As I've mentioned there are two ways to get back to my flat from campus - the road through town passing by the St. Nicholas Cathedral and the shortcut through a field that approaches my apartment from the North. I decided to take the latter route Tuesday after lab as it would be dark ere I returned home. On a normal day I would pass five equine pals along the way; there's a nice little stretch of road with a house flanked on both sides by a field of horses. As I passed the first pasture I noticed the peculiar absence of one of the horses, a friendly black draft-cross, but didn't think much of it as there were one or two places feasibly out of sight of the road. It also struck me as slightly odd that one of the ponies was watching the bushes that formed the boundary to the yard, but as my mind was wandering elsewhere I just filed it away on the off chance it would come up again. Well... it did about twenty seconds later as I passed the driveway to the house. I noticed a bit of movement out of the corner of my eye and lo! There, in the flesh, was the missing horse. He was a bit skittish and the man in the house had come out to try and catch him, and there were two other onlookers. I managed to at least coax the horse up to the fence, but wasn't of much help myself since I didn't have anything to use as a makeshift halter. But we needn't have waited long as a van pulled up and three fellows hopped out. In minutes the two younger ones hopped the fence, cornered the horse, led him out of the yard by the hair under his chin, put a bit in his mouth, fashioned a headstall out of a bit of twine lying on the ground, clipped a dog leash to the bit, and one of the lads hopped up and rode off down the middle of the road away from the mount's home field, the van in hot pursuit.
I related this little chain of events to someone back home who suggested I had just witnessed horse thievery at its most spontaneous. I enjoyed his imaginative take on the scene but wrote it off as an actual possibility; surely there would be no one (or no group) so audacious as to commandeer a horse in broad daylight with witnesses! Well, the fellow was nowhere to be found on Wednesday when I passed by that morning, and the same held true Thursday. The whole situation started to seem more suspicious, and the more I considered it the more irked I was that these guys didn't have a proper bridle when they arrived. Or a halter. Or anything that a horse owner might have... We had a Butler group dinner that night and I tossed the story out to our group representative who went on a tirade about "knackers*", essentially Irish gypsies; she confirmed the notion that I had probably watched these folks make off with someone else' horse. I phoned in to the Garda today to see if there were any reports of a missing gelding, but they said there hadn't yet been a call. They took down the events anyway and said they would contact me if anything came up, so I suppose I'll just wait and see if I get a call or the horse reappears in his paddock...
Seriously!! I just never believed that such an absurd thing still happened, much less that I would see it!
*I later learned that Knackers is a rather insulting term, so it is more PC to call these folks "travelers" or "tinkers"...
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