Peggy
It was unusual to see old police horses on the streets of Toronto; the
policy was to foster them out to good homes while they still had some useful
years ahead of them. There was always a long list of people anxious to adopt
them; they were so quiet, safe and dependable it was almost like acquiring
an insurance policy.
The people making the decision when to farm them out were faced
with a dilemma: the animals didn’t have “Best Before” labels but they were
a valuable commodity and the trick was to get the maximum number of
years out of them and still leave them with enough health and vitality to
make them attractive to the people who might provide them with quiet
country homes in their dotage.
It wasn’t always just a practical issue; often officers and horses had
been paired up for years and had formed strong emotional attachments. It
wasn’t unusual for those in charge to put off placing a horse for a couple of
years so that it would coincide with the retirement of the cop who rode him.
I guess it was because of this that you occasionally saw an officer
with grey around his temples riding a horse with grey over the eyes.
It’s been a long time but whenever I’m able to conjure up a vision of
somebody I served with I always see his horse standing beside him. Pat
Wolfe with Duchess, Ron Bond with Joe, Merle Jones with Sandy and on
and on.
Sometimes a horse would face early retirement because they received
a permanent injury or become sore footed from the constant pounding on the
pavement. Roy Cardy had to part with his mount Peggy prematurely because
she injured her fetlock and was no longer up to the heavy work required of
her. She was a real old treasure, a very dark bay, comical to look at with her
oversized head and one slightly lopped off ear. It was a sad day for Roy
when he had to part with her but he consoled himself with the knowledge
that she was going to a good home.
The horses, while they were with the Mounted Unit, lived a good life,
well fed and looked after, almost pampered. Even after I left the job I kept
an eye out for suitable remounts for the Dept. I had already found a couple
and I knew they were going to a good home. Inspector Johnson seemed to
value my judgment and purchased them without question.
I was buying and selling a lot of horses at the time and attended all the
auctions and regularly made my rounds of the horse dealers: Alex Picou in
Oshawa, Alec Stewart at the Toronto Stock Yards, Les Erhlick in the heart
of the city, Vern Mason in Richmond Hill and Albert Greco in Kleinberg,
plus all the special auctions and the regular weekly one at Kitchener
Livestock Sales.
Alec Stewart had given me a call to say he had a couple of ‘second
hand horses’, as he called them, to show me; these were usually older horses
that his clients had traded in on the fancy purebred stock that he imported.
He knew that I was more interested in quiet temperaments than I was in
breeding and good looks. Some of the most useful school horses that I used
at my stable had come out of his pens.
Alec kept his horses at the old stockyards in the northwest corner of
the city, using a few of the pens you first encountered as you entered through
the main gates. The entire facility was comprised of about twenty acres of
neat orderly whitewashed pens separated by narrow cobbled alleyways. All
of it was covered in one low roof that kept the place in a constant state of
semi-darkness. The horse stalls that Alec kept benefited from the light from
a bank of windows along an outside wall but if you ventured further in, you
were enveloped in the gloom of the place and bombarded by the cries of
thousands of doomed cattle, sheep and pigs waiting their turn to enter the big
centre aisle where they would follow the Judas steer to the slaughterhouses
on the north side of Keele St. Neither was a certain class of horses, termed
meat horses, exempt from a similar fate. I knew where the pens were that
held those poor creatures but I tried not to think about them and seldom went
there.
When I arrived at the yards early one morning I first checked the
restaurant in the basement of the main building for Alec. He had already
finished his habitual bacon and eggs that morning and had headed out to see
to his horses. When I found him he was standing on a bale of hay peering
over the fence into one of his pens. I liked the old guy; he was the last of his
breed-- an agile seventy-two years of age at the time, still tall and erect and
bright as a penny. He was always dressed to the nines no matter where he
was or what he was doing, with jacket and tie and highly polished shoes
topped, when he was in the stable, with a long raincoat with a bamboo cane
hanging from an inside pocket. When he saw me he tilted back his grey
fedora and beckoned me over.
“See that sorrel mare in the corner?” he asked “How tall would you
say she was?”
I climbed up the rails to have a better look, “Oh, I dunno, maybe
about 15.2.” “That’s what I was thinking.” he said. “But I’ve got to be sure
because I’ve got some people coming to buy her. Listen, you’re younger
than me--climb in there and measure her for me.”
“Okee Dokee,” I said as I swung over the top rail and dropped into the
pen. He unhooked the cane from inside his slicker and handed it to me
through the rails of the fence. I loved that cane, hidden inside the shaft was a
long, narrow telescopic ruler with a flip-out arm with a level on the top. I
backed the mare into a corner and she stood quietly while I held the cane
ruler against her shoulder, extracted the ruler and settled the level arm down
on her withers.
“I guess we were both wrong,’ I said, “She’s about 15.3. She’ll be
sixteen hands with shoes on.”
“All the better” he beamed, and then I surrendered his wonderful
antique cane to him, jokingly restating my desire that he leave it to me in his
will.
