Wild About Horses Read online

  Barclay cites a report from 1885 of a French cavalry officer who mounted a spirited horse without saddle or bridle, galloped across a field, jumped over tent ropes, trenches and other barriers, turned and stopped the animal at will. The officer used a strap around the horse’s neck as brakes, and to turn he slapped the horse’s neck with his palm.

  On the one hand, that officer had the benefit of centuries of horsemanship. On the other hand, much of that horsemanship was dubious, and his gift with horses may have been beyond the ken of most of his and our contemporaries. I think of Monty Roberts, a trainer who learned the essentials of his gentling craft as a thirteen-year-old boy simply by watching wild horses in the high desert of Nevada in 1948. No one told him you could gentle a horse; indeed, conventional wisdom advised aggression. He went the other way, and he wonders whether others ever did the same. “Horses are such good teachers,” he says. “There had to be people before me.”

  We may never know whether individuals or whole Ice Age tribes could ride as that nineteenth-century officer could, sans bit or bridle or saddle. That being so, we may never know precisely when that first rider felt the bracing wind that comes only on the back of a fast horse.

  Some things we like to think we know. By 1286 B.C., the Hittites and Egyptians were clashing with the tanks of their day — horse-drawn chariots, many thousands of them. In 950 B.C., King Solomon would boast of twelve thousand horses in his stable. (Solomon reorganized the army in Israel and Judea and may have built a huge chariot force. But the number twelve in the Bible, scholars say, symbolizes completeness, so that twelve thousand may constitute a plucked number. Proof again that things are seldom what they seem.)

  Next came warriors on horseback, though it must have been amusing to watch them mount. Did they step up on a block? Use their spears as pole vaults? Or did the horse kneel like a camel?

  Between 500 B.C. and A.D. 400, Hun tribesmen of the Russian steppes invented both the saddle and the stirrup — opening up new possibilities for warfare. The stirrup, according to some observers, was the most significant military development in the five-thousand-year span between the taming of the horse and the inventing of gunpowder. It is easy, then, to see the history of the horse as the history of war.

  The war horse was often sacrificed in great numbers, especially as weapons of war became more deadly. But a special affection between certain soldiers and certain horses is apparent all through the ages, and though early humans made a meal of the horse — and horsemeat is still prized today in France and Belgium, for example — some societies simply will not consume horseflesh.

  Buddha, like one pope, prohibited its consumption. Muhammad never banned it but never ate it, either. But in Victorian England, out of concern about the protein-deficient diet of poor people, The Society for the Propagation of Horseflesh as an Article of Food was formed in 1868.

  A much publicized dinner at the august Langham Hotel in London offered a nine-course meal that included horse soup; fillet of sole in horse oil and fillet of roast Pegasus; turkey with horse chestnuts; sirloin of horse stuffed with Centaur; braised rump of horse; tongue of Trojan horse and jellied horses’ hooves in maraschino.

  The push to rediscover horsemeat occurred at a time when the price of beef was soaring and epidemics plagued the cattle industry — shades of mad cow disease. Victorian England required millions of horses for the transportation of people and goods, so it did not lack for horseflesh; still, horsemeat never caught on. The Christian taboo was too entrenched, feeling for the horse too strong.

  In the New World, an ocean away, the horse would enjoy a rebirth in the clearing of the land, the drama of the buffalo hunt and the centuries of fighting between cowboy and Indian. The great migrations of families across the continent in covered wagons and Red River carts, and of cattle from Texas to the north and west, could not have occurred without the horse. This was a new chapter in horse and human history.

  With dizzying speed, the horse that Columbus brought spread north and west and plains riders developed exquisite skills. George Catlin, the nineteenth-century traveler who mingled with the Comanche in 1834, was at first confounded by the war games of young Comanche boys. Here is what he saw: at a full gallop, the boy would streak past an imaginary enemy, dropping down on the far side of his animal so only one heel and perhaps the top of his head were visible. From that position (all the while toting lance, shield, bow and quiver), he would let loose arrows either over the pony’s back or under his neck. Neither pony nor rider came to grief, and the arrows landed on target.

