Tug replied, “Yes sir,” but was thinking, Dammit. “I’ll get him moved as soon as we get the feet on these horses trimmed up and get ‘em turned out again.”

The colt was pacing the fence line the farthest he could get from the humans. He had already worked himself into a lather, and despite the questioning looks from his adopted herd, he couldn’t calm down. It was one thing to be caught in such a small enclosure with a band of horses he barely trusted. But just when he thought he had one thing he was seeing or smelling figured out, it would suddenly change. He had never seen a horse with a human on its back before, and so his initial assumption was it was one animal, not two separate ones. When the rider dismounted, it gave the impression the animal suddenly split in two, and he panicked, turned and ran, nearly crashing headlong into the opposite fence. Having already done that in the pasture when he first saw the riders approaching, he knew better this time and veered off at the last minute, before going back to pacing the fence line, throwing his head over the top rail and trying to find a way out.

While things looked much different than anything he had ever seen, it was the smells he was experiencing that were even more troublesome. He was used to dealing with and being around horses, and even though all horses have a slightly different body odor which allows them to be distinguished one from the other, they also smell relatively the same. When a horse comes across another horse, there is no question he is encountering another horse just by the way the animal smells. In fact, the difference in odor from one horse to another is so subtle, it would be like comparing the sound of water in a creek going around a soccer-sized rock, as opposed to a basketball-sized rock.

But here, not only were there horses that smelled a little different than anything he had ever encountered before, but there were also mules, which smelled completely different, although relatively the same from one to the other. The most disturbing odors, however, came from the humans. The humans smelled so completely different his mind was having a hard time processing the information. As far as he could tell, each individual human had the same odor—the one that was specific to the species—but it could barely be distinguished over the individual human’s completely different odor that nearly covered it up. While horse’s individual odor was subtle, like the sound of water moving around different sized rocks, human’s individual odor was more like the difference between a tree falling and a clap of thunder. Both of which were extremely overbearing to the colt when he experienced them in close proximity to the source.

For the colt, it had always been the subtlety of the individual animal’s odor that allowed him to process the information about it quickly and smoothly in his brain, causing him the least amount of stress, effort and energy in the gathering of that information. It was what he was used to and what he understood. Being bombarded by one overpowering odor after another was almost more than he could handle, and he did everything he could to stay as far from the humans as possible.