The Drift from the mouth of a Dartmoor Pony

I was basking in the warm sun with my mother standing guard. Life was fun on the Moor with other foals to frolick with. The grass was juicy and longer than usual. All this rain my mother said. The Leat (streams) were full and fun to jump over or stand in and watch the water rushing by.  The holiday season was over so there were fewer people wanting to stroke me and point that thing at me which mother said was a camera. They even tried to feed me strange things like cabbage stalks. Yuk.

I stretched out lazily when suddenly there was a terrible noise, like hundreds of buzzing bees. I stood up and saw this thing rushing towards me. Mother said ‘ oh no, it’s the Quad bikes coming for us’. I was too frightened to ask what she meant. We all started running, chased by these things and big horses with people on them. Chaos, fear and running. We were being rounded up onto the lane. So many of us all together. Other herds joined us. We were corralled. We were kept there for ages, getting thirsty and scared. Then a huge cattle lorry came and we were pushed into it.

We trundled over the Moor on and on until eventually, we came to a stop. We were let out into a big field. All of us together. Tails up, snorting and charging around.  We were given water. We waited and waited. I wanted to go back to my Moor.

Farmers came to sort us out & check us over. We had our tails trimmed when we had been checked. There was the sound of a gun. Mother said, don’t look. Stay with me.  Some of our herd were rounded up ‘to be sold’.  At last, the rest of us were loaded back into the rattley truck and driven back to our Moor.  But not to our home. We were let out about ten miles some said to walk slowly to our part of the Moor.  Some mothers were calling for their foals, but they had been taken.  I was one of the lucky ones to brave another winter on the Moor. I rolled in the lovely rustic scratchy bracken. Home, at last, and free to roam.