  3.4 Plains warriors, in short order, developed into the finest light cavalry in the world. (photo credit 3.4)

  Curious to know how this was done, Catlin offered one boy some tobacco to get a closer look. What enabled the circuslike maneuver — in part, anyway — was a hair halter braided into the mane at the withers. That loop cradled the boy’s elbow and took his forward weight. But the balance demanded the deft use of the heel — this required years of practice.

  3.5 Hunting a tiger in India: humankind would find many uses for the horse. (photo credit 3.5)

  If, during a skirmish, the warrior’s horse was wounded or killed, the rider invariably landed on his feet and used his shield as protection. He then waited for help. It usually came, since Comanches felt a deep compulsion to rescue wounded or dead comrades: the wounded because it was the honorable thing; the dead because a scalped human had no place in the hereafter.

  Such rescues demanded extraordinary horsemanship. Young boys would train for the maneuver by first learning to ride hard toward a small, light object on the ground, lean down and scoop it up. The objects got heavier, bulkier, and then two riders galloping side by side would haul up a boy playing the role of wounded comrade, his hands in the air to help the lift, and one rider would lay the boy across the horse and continue on. Finally, the boys would practice picking up a “dead” comrade — who could be on his belly, his back or crumpled in a heap — while riding full out.

  Stanley Noyes, the author of Los Comanches: The Horse People, noted that “This extraordinary maneuver required perfect timing, great agility and strength, and expert riding. If performed today during a rodeo, it would probably leave even our hypothetical American cowboy shaking his head. Yet every Comanche warrior was supposed to be able, if the need rose, to effect such a rescue by himself, and this at the risk of his own life from enemy arrows or gunfire.”

  Although the Comanche felt no great affection for horses in general, each warrior had his favorite war or buffalo horse, who would be extricated from the herd and staked next to his lodge at night. Like knights and Arab warriors of old, he rode a common horse to battle but his prized war horse into battle. If ever that horse (who often doubled as a buffalo horse) was sold, he would fetch an object of veneration, such as a white buffalo hide. In other words, that horse was almost priceless. “Some men,” wrote Noyes, “were said to love such animals more than their wives or children.”

  The story of the horse in Canada is the story of humble beginnings and horse fever taking hold — among both indigenous peoples and newcomers. The first colonial horses came in 1665 from the royal stables of Louis XIV. Eighteen mares and two stallions would form the basis of the hardy black horses later called the Canadian breed. Those who survived Quebec winters became legendary as stalwart all-purpose horses and easy keepers. So attached to these “little horses of iron” did French colonists become that when the English were about to attack in 1757 and food supplies dwindled, none would slaughter their Canadian horses.

  Early census figures show that in 1681 there were only ninety-four known horses in the entire country. Then the numbers soared: 156 in 1685; 580 in 1695; 5,270 in 1720; 13,488 in 1765. The government grew alarmed at the rapid increase and restricted each farmer to two horses and a colt lest the horses interfere with the raising of cattle. In 1710, the governor complained that there were so many horses in Canada that “young men were losing the art of walking, with or without snowsh
oes.” His solution, a time-honored one, was to kill some of the horses. They could, he suggested, be salted and sold to the savages “en guise de boeuf.”

  On the plains, it was “the savages” who provided Manitoba settlers with mustang horse power, and the pioneers were glad of it. Still, they longed for bigger horses to pull their plows. Enter the legendary Fireaway — a sixteen-hand red roan stallion. He was a Norfolk Trotter who endured not only the long sail across the Atlantic but also the journey from York Factory on Hudson Bay to Fort Garry (Winnipeg) — in a canoe. Somehow the horse learned to stand and balance himself, even in rapids, and obligingly exited and entered the canoe on portages.

  No one was disappointed when Fireaway arrived in his new home. He would change the stock of western horses for decades. The Wonder Horse of Red River, they called him. Fireaway the Marvelous. Handsome, fast and apparently a target for horse thieves, he won the admiration of everyone. A Hudson’s Bay Company governor wrote: “He is looked upon as one of the wonders of the world by the natives, many of whom have travelled great distances with no other object than to see him.”

  As recently as the 1920s, to be a farmer in Canada was still to be a horseman. Allegiance to a particular breed of plow horse, like allegiance to a particular political party, was passed on within the family. British, Scottish and Irish farmers tended to favor Clydesdales; settlers from continental Europe and America preferred the bigger Percherons and Belgians. In Saskatchewan, then home to one million horses, rural churches would divide on a Sunday morning, the Clydesdale backers on one side, the Belgian and Percheron faction on the other.

