A rhythmic knocking stirred me from sleep: Clunk, clunk, clunk. Pause. Clunk, clunk.

I fumbled for my phone and poked at the screen, squinting at the offending glow: 3:30 a.m.

My sleep-fogged brain tried to make sense of the sound. It wasn’t coming from inside the house, nor the front door. It wasn’t coming from the road. 

The noise was echoing, instead, from the far end of the property. From the barn. The barn! I sat up in bed and patted the nightstand for my glasses. 

“It’s probably a racoon going after the garbage,” my husband Brad mumbled and rolled over. 

Brad married into horses. It wasn’t a racoon. It was Moose. 

Moose, our 17.3-hand palomino Quarter Horse (yes, you read that right), just turned 26. It feels like it’s always something with Moose: abscesses, arthritis, tick bites that swell and seep, a months-long, expensive battle with equine protozoal myeloencephalitis, a pulled suspensory, Cushings. Once, a reaction to dewormer ballooned his lips and tongue like Will Smith in “Hitch.”

I fumbled for my slippers. 

“You’re going down there?” Brad asked, but I was halfway out the bedroom door, pulling on a sweatshirt as I padded down our creaky stairs. My gut was telling me I’d need an extra set of hands at the barn, so I needed our toddler son to stay asleep. 

At the front door, I shoved sockless feet into muck boots (yuck!) and yanked on whatever coat was top on the rack, zipping it shut and pulling on gloves as I sprinted down the driveway. My pajama pants were no barrier against the freezing wind, but I didn’t notice the cold. 

All was quiet when I tugged open the big sliding door and plugged in the twinkle-lights that drape the aisleway. But moments later, there it was again: clunk, clunk, clunk. 

In the first stall, Liffey squinted and blinked, annoyed but fine. Ike, in the second stall, nickered and bobbed his head, hoping perhaps that it was time for breakfast. 

In the third stall, Moose was down. 

His legs were wedged against the wall, trapped by the enormity of his body. I knew what getting cast was, but in over 30 years of horses, this was the first time I’d faced it. 

Thankfully, Moose was both the most sensible horse in the barn and a true gentleman. He wasn’t flailing. He wasn’t panicked. He seemed to understand that the pickle he’d gotten himself into wasn’t one he could get out of alone. I opened his stall and stepped inside, and when I squatted to put a hand on his neck, he lifted his head and looked back at me like “Uh, mom? A little help here?”

Then he shifted his legs the little he could, and thunk, thunk—his hooves butted the wall. 

“It’s OK, Moose-Man,” I said, feeling his chest and eyeballing his legs and head. His coat was dry and cool, and there were no visible signs of injury or struggle. Thank god. My own hands started to tremble, more nerves than cold. I looked from Moose’s worried face to his hooves against the wall. I took a deep breath.

“Ok, big guy. Let’s figure this out.”

If you’ve been around horses for long enough, you’ve known one of these guys. Maybe you owned one. Maybe you’ve boarded one. Maybe there’s one in your barn right now. 

I’m talking about the horse that makes you worry.

Maybe it’s a horse predisposed to choke, or one that colics at significant shifts in the weather. Maybe it’s that horse who regularly returns from turnout with unexplainable injuries, or who always just looks a little bit off. Or maybe the horse who makes you worry is healthy but just really old.  

No matter the specifics, the horse who makes you worry is the one whose stall you pass by one extra time at the end of a night check. It’s the horse that you watch just a little longer when you turn them out. The one you keep in the front field so you can see him from the house.

The horse who makes you worry will cause you to second guess yourself constantly: Did his grain soak long enough? Did she drink enough water today? Which blanket for tonight’s 30-degree temperature swing? Was that a funny step, or are my eyes playing tricks? Did I remember his cribbing collar? His meds? His fan?

My first horse, a chestnut Quarter Horse with tall socks and a fat blaze, lived his life as the horse who made me worry. 

I always expected Elmo’s belly to be his downfall. He was a cribber, and if his collar was too loose or backwards or—god forbid—left off, he could work himself into a gas colic that was almost always vet-worthy. A particularly nasty episode resulted in a three-day clinic stay, clearing out a chunk of my savings account. But he ended up OK, and that’s all that really mattered. 

Elmo also liked to colic regularly at even the mildest temperature changes, despite varied and extensive preventative efforts. He’d collapse to the ground, moaning dramatically, but usually those belly aches were extinguished with some Banamine and probiotics, and within the hour he’d be kicking at his stall, insulted that we’d taken away his food. 

When Elmo was in his late 20s, my husband and I bought a little farm, and we brought Elmo home. Like a mother hen, I clucked around for hours and days before his arrival, fluffing his stall and checking and rechecking the fence-lines and fields. I cried tears of joy into his neck as I led him into his stall that first night. Seeing him and his pasturemate from the kitchen window was a daily dream come true. 

But having him at home also meant sole responsibility for his care, and solo worrying: There was no longer a boarding barn owner or barn manager, or even boarder friends, to share my concerns. My husband, who at the time was still trying to figure out how to put on a halter, couldn’t have differentiated between “he’s dozing in the sunshine” or “he’s probably dying.” I was on my own.

