Stories from the Amazon - Leilani

Leilani was one of the most special horses I ever had the privilege to own. Her story starts a long time before she became my mare. I was at a horse event one weekend. There was one big ranch owned by rich people who had a big beautiful barn full of nice horses and a bunch of arenas, a fancy auction arena, a straightaway race track for horse racing, arenas for roping and barrel racing and who knows what else. Any time I heard of a horse event going on there I made a way to get there and attend. This weekend was one of those fun events. I loved to walk through the barns and admire the horses and dream of one day having a barn full of fancy horses like those. There were two horses in particular that stood out to me that weekend. One was a tall grey mare and one was a big dark bay mare. They looked different from the other horses so I asked around and found out they were recently brought up north from southern Brazil, the land of good registered horses and rodeos. Both these mares were well trained for barrel racing and had been champion barrel racers. I'm sure the rich guy wanted to buy them for his daughter or girlfriend. That's usually how things like that work in Brazil. I stood there for a long time feasting my eyes on the two beauties and thought to myself that I would love to have a horse like that but didn't think I could ever afford one. A year or more passed and I didn't really think about those horses much anymore and didn't happen to see them again. During that time I lost my brother and was in another part of the country and then we went to Hawaii in hopes of finding my brother. Finally after all that I made it back to my hometown to live. I needed to figure out what to do with my life. I had been working for about 5 years on the mission field but losing my brother changed me and I felt the need to be with the rest of my family for a while. But I had bills to pay and didn't want to just float around life in my grief. All my life people had asked me if I was going to become a veterinarian but I really just wanting to raise horses, train them and do something with horses. So I put a fleece before God asking Him for direction. I decided to try to get into vet college and if I couldn't pass the tests then I'd open an equestrian center. I studied and did my best and took the entry test to two colleges in towns I thought I might like to live in and waiting anxiously but ended up not passing the tests. I was actually quite sad since I had put a lot of effort and study into that. But I figured that was God's way of answering my question of what I should do with my life and I went forward with the equestrian center. I got my first students and started building an arena and after a short time I got the money to build a nice 8 stall barn. I needed lesson horses so I went through quite a few trying to get the best ones. One day we went out to that fancy ranch. It had been pretty neglected in the years that I hadn't been around and it looked run down. The horses were all in the pasture grazing and the owner told me to go look at them and tell him which one I wanted to buy. Reluctantly I went out there and started looking at the horses. They were all pretty skinny and didn't look very tame. Until my eyes fell on a tall grey mare, who happened to be a bag of bones. My heart lept in my chest as I recognized her. I decided to play it cool and not show the owner how excited I was to see that mare in the pen full of options. He asked me if I found one I wanted. I told him not really, except maybe the grey mare. He then told me that she was worth a lot of money because she was a barrel racing champion. We haggled for quite a while with me pointing out to him how terrible she looked and she wasn't worth that anymore. Finally he agreed to sell her to me for a very reasonable price. I was thrilled out of my mind and brought her back to the ranch and started feeding her and pampering her again. She quickly gained weight and I started riding her. She was the perfect lesson horse, my favorite horse to ride and she definitely knew the barrel pattern. I set up some barrels and she flew around them. It was exhilerating. I named her Leilani which means White Flower, after the time I spent in Hawaii hoping to see my brother again since her arrival into my life was pretty soon after losing John. I had the riding center going pretty well and had some boarding horses and was also training some for other people, as well as the students that rode with me weekly. One of my boarders was a trained barrel racing stallion, big bay, solid looking horse. I decided to get a breeding to him for Leilani to get another barrel horse out of the two of them. The stallion owner agreed and all was going well with her pregnancy. About 2 weeks or so before her due date, it was a Sunday afternoon and I was cleaning the house. I was married by this time and my husband had left for the weekend to a rodeo. One of our good friends, Charles, was staying at the farm hanging out with the farm hands. He used to like to come spend weekends with us. We had a farm hand who was a big jokester. He would joke around a lot and you could barely believe half the things he said. On this day he had been at the barn tending the horses and he came over to my house and called me and told me Leilani's guts were hanging out. I didn't believe him. I said, "No way. Horses guts just can't fall out of their bodies." He urgently insisted that indeed her guts were falling out of her belly and finally I believed him and went running as fast as I could to the barn, which was on the other side of a big hill. The worker was hot on my tail and Charles followed along behind. My heart sank to the bottom of my feet when I saw her. Sure enough she had a big trail of guts hanging down and she was in a cold sweat from head to toe. She was in so much pain and kept laying down and getting up. We tried to keep her on her feet because every time she would lay down and get back up, more of her insides came out. Tears and sobs were pouring out of my body as I tried to figure out what to do to help her. I made the worker hold Leilani while I climbed to the top of the hill to try and get ahold of a vet. To my great dismay it turned out that all the veterinarians in the whole entire town were at a conference and only one was on call for the whole city. He agreed to come out and see what he could do. Town was about a 15 or 20 minute drive from the farm so I was hoping he would arrive in time. I told Charles to run back to the house and get all the knives he could find out of my kitchen because if she died I was going to try and cut the baby out of her and at least try and save baby. Now Charles was scared of seeing blood so when he returned, he handed me all the knives without looking at poor Leilani.I was furious with my husband for not being there to help me and for not leaving me with a gun to put the poor mare out of her misery. It broke my heart in a million pieces to watch her suffer with her insides trailing out behind her now. The vet finally showed up about 45 minutes after I called him. He took one look at her and about the only thing he said was that he could try to clean it all up and put her guts back in and sew her back up. Even an idiot could see that there was no way she was going to survive much longer. Shock was already setting in. Cold sweat was dripping from her, blood was everywhere and she had stepped on the guts so many times by that time in her agony that I knew the only thing to do was put her out of her suffering. The vet cut the baby out and put Leilani down. She was a beautiful bay filly, just what I had wanted. She was surprised to see the sunlight all of a sudden, ripped out of her warm, dark womb. She tried to stand up. Every foal is born with soft pads on the bottom of their feet to protect the mother during birth. Hers however were extra soft, almost like her hooves hadnt fully developed yet. I carried her to the house and laid her on a mattress in my bedroom and frantically went to all the neigbors to try and find some colostrum to feed her. I finally found someone who had just had a calf born and they gave me a gallon of the colostrum. She drank it with gusto and kept trying to get up. Her hooves just kind of seemed to fall apart an I desperately tried to keep her from standing. Or at the least, make sure she had enough padding to not hurt herself any more. I fed her every couple of hours. She never managed to poop, although she tried. When Monday came along, my regular vet came to check her but by that time she was too weak and fragile. He did the best he could to try and save her but she was just born too early for any chance of survival in an Amazonian jungle life. She died later that day along with my barrel racing dreams. In my lifetime of having horses there have been a few that I've lost to very tragic accidents that left me completely shattered with the horror of it. This was the first of those.