DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a horse who lived near Mullingar. She was a beautiful bay mare, but she broke out of her field one day and wandered far away, and got tangled in barbed wire, writes MICHAEL HARDING.

The wire twisted around her back leg, and by the time she was found, the leg had almost severed. She had pulled away fiercely, but the wire just continued to tighten around the bone.

People said she would have to be put down, but the owner, who loved her greatly, wouldn't hear of that.

Instead, the bay mare, with skin as silky as a chestnut, was nursed back to health, her dressings changed twice or three times a day, over a period of six months, until she recovered. And then she was put in foal.

Horses endure 11 months of pregnancy, and because the bay mare's dates were mixed up, people were on their toes six weeks too soon.

But then one day I heard through the grapevine that the mare was about to produce milk. The hour was almost at hand.

I was asleep when I got a phone call around midnight on Wednesday, to attend in a stable yard just outside the town.

I am not a vet. I am as useless in a stable yard as a chocolate teapot; but I could not resist.

When I arrived, the newborn had just been released from the amniotic sack, and lay as slippery as an eel in the stable straw.

People moved about beneath the half-moon and the clear sky; whispering, watching, and using their phones to take photos.

The mare was still sweating in the straw, her eyes half-closed. She had huge long eyelashes.

She rose to her feet. The little foal lay in the straw. Everyone waited to see if he would get up.

"You're used to this sort of thing," I said to the man in charge.

"This is the second tonight," he said, "and two more due; last week we had 10."

Most mares foal around the same time of year; and most of them foal at night.

"It's in their nature," he said, "so that the foal can rise and be on its feet before dawn, when, in ancient times, the herd might be ready to move off."

People in the yard were still on edge; anxious that the afterbirth would be evacuated efficiently and completely. When it did arrive, it was taken to the end of the yard, in a bucket and thoroughly scrutinised. Anything that might remain inside the mare could poison her.

Suddenly a fuss stirred, concerning the stable straw; barrows of it were wheeled down the yard so as to make the cement floor soft and warm for where the young foal, not yet an hour in the world, was lying still.

For 30 minutes, the foal made attempts to stand. He was like a hopping frog. Finally, he succeeded, standing with long spindly limbs splayed out, like a Daddy-long-legs.

People tried to get him to suckle but he wasn't able to find the milk, and so he sucked a lot at the skin under the belly, until someone helped him to the teat.

The hindquarters of the bay mare were wiped with a cloth and a bucket of warm water.

By then it was late in the night, and I decided to go home. Others remained until dawn. Some who went to bed could not sleep; some remained all night in the stable just gazing at the shivering life; the foal dozing in the shelter of its mother's great haunches, and her palpitating heart.

Thursday morning was cold; the people decided not to allow the foal outside. When

he finally took his first steps up the yard, on Friday, towards the fields, some of the

other horses made a great show of neighing, and banging the stable doors with their hooves.

At the weekend he got injections, and was put out to grass. The big bay mare grazed

with him, and never took her eyes off him, all day.

The bay mare will never jump again, but her little foal will probably find his way in and out of many horse boxes and lorries, and even aeroplanes, through many sales and various stable yards, into the pockets of countless arenas and over many jumps, in Cavan and Belfast, in Hickstead and the RDS, as he jumps the jumps of a well-bred beast from the plains of Westmeath, on his four perfectly formed little legs.