Wild About Horses Page 2

  Customs among horse cultures were rich and varied, but the similarities were sometimes striking. Plains Indian tribes were true masters of the horse, and among the Crow, for example, horse and rider were so much considered as one entity that a warrior would strike a man’s horse in the face to insult the owner. Is it pure coincidence that among the Siberian Kirghiz, a continent and centuries away, to strike another man’s horse or even to speak harshly to the horse, was akin to insulting the owner?

  Few societies have failed to be touched in some way by the horse. Early humans formed horse cults, created complex cosmologies with winged horses, explained the rising and setting of the sun as the work of heavenly horses pulling the orb across the sky. All over the ancient world, the horse figured almost as much in human consciousness as the sun itself.

  It was believed that in the afterlife horses, too, would be resurrected, some wearing the gold-plated girths, richly embroidered saddle cloths and bronze tail rings they had been buried with, standing in their graves as if ready for one last, glorious ride.

  In Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, a veteran of cavalry wars opines on the nature of horses — how “the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose,” how horses love war and have no need of heaven. And when the old Mexican is asked what would happen to horses’ souls were horses to disappear from the face of the earth, he assures that “God would not permit such a thing.”

  Such confidence in the future of horses can only come from exceedingly deep roots — the oral traditions and ancient mythologies that were the precursors to our literature. There, the horse loomed large.

  Always were, McCarthy’s sage seems to say of horses, always will be.

  It was long thought that the first rider mounted a horse some four thousand years ago, but recent discoveries keep pushing that moment further and further back into the recesses of time.

  During the 1960s, a horse-head carving — with engraved lines that could be a halter — was found in southwest France in a cave known as La Marche. The carving is up to fifteen thousand years old. “Upper Palaeolithic people,” says paleontologist Paul Bahn, “were of exactly the same intelligence as we are. You’d expect that it would dawn on them that they might be able to do more with horses than simply throw a spear at them when they were feeling hungry.” The image of Ice Age people “galloping across the chilly grasslands of Europe” might conflict with our preconceptions, says his colleague Richard Leakey, but may well be accurate.

  And what to make of thirty-thousand-year-old horse teeth that show evidence of crib biting — the habit of biting on hard objects that only corralled or tethered horses engage in? Did confined horses serve as pets, as decoys, or as a ready source of fresh meat? And when did that first courageous human ride the first horse? Teeth, it turns out, may offer the best evidence for dating the elusive moment when Homo erectus became Homo equestris.

  In December, 1991, Scientific American featured an article by an American-Russian team of two anthropologists and one archeologist who argued from their own field research on the steppes of Russia that humans rode horses at least six thousand years ago. Like forensic scientists probing dental records to identify a murder victim, the scientists scrutinized, even X-rayed, horse teeth found in a burial site.

  Over time, horses accustomed to wearing a bit sustain subtle damage to their teeth, quite apart from natural occlusion. The two kinds of dental erosion are clearly distinguishable under a scanning electron microscope. The scientists were thus able to buttress their claim that riding predates even the invention of the wheel by at least five hundred years.

  As described in the Scientific American article, excavation at the burial site uncovered a seven-year-old stallion who bore telltale marks on his teeth: the beveling, the scarring of the enamel, the cracks and their location, all supported the conclusion that the stallion had been ridden. The stallion was surely not the first horse to be ridden, but he is the first horse known to have been ridden. His remains, the authors enthused, therefore constituted a “most spectacular find.”

  The team uncovered more than two thousand horse bones at the site — a village called Dereivka, near Kiev. These Copper Age people, known as the Sredni Stog, clearly had eaten horse-meat. Equally apparent was that the horse had special meaning for them: the aforementioned stallion’s head and left foreleg had been ritually deployed to mark a sacred site.

  The magazine piece also featured a photograph recreating what the assemblage of the stallion’s bones might have looked like. It is a haunting image of a ritual that was widely observed in pre-Christian Europe. The skulls of two horses are mounted on poles, with other poles forming a rough tripod. From the uppermost and nearly horizontal poles hang the horses’ hides, ghostly skins flapping in the wind.

