How It All Began, Part Two...

...Ok, here comes part two of my story. I am sorry that I left you all hanging on for so long, but it is impossible for me to sit down and write a memoir, when my kids are home...fighting...and arguing...and playing...and hungry..all of the time! They are always hungry! I also need to apologize about my ending to part one,because it made it sound like something bad happened while I was away at camp, and nothing did. I need to go back to Writing 101 and learn how to not leave my endings sound like cliff hangers :)

So...I was sent away to camp for one week, and I was not happy about it. My poor mom had to feed Cheyenne small handfuls of hay every hour, and she even fed him throughout the night. She also had to deal with the after effects of his tube worming, and she said that it was not pretty! Upon my return a week later, Cheyenne had made a complete 180 degree turn, and was putting weight on at a rapid pace ( It's amazing what food can do!). Even though Cheyenne began to resemble a horse-with really long legs!-people still thought that my parents were crazy to let me "waste" my money on a half-dead, yearling, colt (I may have called him a gelding in my last story, but he was not gelded until the following March, when he was 1 1/2 years old. We gave him some time to "catch"up).
After about one month, Cheyenne had put on about 75 pounds, but you could still tell that the world had not been kind to him up until now. He was so scrawny, but I just new that he would mature into a big, well rounded horse, because of his Crabbet breeding, his 1/8 QH, and because I knew what his sire, dam, grand sire, and grand dam all looked like: BIG! Still, everyone of my friends, and fellow 4-H members had QH's, and they all just looked at me like I was crazy.

Remember when I said that I was a hopeless romantic, who knew everything there was to know about about Arabian bloodlines and pedigrees? Well I was not about to let my little guy go around with the name of Cheyenne ( it wasn't "Arabian" enough!) so I began the task of picking a new name for him. I still had hopes of being able to register him, but that never happened because in order to be registered as a 1/2 Arab, the sire must be registered, not the dam, and with Cheyenne, it was the other way around (I did contact his sire, Solomon's, owner-she gelded him, and she still has him!-but it was going to cost her about $800 at that point to register him. I offered to pay half-I really wanted to show breed shows too!-but she was unable to come up with the other half. To this day, I still get angry when breeders are irresponsible and do not register their foals. If you cannot afford to do it, you probably shouldn't be breeding them!).

Because I had Cheyenne's pedigree-the lady that I bought him from owned his paternal grand dam, and dam, so she knew his breeding-I played around with several Arabian sounding names that included parts of his heritage, and let me tell you...I came up with some doozies! I ended up combining his grand sire's name, Shabaoud, with his dam's name, Destrier, and came up with Shadest (pronounced "Shuh"dest). At first I threw in part of his granddam' s name-her name was Spirit Anissa-and I called him "Shadest's Gallant Spirit," but after about one week, even I thought that it sounded ridiculous, so "Shadest" he became.
I continued to ride both Pinto and Jewel, but I also spent hours with Shadest. I groomed him, trained him to side-pass, back, pivot, set up for halter and showmanship classes, and basically just fell in love with him. We would go on long walks together, and I even led him along on trail rides (He was one of the easiest horses to ride, because by the time he was old enough to be ridden, he had just about done and seen everything and anything, and I think that all of that experience made him a great little trail horse). He continued to grow, and just like I knew he would, he began to get big. After just one year, he no longer resembled the skinny, scrawny, colt that I brought home...except for his coloring..lol!
There was, however,one nagging reminder of his days as a starving, worm-infested colt...Shadest was prone to colic...something that eventually took his life. The vet said that his digestive tract was irreversibly damaged form his lack of "groceries," and from his lack of being wormed as a foal. So...every fall, Shadest would colic; sometimes multiple times, but we were always able to stay on top of it. Shadest was also very accident prone, and he always had some type of injury on his body, and some, as you will find out later, were life threatening.

To be cont....