A horse is built to run. A donkey is built to stand and think about it. You have met Hector. This is the other half of his field.
Here is the thing nobody warns you about a parade horse. Hector stood through the King's Troop and the massed bands and a nation's worst day without shifting a hoof, and he will still, in a quiet Welsh field, levitate sideways at a pheasant coming out of a hedge. A carrier bag on the wind is, to a horse, a clear and present danger. The guns were a job, and the job had rules. The hedge has a pheasant in it and no rules at all, and so the flight animal underneath the seventeen years of training remains, on the matter of pheasants, entirely undefeated.
Nelson does not look up.
Nelson has never looked up. A donkey does not flee, it assesses, and it assessed the pheasant long ago and found it beneath comment. People call that stubbornness. It is an animal declining to spend adrenaline it sees no reason to spend.
And here is the domestic arrangement, which anyone who has kept the two together will know on sight. Nelson is a third of Hector's size and entirely in charge. He eats first. He picks the dry spot. He decides when they move. The black charger who carried the weight of the state stands by, with enormous patience, while a small grey donkey finishes the good hay.
The one thing that reliably undoes Hector is Nelson leaving the field. Five minutes, a foot trim, a vet down the lane, and the great composed horse comes apart at the gate, calling and calling, because a horse is herd to its bones and has decided that its herd is one unbothered donkey.
Nelson, for his part, despises rain. A desert animal washed up in Denbighshire, he stands in the shelter looking martyred while Hector grazes out in the wet, waterproof and serene.
Two opposite natures, each propping up the other exactly where it is weak. The horse who fears small things and the donkey who fears nothing at all. It works. It was always going to.