Absolutely Fabulous

Although I have known Patsy for as long as my other New Forest ponies, she didn't belong to me. She would arrive at my gate in the middle of spring, long after all the other waifs and strays had turned up asking for help for the homeless, and only when she started to lose condition. Although she would stand close to the fence, she wouldn't accept any contact, and I grew to admire her aloofness along with her real beauty. 

Every other year or so, she would have a foal which would always be taken off her at a late stage because she was difficult to find and hardly ever came in on the drift. It didn't matter because she seemed well capable of taking a foal through the winter. As she reached her late teens, however, she struggled to maintain her own weight, giving everything she had to her exquisite foal. Eventually I felt forced to notify the agister and both she and the foal disappeared off the Forest. I was worried that I had signed her death warrant - at that age the owner could have easily accepted the subsidy for taking an older pony off the Forest - and 'sent her on her way.' I was extremely relieved when she turned up just a few weeks later, the foal having been kept in. She was still on the poor side and I decided to see if I could buy her. 

I tracked her owner down through the Verderers and she was only too pleased to let me have her for just over that subsidy price and asked me to promise to keep her on the Forest forever. I brought her in to fatten her up and then turned her out for the following summer, bringing her back in again just as the winter started. This seemed to be a good arrangement for mare that had thrived out for so long but needed a bit of extra help. 

When Juma was killed I felt that I couldn't leave Patsy out when all of the others were in and tried not to think about the promise I had made. Turning her out on the Reserve, now bucket-trained, meant that she could have the perfect life again without the same risk of being run over.  One day I may get round to taming her but there was something about her which meant that I wanted to leave her wild.