For several years I kept my own stable

For several years I kept my own stable. It was a painful and unprofitable business, but that's for another thread.

The first couple of months I lived there in the literal sense - I had no money for a groom, and the horses needed watching around the clock. I must say that the place was remote, despite the fact that we were on the territory of the recreation center. Just beyond the cabin where I slept, a dark and somewhat unpleasant spruce forest began. Going out in the evening to check on the horses, or just to the separate toilet, I lit the street light - it was scary to the point of creeping out: it seemed that from the spruce forest someone was looking at me closely and unkindly.

Then things slowly, slowly got going, and I was able to hire a girl to take over for me a few days a week. She was the first and began to tell me that the stable is not quiet - then someone will close her in the toilet, then in the morning in the hay barn all thrown out and scattered, the horses are worried, at night in the walls of hoof beats and roaring. I must say, I do not take mysticism calmly, nothing but the silent threat of the forest did not feel, and so her words did not pay attention.

And so, I came one evening, let Olga go, took some of the horses to the levada at night, drank some tea and went to bed. I woke up from a wild shriek, the way I heard when stallions were fighting.

I rushed out in my best clothes and saw an unfamiliar horse in the levade with my walking Budennovets. I must say, my red-haired beast was notable for its rather rotten character, about horses they say "strict", and he could not stand other stallions.

Our territory was closed, and no one else's horse could get it. I cursed Olga with the last words, who, evidently, had taken the horse to stay and forgot to tell me about it. My chest breaks through the gate and gallops to the stable. I put a halter on someone else's foal, take him out, tie him to the post and go to the stable - to close my own and find out in which barn was a newcomer.

There are no free stalls. Well, Olga was not crazy to take a horse to stay, not having a free room for that! She decided to leave her horse in the paddock for the night, thanks to the summer. I went out, and the horse was gone. I saw the halter tied to the halter by the pole, but neither tall sallow stallion, nor his hoofprints in the puddle near the sink.

I could not sleep.

I remembered that I occasionally heard a distant ringing in the woods, but I did not pay attention.

What kind of creature I was trying to get into the stable at the time, I don't know to this day.