Hector went down with colic on Thursday night, and Nelson, who has never hurried in his life, walked the yard with him for an hour and a half. The farmer found him at ten, pawing, looking round at his own flank, dropping down and getting up again, which in a horse means his gut has stopped and you ring the vet and you walk him. You walk him so he does not roll, because a horse that rolls with a twisted gut can finish himself, and you walk him because walking sometimes shifts it, and you walk him because it is the only thing you can do and standing there is worse. The vet was forty minutes away. So the farmer put a headcollar on seventeen hands of trembling Cavalry Black and led him out of the shelter, round the yard, under the light, and the horse, who has walked in step beside a man for seventeen years, walked in step beside a man, with sweat coming through the thick new coat and his eye white at the corner. Nelson came out of the shelter behind them. A donkey walks when there is a reason to walk, and the reason is usually grass. He had been in his dry corner, in the straw, with the night exactly as he likes it, and he came out into the yard without being called, fell in on the horse's off side, and walked. The farmer did one lap. The donkey did one lap. The farmer did twenty laps and the donkey did twenty laps, at the horse's pace, two feet from his shoulder, and did not stop, and did not graze, and did not once look at the gate. When Hector tried to go down, the donkey was in the way. Not pushing. Standing where the horse wanted to drop, so the horse had to stay up. The vet came at twenty to eleven. He put a needle in the neck and the thing eased inside half an hour, which it usually does when it is going to, and Hector passed a load in the corner of the yard that the farmer said was the finest thing he had ever seen a horse do. The vet asked how long the donkey had been walking. The farmer said since ten. The vet said in twenty years he had seen a lot of people walk a colic and had never once seen anything else do it. By midnight Hector was eating hay, carefully, with Nelson next to him. The donkey had walked further in ninety minutes than he walks in a week, and he went back into the straw and lay down without looking at anybody. The farmer went in and sat at the kitchen table in his coat for a while. He is not a man who sits at the kitchen table in his coat. A horse has never asked that donkey for anything. The donkey has never been given an order. Somewhere in there they have come to an arrangement, and on Thursday night it was walking.