Nelson brayed on Wednesday, which he has done twice in his life, and both previous times it was about hay. This was not about hay. You have to understand Nelson to understand the size of it. He is a small grey donkey who came free with a horse and has spent every day since assessing the world and finding almost none of it worth a reaction. A pheasant out of the hedge: beneath comment. A carrier bag on the wind: management's problem. The farrier, the vet, Martin the postman at the gate every single morning: all filed, long ago, under fine. Nelson does not spend adrenaline. He has a lifetime's supply precisely because he has never once dipped into it for anything that did not concern the hay. Hector is the one who comes apart. Seventeen years a Cavalry Black, seventeen hands of trained composure, and still, in a quiet field, undone by small things with no rules to them. And undone completely, every time, by the one thing that has never had a rule: Nelson leaving the field. On Wednesday it was the other way round. Hector went down in the morning and did not get up cleanly. Nothing dramatic to look at, a big old horse struggling on wet ground to fold his legs back under him, the way big old horses sometimes do, more indignity than danger. But he was down, and he was working at it, and he was not managing it, and the field was suddenly a place where the large warm reliable thing was not upright. Nelson stood over him. Then Nelson, who assesses everything and hurries for nothing and does not raise the alarm because in his considered view nothing is ever worth waking a tired horse for, raised the alarm. The full cracked bugle of it, flung down the lane, on and on, a donkey who does not do this doing this, until the farmer came out of the house at a run, because a silent donkey suddenly loud means something is wrong in a way a noisy one never could. The farmer got Hector up. It was fine. It was, in the end, a big horse and a bad patch of ground and a bruised dignity, nothing more. Nelson stopped the moment Hector was on his feet. He has not mentioned it since. He went back to the hay. He has assessed the incident and, by every sign available, filed it under dealt with. But he broke his own rule for it. In a whole life of spending no adrenaline on anything, he spent all of it at once, on the one thing he has never admitted to caring about. Hector is grazing this morning, upright, enormous, fine. Nelson is beside him, in the dry corner, first at the hay, saying nothing. He would tell you it was about the hay.