On the third day of the new year, Dusty, a bay Morgan gelding, collapsed in the morning rain. His giant body was stuck – halfway in his stable, halfway out.
The horse was 29 years old and had collapsed once or twice before, but never like this. Nancy Miller coaxed and pulled and pushed. The fire department came, then the vet, with an IV of fluids. But Dusty, panicked and wild-eyed, couldn’t get up. There was so much mud. His brown coat, which Nancy had stroked and brushed for 22 years, had turned nearly black, covered and soaked in the unforgiving winter mud and grime.
Dusty, a 29-year-old bay Morgan horse, outside his home in Soddy-Daisy. (Contributed photo)“I got Dusty when I was 10,” Nancy said. “After 22 years, he had become my life.”
She was a girl when her grandfather, a carpenter, drove her out to Chickamauga Battlefield, where they were auctioning off stable horses.
“Every horse-crazy little girl wants a horse,” she said. “And I was lucky to have this dream come true.”