It was October of 2001 and I was on my way from Barcelona back to Switzerland to return the camper van that Kumiko and I had rented.  I was just coming into some unknown French town when I passed two horses grazing in a small field - make that a very small field.  As I drove past at about 70 km/h, I only got the briefest glimpse of the horses - more like a snapshot in my mind's eye.

But as I continued down the road, reviewing the image in my mind, I realized something just wasn't quite right.  Each horse was on a  tether about fifteen meters in length.  One was grazing, as you would expect.  The other was standing with its head lowered - but not all the way to the ground in grazing-stance - and was holding it only a few centimeters from a support cable for a telephone pole at the edge of the field near the road.

I was compelled to turn around and go back to investigate.  I parked the van in a driveway adjacent to where the horses were tethered.  As I approached the horse, I could see that something was indeed not quite right.  In his slow meandering while he grazed, he had obviously walked between the cable (stretched from high up the pole down to the ground) and the pole itself.  At some point, he must have realized that he could no longer move around as much as before and, maybe in a panic, had run around the cable several more times - probably thrashing about while trying to get free.

I came to this conclusion because, by the time I arrived, his tether was wrapped about eight times around the cable, and pulled so tightly that I couldn't move it at all.  I knew that I wouldn't be able to get the horse to walk eight times around the cable in the other direction in order to free him.  The only way to get the tether loose would be to unfasten it from the horse's halter, unwrap it from the cable, and reattach it to the horse again.

My worst fear was that, if I attempted this by myself - holding the horse with one hand while working the tether loose with the other - the horse could very easily get away from me.  And the last thing I wanted was to be responsible for losing someone's property in an unknown village in southwest France.

I went to the nearest house (where I had parked the van) and, as I approached the door, a man called to me from an upstairs window.  He couldn't speak English, so it was difficult to explain the problem.  I simply resorted to pointing in the direction of the field and motioning for him to come with me.  He indicated that he couldn't walk very well and kept pointing toward the town.  I guessed he was telling me that the owner of the horse lived in that direction.

I knew my chances of finding the owner were slim to none, so I went back to see if I could do something on my own.  Suddenly, I remembered I still had one of the cable-style locks that we had purchased along with the bicycles when we rented the van.  The other lock went with the bikes when they were stolen in Amsterdam - but that's another .

I slipped the cable-lock through the horse's halter and around the telephone pole cable, which made it impossible for the horse to get away.  Then I unfastened the tether, unwrapped it from the cable, and reattached it to the halter, as was my original plan.  When I removed my lock and freed the horse, he simply went back to grazing again, without so much as a snort of thanks in my direction.  But I drove away with the nice warm feeling that comes from doing my good deed for the day.