By now, his customers had found their way to his area of the yards
and as they approached where we were standing, he pointed down the
alleyway in the opposite direction saying, “Go down to pen number 23--
that’s where those horses I told you about are.” I can take a hint so I made
myself scarce and headed in the direction he indicated, He didn’t like me
around when he priced his horses to the general public because he knew that
I knew that they were generally worth about half as much as he was asking.
Anyway I busied myself in the wholesale division of his establishment,
picking out a couple of geldings, an old Palomino and a little bay Standard
Bred with a star on his forehead. I tried each of them out, riding them around
the pen bareback steering them with the top strap of their halter; they seemed
to know what they were doing. If the price was right they would be coming
home with me.
Alec was still busy with his customers when I finished trying out the
horses I was interested in, so I wandered off into the inner part of the yards
to kill time. I was thinking about something else as I wandered through the
aisles and was surprised when I found myself next to the pens that contained
the meat horses. My first instinct was to turn and walk the other way but
some weird compulsion drew me to the pens where I climbed the rails for a
closer look.
The scene was what I expected to see: about a dozen dejected looking
horses, mostly heavy draft animals in poor condition with heavy winter
coats; they had obviously been kept outside all winter. There was very little
colour variation in the group, all blacks or dark bays with occasional white
patches on their backs and shoulders where they had been galled by years of
work in harness. Most stood with their heads hanging, puffing wisps of
frozen vapour that rose and hung over the pen in a low, thin static cloud.
Some stood on three legs nursing old injuries while others hunkered
back on their hindquarters to relieve the pressure on their foundered front
feet. It was a sad lot but there was nothing I could do about it. I figured the
sooner they got put out of their misery the better.
One animal in particular caught my eye. She seemed more animated
than the rest of the bunch moving around the pen, weaving in and out of the
other animals and going over to the long manger periodically and grabbing
mouthfuls of hay. She didn’t show as much draft blood as the rest of the
group; her hair was incredibly long and it made her body seem thicker and
fuller than it really was. As I climbed down to leave she came forward and
hung her head over the top rail directly in front of me. That’s when I noticed
it; it hadn’t been noticeable at a distance because her hair was so long, even
the fuzz on her ears, but now I could see it: her right ear was not pointed
like the left, it was shorter with a blunt straight top. I couldn’t believe my
eyes but as I imagined her with a short and shiny coat, without the long hair
and the pellets of dung that adhered to her rear end, I knew it must be her. I
climbed back up and over the rail, grabbed hold of her halter and eased
myself onto her back. I pulled back gently and whispered, “Back, back.” She
responded immediately. When we were in the middle of the pen, I moved
her around, neck-reining her in both directions. She turned without
hesitation. Then I gave her the final test: halting her and restricting her
forward motion, I applied my right leg to her flank; she did a perfect side
passage to the left sweeping the other horses out of her way as she went.
“Well, for Christ sake, it is you, Peggy, old girl!” I said as I slid down off
her back, rubbing her eyes and making much of her. The swelling on her
fetlock confirmed the obvious so I told her to wait while I went to see if I
could spring her.
The agent in charge was reluctant to do business with me because
he said the whole group of horses had been spoken for. He changed his mind
when I offered him double the going price of fifteen cents a pound and we
weren’t long weighing her and him pocketing the three hundred and thirty
dollars cash I gave him.
As I led her over to Alec’s stalls, I was pleased to see that she
wasn’t limping or favouring her old injury. I put her in the pen with my
other purchases and before the day was out they were all trucked to the
safety of my stables.
I couldn’t wait to tell Big Ed about rescuing Peggy but I wanted to
clean her up a bit first so I waited ‘till the next morning. Overnight I decided
that I would have a little fun with him so I devised a plan. He lived in the
cottage next to mine in Sunnybrook Park and I made sure I was waiting at
the paddock fence as he made his way over to his office the next morning. I
had already turned Peggy loose in the enclosure and place some hay in a
corner furthest from where I stood waiting for the Inspector to pass. He
grunted, “Good morning,” and I started right in on him. “Look over there,
Inspector, I’ve got another new horse for you.” He squinted in her direction
for a while then said, “Well, she looks the right sort from here, a little rough
but she’d probably clean up, how old is she?”
“Ya know, I’m not quite sure. Why don’t you come over with me
and we’ll check her mouth.”
The horse stood still and watched us as we opened the gate and
headed over to her. I grabbed the fancy new halter I had put on her while the
Inspector parted her lips and looked in her mouth. He looked a little startled
when he saw the length of her teeth then something dawned on him. Without
a word he reached up and caressed her chopped off ear. Then, still remaining
silent, knelt down and felt for h
er injured fetlock. He uttered one word and I
started explaining.
As my story unfolded, his face became redder and redder until I
thought the top of his head was about to blow off. When I finished he turned
and marched purposely toward his office. I knew he was a man on a mission
and I pitied the person who had betrayed his trust and sold Peggy down the
river.
I never found out exactly how he handled the matter but I made
darn sure that the home I subsequently found for her was the very best and I
know she enjoyed her remaining years until, much later, she was finally laid
to rest in an orchard next to her pasture. |
| Roy Cardy with Peggy's replacement |
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