I slowly grew more confident in my role as solitary decision maker, though I made more calls to Allegheny Equine’s 24-hour call line in those first few years than I’d care to admit. 

Regardless, and especially as Elmo aged, and even when two horses turned into three, then four, then six, then eight, he remained the one who made me worry. He kept me home from work on a few occasions where my gut told me something wasn’t right. (Once, the vet determined he was just tired from switching over to night turnout.) One Christmas Eve, I found him choking at midnight, but he managed to clear it himself while I ran to the house to change out of my stockings and heels. In a rush to a niece’s graduation, I couldn’t remember whether I’d remembered his cribbing collar, and I asked a friend to drive to the barn to check. (I had. Thanks, Shelby.)

And before every trip—whether a little weekend getaway or longer vacation—Elmo received a stern lecture to keep it together while Mom wasn’t home. He was Not. To. Die. when someone else was watching the barn. He was to drink his water and eat his hay and poop his poop and just be on his genuinely best behavior or else. 

My two biggest fears any time we traveled: First, that someone else would have to make the call that only I should have to make. Second, that I wouldn’t be there to say goodbye. 

Colic didn’t take him in the end. I’ll save the details for another time, but one Saturday he was sauntering down the trail that looped our farm, 6-year-old lesson student on his back, and the next morning he was down in the pasture before I awoke. Somewhere inside of his abdomen, a tumor that had been growing silently had ruptured. He was 31. We’d been together for 23 years.

That day, I learned that the only thing worse than the horse who makes you worry is when that horse is no longer there to worry about. 

Back in the barn with Moose, I willed him to be still for a few more minutes then ran to the house. I took the stairs two at a time in shavings-coated boots. 

“Brad,” I whispered, nudging his arm. “Get up, please. I need your help. And put on real shoes.”

Down in the barn, we knelt behind Moose, discussing the safest way to right him. I called the vet, desperate for professional guidance. Brad and I searched “how to right a cast horse” on YouTube while we waited for the vet’s return call, and I questioned whether people should be allowed to keep horses without some sort of license. 

Moose sighed at our incompetency and scratched his head against the shavings on the floor. 

Brad and I debated trying to flip him over, but worried about his long flailing legs; the angle of his body didn’t give us a safe place to tuck out of the way if we could turn him to his other side.

I looked down again at the big horse. His plaid turnout rug was spread under his barrel like a picnic blanket. I’d unbuckled all the straps when I first found him, thinking that the blanket might be constricting the movement of his shoulders. Brad and I both noticed the loose fabric at Moose’s neck, and wondered if we could somehow budge his 1300-pound self away from the wall just enough. 

We grabbed handfuls, counted three, and heaved back, sliding Moose’s front end just enough for him extend a front leg, push off the wall, and right himself. He was standing in seconds. A weight lifted from my chest. 

Brad gave Moose’s neck a few pats, then retreated to the house. I led the big horse to the indoor and turned him loose, studying him for signs of injury or distress. Moose wandered around, sniffed some ground poles and my toddler’s collection of plastic trucks in the corner, then poked his head back into the barn to look for his friends. I tossed pint-sized Penelope, Moose’s best buddy, in with him and sat on the concrete aisle at the edge of the arena, watching the pair, until my butt went numb from cold. As sure as I could be that Moose was OK, I retreated to my bedroom where I stared into the dark until it was time to get up for work. 

A little over an hour later, I was back at the barn to feed and turn out. My stomach flip-flopped nervously when I slid open the arena door, but Moose and Penelope stood glued together in the middle of the arena, ears perked, visibly chuffed by their sleepover. 

Delivering hay to the fields, I sipped strong coffee and blinked dry eyes that protested both contacts and the cold air. Moose marched by my side out to his pasture, where I watched him walk away until he disappeared into the dark. 

I’m working on my worrying. 

There’s so much with horses that we can’t control. I could control Elmo’s cribbing collar and making sure he had full buckets of water before temperature swings, and I could stick my hands into warm buckets of soaking hay cubes, breaking up chunks. 

I couldn’t control a growing tumor, or what day on this Earth would be his last. 

So I’m trying to control the things I can, and let go of the things I can’t. I have a better idea now of what to do about a cast horse, and I have two soft lines of rope in the barn on a hook for the next time one chooses to get stuck. But I’m sure that for as long as I have horses at home, I’ll be continuing to face the unexpected, and I’ll keep learning as I go. 

But right now, as Moose is sauntering around the front pasture behind Penelope, and as long as he can still lay down and roll and get back up, and eat his grain and doze in the sunshine, I’m trying to remember to worry less and to enjoy him more. Because I know one day he will leave us, and the worrying is never as bad as the gaping hole he’ll leave behind. 

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Sarah K. Susa is the owner of Black Dog Stables just north of Pittsburgh, where she resides with her husband and young son. She has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Allegheny College and an M.Ed. from The University of Pennsylvania. She teaches high school English full-time, teaches riding lessons and facilitates educational programs at Black Dog Stables, and has no idea what you mean by the concept of free time.