O dear… looks like we have a bit of a problem..!

Picture this……..!

In one of the most remote corners of a very very large back country cattle station, waking up from a wonderful nights sleep in the Cattle Creek hut, grabbing two canvas horse feed bags…. walking down through the bush track to the stream below, filling both bags with water then trudging back up the hill, past the hut and out up the hill further to the small horse paddock to give my two horses on this trek a drink, as there was no stream or water source within said paddock…

Both Shae and Bailey came down off the hill from feeding to greet me and of course have a drink, and as usual while they are milling around I cast my eye over both of them to make sure they haven’t injured themselves and to make sure they are both ready for today’s continuation of our current trek…

To my horror as I checked Shae, I discovered that he had dropped a rear shoe, presumably over night in the paddock as I was riding him the day before and on stony ground if a horse is missing any shoe they start limping somewhat, but had not noticed any limping or favoring of legs…

Now as an experienced horseman, for a horse to loose a rear shoe is relatively rare, infact all of my hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of back country trekking apart from this incident I have never known any horse to loose one… Front shoes on the other hand is a reasonably frequent occurrence, and we have a range of front shoes of differing sizes that we carry and all the tooling needed to address this issue when it arises.

Because we need to be very conscience of weight carried, and the rare occurrence of loosing a rear shoe, coupled with the need to carry several sizes of shoe to fit the different feet size I opt not to carry rears on treks… 

Ok… what to do..?

The horse paddock was only about a acre and half in size, so thought there would be a reasonable chance of finding it on the ground, so started a grid pattern search, back and forth across the hill about 5 metres apart all the way to the top…. but NO CIGAR…. darn… ok  I will do a second grid up and down the paddock, but finishing this again NO CIGAR…

Now I had a couple of fronts that fit Shae, and tried both of these as a fit on his missing rear foot, however front shoes are bent quite a different shape to rears, with the former being much wider on the sides and if I was to nail it on then within a short time shae would have stepped on the protruding metal sticking out and ripped it straight back off and probably taking some of the vital hoof side wall with it… so not an option like this..

So having no tools to change the front shoe shape to be bent to form a suitable substitute rear, I faced a huge problem…

Because of where we were, poor Shaes feet wouldn’t last ten minutes walking on rocky stony ground even if we tried to ride straight out to the station homestead without a shoe on…

So……. again what can I do to fix this problem….?

Taking the closest fitting front spare shoe I used my long handle nail nip up pliers and used these to hold the shoe against the big rock in the left of the hut photo, and finding a short length of galvanized 2 inch pipe, bashed the shoe both sides to close it up somewhat which initially was a good idea and worked, however trying this bashed shape on the rear foot, the two ends of the shoe had become together too close to fit his middle of foot FROG,,, which is a rubbery component of his foot and if put on like this would hurt him… 

So… I had the shoe width a lot better but now how the heck am I going to bend the two shoe ends out to fit around said frog…? 

HEAT was needed… so thought if I get the fire going in the hut and a really big and hot fire then place the shoe in the red hot ashes that would hopefully get the metal soft enough to bend…

Again with all the time spent getting the fire as hot as I could the shoe never turned anywhere near red hot, and taking it back out to the rock and trying to bend the ends out using the pipe, it was hopeless…

Suddenly I had a brainwave…….. if I put the shoe back in the fire and get it as hot as I could then……. with my butane gas burner used to cook my meals, turned right up and concentrating the flame on just one end, it started to turn somewhat red…..

So dashed out the hut door and bashing it with the pipe, the metal end moved out… back in the hut for a repeat of the other side , we had a very crude shape that might now work…

Throwing the shoe in cold water and with fingers crossed, headed up to Shae and tried it for fit…… WOW… the frog was clear, and only about 5 mm of metal was protruding out the side of his foot, I thought hopefully it will be near enough…

Nailing it on, it looked sort of ok…

By now I had lost most of this days trekking time so decided to stay an extra night and head off in the morning but……. will the shoe still be on him overnight..?

Next morning I awoke early and with fingers crossed walked up to the paddock hoping like heck that he hadn’t stood on the protrusion …

BY GOLLY…. the shoe was still on……Y>>>>E>>>>S>>>>>S>>>> 

Saddling up both the pack and riding horse we set off to our next hut destination and all day I kept looking down to see if it staying put….

Well it lasted the rest of the 120 kilometres, and infact left it on until the farrier was next due for a new set, and it stayed put….

I have to say I have never forgotten this little incident…