what would become of her here. Later Wayne told me he wondered if we should have bought her right then and there. I cringed when the man said she would end up in the pickle barrel if she did not work out. So when he commented again about Navajo, this big strapping quarter horse clydesdale cross, my self-talk said, “Not in this lifetime.”  If I were honest, the words were a quite stronger than that, but let’s leave it there for now. 

Navajo stood like a champion, taking it all in, and when asked to get back on the trailer, he walked on as if he had been doing it every day. From there, it was on to the ferry terminal. The driver makes this trip quite often. It’s not her practice to take them off when she stops at the ferry. She checks to ensure they have lots of hay and water and settles them for the trip. Wayne and I made our way to our cabin for another midnight crossing. Miracle number two. A crossing just like the first. Unbelievable, really, in the middle of the  North Atlantic on the Cabot Strait in March. The ferries were not able to do the crossing the weekends before and after we sailed. As I said before, another miracle. 

The trip across Nova Scotia was uneventful. One stop just after we got off the ferry to make sure the four-leggeds were okay and away we went. Approximately 72 hours from pulling out of our driveway, with almost 1200 kilometers driven and two ferry crossings made, we were pulling back in with the trailer behind us and my boy home. The driver backed him out of the trailer for the final time. He took a big drink, walked with us to meet his pasture mates across the fence line and then settled into the back pasture for a well-deserved nap. Horses need to feel safe and secure to lie down. Either he was completely exhausted, or the spirit of his momma was still with him telling him it would be okay. Maybe both. He went flat out. He was home. Forever. 

Navajo has found his place amongst the herd. He is a master at the equine-facilitated coaching work we do. He’s big, bold yet like a scared teenager when he gets a fright. He is intelligent and learns so very quickly. He is a confidence builder. He has taught others and me so much in the few years he has been here. Every day is a blessing. He’s going to be 29 this year. This is his last stop. When it is his time to transition and cross that Rainbow Bridge, he will rest beside his momma. Another miracle.