  “The assemblage,” the authors wrote, “recalls Indo-European myths of a horse that bears souls to the gates of Hades, where dogs stand guard.” The mood of the photograph is unsettling: the skulls seem to possess a dark vitality. The positioning of one head just below and ahead of the other, suggests motion, as if the creatures had indeed embarked on some terrible journey to the underworld.

  1.1 For eons, the ancients marked sacred sites by mounting horse skulls on poles. (photo credit 1.1)

  The scientists found near the stallion’s bones those of two dogs, along with perforated pieces of antler — possibly the cheek pieces of a bit — plus a clay figurine shaped like a boar and fragments of other figurines in human form.

  The ritual mounting of horse heads on poles, the authors added, “was conducted well into this century among the Buryat and Oirot peoples, who live between the Altai Mountains and Lake Baikal in Soviet Asia; it may persist there to this day.”

  I find it intriguing, even gratifying, that such rituals endure despite the apparent global domination of Western culture. In one part of the planet, girls in riding helmets trot their horses around an arena on a Saturday morning while an instructor reminds them politely, “Heels down, girls. Heels down.” Elsewhere on the globe a horse is beheaded and skinned to create a sacred sculpture whose origins date back sixty centuries or more.

  I was amazed at how many disparate cultures in the ancient world used horse bones either to curse the living or to honor and equip the dead.

  The Vikings, for example, believed that to put a curse on an enemy you simply beheaded a horse, set the skull on a pole and pointed it toward the intended victim. Keeping the skull’s mouth agape was thought to enhance the curse.

  The thirteenth-century tomb of Sir Robert de Shurland at Minster in the British Isles suggests that perhaps the Vikings were right about horse skulls and curses: the bones have power. Near the tomb is a sculpture of a horse’s head emerging from the sea; on the church tower close by is a weather cock in the shape of a horse’s head. Why all this horse symbolism?

  Legend has it that Sir Robert — for whatever reason — buried a priest alive. When the king happened to be sailing nearby, the knight swam his horse two miles out to sea to beg, or purchase, his pardon. Which was forthcoming. Back on the beach, an old woman warned the knight that the extraordinary horse whose marathon swim had just saved him would also cost him his life. Sir Robert took his sword and lopped off the horse’s head. And that, it seemed, was that. But a year later the churlish knight was walking on that same beach and chanced across his horse’s skull, which he kicked in contempt. A bone splinter entered Sir Robert’s foot, and the infection killed him.

  But one image recurs in the prehistory of the world — the horse skull strategically mounted to mark a grave, in the manner of the Sredni Stog. The Patagonian Indians of South America would mark the death of a chief by sacrificing four horses, stuffing their skins and propping them up on sticks — precisely as was done in Copper Age Ukraine.

  In the middle of the thirteenth century, as part of a diplomatic mission from the pope, a portly Franciscan monk named Johannes de Pian del Carpine spent some time in the court of the Great Khan. The
aged friar took note of Mongol burial customs.

  “The dead man,” he wrote, “is laid in the earth with his tent, and provisions and mare’s milk beside him. A mare with foal at foot and a saddled and bridled gelding are buried with him. Then they eat another horse, stuff the hide with straw and prop it up on two or four poles, so that in the next world the dead man shall have somewhere to live, a mare to provide milk, a foal to start another herd, and a horse to ride.”

  In fourteenth-century China, an emperor killed in battle was entombed with four young female slaves and six guards, and a vast mound built over them; four horses were then made to gallop around the mound until exhausted. The horses were finally killed and impaled on poles, there to stand guard and serve the emperor in the afterlife. In later eras, tiny terra cotta figures of horses and soldiers stood symbolically in their stead.

