My legs were a dead weight as I dragged them behind me, crawling like a soldier in the trenches. I slithered on my belly, using my elbows to lever myself, trying to keep my momentum and inching forward on my forearms. With each drag I felt the grass poke and scratch me through my wet clothes, digging into my elbows, arms and stomach as I pulled myself across the ground. Soon, the cloth of my shirt had been ripped away and I was crawling on my bare skin. Pain shot through my arms as I put one forward and then the other, time and again, inching and inching. It was so slow! Was I even getting closer to Loulou? And then, I began to see my progress. With every painful belly slither, I was getting nearer. One arm in front of the other, brace, drag, pull, do it again. Until, at last, I was there, right behind the hindquarters of the mare.

“Loulou!” I was panting, exhausted. My arms were bloody and grazed, but I had made it. “Loulou, be brave … good girl, I’m just going to slip my hand up here to feel inside you …”

I pushed aside her tail, and then as I put my hands there I felt the mare kick! Loulou, startled by my touch, had lashed out and struck me in the shins! The kick was hard and it was square against my legs. For all I knew it had broken a bone. Yet I didn’t feel it. My legs, after all, were already numb and paralysed. So it didn’t hurt at all and I carried on. I spoke soothing words to her and I pushed, harder this time with my fingers, so that a moment later I felt my whole hand enter the birth canal and then my forearm had gone inside the mare.

Very gently, I began to feel where I expected the foal to be. A foal is born front feet first. So I should have been grasping for a front hoof. But that wasn’t what I felt at all. The foal must have turned the wrong way so that it lay sideways twisted in her belly, creating a breach. No wonder she couldn’t deliver like this!