The Pleasure Tree (Winter 2005)

During the winter the Herd grazes in our woodlot at the back of our farm. It is full of 8 year old radiate pines that have been pruned to provide open space underneath. Cool in summer and warm in winter. We leave some low branches on some of the trees for the ponies to scratch on. In spring these lower branches are often covered in hair as they scratch out their long winter coats. We had taken out a couple of crops of Christmas trees, so there are some stumps to rub on as well. By providing ample places to scratch, we found that the ponies do not rub out their manes or tails.

There was one very small tree which had grown quite leggy underneath the more mature trees. It was a couple of meters tall and you could bend it over if you tried. We had began to notice that this tree had taken on more a horizontal form of growth and figured it had been used as a scratching post. As it was the middle of winter, I used to take a turn around the forest in the evening with my trusty headlamp, checking each pony and spending a bit of time with each of them.

It was on one of these long winter evenings, I finally saw how the tree had got its bent appearance. Sisko was standing astride of the tree. The top few branches with some sad looking pine needles were sticking out from under his tail and the base of the tree was under his chest. Sisko was gently rocking back and forth, rubbing his belly on the trunk of this poor tree. The look of his face made me laugh out loud as “he had reached nirvana and was at one with the tree”. I didn’t disturb him, but left him to enjoy a damn good scratch