  Ancient people often buried their dead with a horse. The Scythians, who lived by the Black Sea, would strangle up to fifty of a dead king’s finest horses — along with members of the royal guard — to keep him company in his sprawling tomb. I cannot argue with their logic: the dead, after all, needed transportation in the next world.

  In West Africa, it was common to bury a man wrapped in a shroud made from the skin of his favorite horse. Hungarians beheaded the dead man’s horse and buried the skull and cannon bones alongside the body of his deceased rider. The horse’s hide was stuffed with hay and laid beside the man.

  Lithuanians in early Christian times created separate cemeteries for their horses, the animals sometimes buried standing and fully tacked. Some Prussian tribes cremated the deceased on horseback — again, so the departed soul could ride to his reward in heaven.

  The fate, then, of many ancient horses was to be buried in the earth alongside their riders, but the horse had another role, too — as an oracle, a link to the heavens. Before battle, ancient Slavic peoples dedicated a white war horse to their god of war and if the horse walked cleanly through a line of crossed spears without catching his feet, prospects for the engagement were deemed good.

  The ancients loved their horses but feared their gods, and so the animals the ancients most prized were sacrificed to appease the heavens. This, too, is a bloody refrain in the common history of horses and humans.

  One South American tribe in Patagonia would mark the birth of a boy in this fashion: a colt or a mare was secured by rope and cut from the neck down to the heart, which was then removed. The infant was thrust into the gore of the still-throbbing chest cavity to ensure that the newborn would one day make a fine horseman.

  In the early days of the empire, the Romans also practiced horse sacrifice. A winning horse in a chariot race would be stabbed with a spear by a priest. Homage was thus paid to Mars, god of war and harvests. That horse’s blood was used to purify livestock; the tail was brought to the ruler’s house to ensure his prosperity and that of the empire. The horse’s head was nailed to a wall, then decorated with a string of loaves to ensure a generous harvest.

  The ancients of India and of Greece, torn between their strong feeling for the horse and the greater tug of sacrifice, dared not spill equine blood. Instead, they would select white steeds and drive them into the sea, where they drowned.

  The Irish and their highland cousins either refused — even in pagan days — to eat horseflesh, viewing it as the worst sort of taboo, or they made ceremonial meals of horse stew. A medieval Welsh chronicler records in rather grim detail how the northern Irish baptized their new kings in horse blood:

  The whole people of that country being gathered in one place, a white mare is led into the midst of them, and he who is to be inaugurated … comes before the people on all-fours, confessing himself a beast with no less impudence than imprudence. The mare being immediately killed and cut in pieces and boiled, a bath is prepared for him from the broth. Sitting in this he eats of the flesh which is brought to him, the people standing round and partaking of it also. He is also required to drink of the broth in which he is bathed, not drawing it in any vessel, nor even in his hand, but lapping it with his mouth. These unrighteous rites being duly accomplished, his royal authority and dominion are ratified.

  1.2 In myth, legend and literature, the white horse — especially the white stallion — figures prominently. (photo credit 1.2)

  As Oldfield Howey points out in his book The Horse in Magic and Myth, the partaking of the body and blood of the horse has a Catholic sense of sacrament about it. Like the white Eucharist, the pure white horse confers divine grace.

  Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, a book of poetry by the American writer Alice Walker, takes its title from the words of a Sioux medicine man: “We had no word for the strange animal we got from the white man — the horse. So we called it šunka wakan, ‘holy dog.’ For bringing us the horse we could almost forgive you for bringing us whiskey. Horses make a landscape look more beautiful.” If the horse was a holy dog, then implicit is the belief that the horse came from heaven.

  The horse, of course, came out of a Spanish galleon. The first one stepped off on January 2, 1494, when Columbus landed on North American shores for the second time. But as the conquistadors began to enslave the indigenous people of what is now Latin America, their greatest ally, it seemed, was the horse. The vastly outnumbered Spaniards, naturally, encouraged the belief that horses did indeed come from heaven, that they were gods.

