Animal Touching Records - Yilin

Author: Xiaoping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: This is the only horse that ran away. We didn’t catch up with it, which means it threw its bones away in some distant place we had yet to reach. If a horse runs away, there must be something chasing it. That is an unseen, fatal enemy of the horse’s life. The horse cannot escape it. I remembered another horse, tied to a straw shed in someone’s home. When I saw it, it was already barely breathing, old and worn out. Clearly, it wasn’t old from being tied in the shed but was tied there after it had grown old. People never fully trust themselves. Even knowing this horse was old and could no longer go anywhere, they still tied it up, leaving it helpless in the end, giving up the fight against fate. What’s more cruel is that in its twilight years, it could only watch the large stack of hay piled above its head but couldn’t eat a single bite. The greatest tragedy in life is starving to death in a granary; a horse starving under a hay stack is a different matter—it’s man-made. I tore a handful of grass and held it to the horse’s mouth. The horse glanced at it but turned its head away. I knew it couldn’t chew that mouthful of grass anymore. The horse’s strength, once piercing through years, had now grown weak and dim. A horse that once carried hundreds of kilograms and ran dozens of miles without sweating or panting could no longer even chew a mouthful of grass.
“Who doesn’t have a time when a sack of wheat is too heavy to carry? Who doesn’t have a time when their teeth have grown old and they can’t chew bones anymore?” I remembered my father’s warning to me. It was as if he were speaking of a horse. Perhaps only when a horse grows too old to move will it understand many things in the world and know how to walk on many paths. A horse cannot pass its life’s experience to another horse. Those young, lively foals never learn to respectfully seek advice from an old horse. They have plenty of energy and time to take the wrong path. Isn’t the old horse the same? After a horse grows old, it might be like a person. It may have failed to achieve anything significant in its life, making countless mistakes, so it holds its own errors in the highest regard, always hoping other horses can learn from them.
Horses and people often live their lives for the same things. Over the years of shared toil, both horses and people age together. I often see an old person leading a horse through the village back home. The person is likely too old to ride the horse, and the horse is too old to carry the person. The person and the horse walk one after the other, through some afternoons. In this long life, both the person and the horse have endured equally heavy labor. People use horses to pull carts and travel, while horses rely on people to provide water, feed, and care, and to clean the manure in the stable. Sometimes, people even take horses to see a veterinarian, caring for them with the same enthusiasm as tending to their own father. The things piled up in a person’s life are piled up in a horse’s life too. People only know that horses have worked for them all their lives but don’t realize that people have also toiled for horses all their lives.
P8