  The Zempoaltecas, a tribe in sixteenth-century Mexico, concluded that only bridles stopped the Spaniards’ horses from eating their human masters and anyone else within reach. When the horses neighed, the Indians rushed to feed them, hoping to placate them. And thus we come to the story of Morzillo, Hernando Cortés’s proud black horse.

  During a skirmish in the early 1500s, Morzillo took an arrow in the mouth; Cortés, one in the hand. Numerous accounts of horses in war describe how furiously they sometimes attack the enemy with their teeth and hooves, and this was how Morzillo reacted to his pain. The Indians panicked at his onslaught.

  Later, Morzillo — healed from the arrow — was left in the care of Cortés’s Indian allies, who said they could treat a splinter in his foot. Still in awe of the horse, they named him Tziminchac, god of thunder and lightning. They decorated him with flowers and brought him what they took to be delicacies — cooked chickens. Perhaps Morzillo pined for his master or perhaps the divine diet was his undoing. In any case, the horse wasted away and died.

  A century later two Spanish priests arrived in that same place, the first Europeans since Cortés. They were astonished by what they saw — a temple large enough to accommodate a thousand people, and in it an enormous statue of a horse seated on his haunches. This was the legacy of El Morzillo, the horse who became a god.

  Stolen, escaped or abandoned, the horses brought by the Spaniards would rapidly spread north to the plains, where people there created their own myths and stories to explain this apparent gift of the gods. A Piegan woman who died in 1880 at the age of 116 told such a story to Montana pioneers. She was called Sikey-kio, Black Bear, and this is her account:

  One evening a daughter of the chief saw a bright star and muttered, “If that star were a young man, I would marry him.” Next day a fine young man appeared to her on the trail and took her to his star world.

  Later, a glimpse of her village far below saddened her, so her husband made a long rope of buffalo hides and gently lowered her back. She bore a son, but later died and an uncle cared for the boy.

  Up above, the great chief saw how destitute were the people down below. He went to the boy — his grandson — and asked him to bring wet clay, which grew and finally moved. Then the great chief called a council of the trees, birds and animals, for he was their ruler.

  “I have made a horse for my grandson,” he told them, “an animal for him to ride and carry his burdens. Now each of you will give me of your wisdom, that this horse may be perfect.” The pine tree contributed a tail, the fir tree a mane. The turtle offered hoofs, the elk his great size, the cott
on-wood fashioned a saddle. From the buffalo, wolf and snake came hair bridle, fur robe and straps.

  The boy then mounted the horse and rode back to his people, who were both astonished and envious of the colts that followed. When the boy became a young man, he told his uncle he was leaving forever but not before turning every fish in a nearby lake into a horse. The people were to catch the horses as they emerged from the water. “But you, uncle,” he said, “are to catch my old mare. Catch her and her alone.”

  When the young man rode the mare into the lake, the water bubbled and issued hundreds of horses. Many were captured but others escaped and formed wild herds.

  Last out was the feeble old mare, and though the people mocked him, the uncle dutifully tied her to a stake by his lodge. That night, as the moon rose over the hills, the old mare neighed three times and thousands of colts and fillies galloped from the woods and surrounded the man’s lodge. That is how the great chief gave horses to the Piegans.

  Every horse people on the North American continent told such legends to explain the coming of the horse, an event that had reshaped their lives as hunters and traders and warriors. Before riding into battle, for example, the Navajo warrior would whisper in the ear of his horse. He was really talking to himself, so much did he feel at one with his horse. “Be brave,” he would tell his horse, “and nothing will happen. We will come back safely.”

  What despair the Navajo must have felt when the Creator, who gave them horses, quite suddenly took them away. Late in the 1800s, the U.S. Army crushed the last resistance of Indian people. Take away their horses, the army realized, and you destroy their spirit of defiance. The horseless Navajo, therefore, were confined to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. There they went on conducting their religious rites, including one called the Enemy Way, long performed on horseback. Determined to maintain these rituals, they improvised.