  Among Indian cultures in what is now Canada the horse almost instantly became currency. Among the Blackfoot, Blood and Piegan, one to twenty horses was the price of a wife. Adultery by a wife sometimes led to the cuckolded husband’s being paid a horse (and the woman’s losing her nose, which was cut to the bone).

  Among the Blackfoot, a warrior’s horses were slain so he could ride them to the spirit world, as was the custom in many parts of the Old World. When one great chief among the Blackfoot died, 150 horses were slaughtered. The Assiniboine, meanwhile, gave a dead warrior’s horse his freedom. Horses even entered the Assiniboines’ dreams. One early anthropologist observed that his Assiniboine interpreter did not dream of things to eat. He preferred, instead, to dream of horses.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE GENTLE ART OF THE HORSE WHISPERER

  There was never a king like Solomon

  Not since the world began

  Yet Solomon talked to a butterfly

  As a man would talk to a man

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  KING SOLOMON, as far as we know, could not literally talk to the animals, but his legend speaks of our ancient and heartfelt desire to close the communication gap between us and them. Fiction, poetry and myth teem with characters — King Solomon and Dr. Dolittle among them — who could talk to the animals and animals who could talk to one another.

  Forty-six years ago the noted animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz wrote King Solomon’s Ring, the title a reference to the magic ring that supposedly allowed Solomon to converse with the creatures. The legend of the ring may stem from a misreading of the Bible: Solomon “spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.” Spoke of, not to. (Kipling’s time in India, with its rich Muslim folklore and the Arabian Nights, where Solomon is a character, more likely inspired the legend.)

  Coyly, Lorenz professes to believe the legend, ring or no ring. If he, Lorenz, can talk to the animals, why couldn’t Solomon? The title page of King Solomon’s Ring includes a sketch of a man with his hands in his pockets, bending low to chat up a duck.

  “Without supernatural assistance,” writes Lorenz, “our fellow creatures can tell us the most beautiful stories, and that means true stories, because the truth about nature is always far more beautiful even than what our great poets sing of it, and they are the only real magicians that exist.”

  Animals have long told stories, but few humans have felt inclined or taken the time to listen. Consider, for example, the manner in which we have schooled the horse for thousands of years. “Breaking” a horse constitutes a pivotal moment in the life of that horse. First bridle, first saddle, first rider, like all first impressions, surely shape the horse.

  If you’re looking for an image of how we have traditionally undertaken that schooling, look no further than film. Consider Monte Walsh, a cowboy film released in 1970 and packed with clichés, not least the one about broncs and bronc-busters.

  Lee Marvin is Monte Walsh, a noble drifter who will not settle down even as the cowboy era fades and, with it, ranch work for men like him. What money he has he gives to the gold-hearted hooker, played by Jeanne Moreau. “It ain’t like I ain’t got a horse,” he says, implying that he’s not that poor. Monte’s pal, the hollow-cheeked Jack Palance, hangs up his chaps to marry the hooker and run the hardware store in the town of Harmony.

  When Shorty, cowpoke gone sour, kills Palance’s character in a robbery, Monte stalks the former to get revenge, but not before breaking a gray stallion — in an extraordinary scene. The corral, the inside of a store and numerous storefronts splinter before the bronc is conquered. “I rode down the gray,” Monte tells the dying Shorty, rubbing salt in his considerable wound, for Shorty had earlier found the grey too hot to handle. The phrase, “to ride down” a horse, vividly expresses how green horses were broken in the Old West, and even today in the New West. The Wyoming license plate features a blue silhouette of a cowboy on a bucking bronc.

  4.1 Traditional bronc-busters went from ranch to ranch, charging $5 a head to make a wild horse manageable. (photo credit 4.1)

  Still, much has changed. The 1990s, especially, have seen the ascendance of horse gentlers, historically called “horse whisperers,” and many of them, ironically, from the same territory that spawned the likes of Monte Walsh. As one young western horse trainer put it, “I had to give myself a macho-ectomy.”

  Monty Roberts, the author of The Man Who Listens to Horses, knows Hollywood film sets almost as well as Lee Marvin. He spent his youth working on them as wrangler and double — for Elizabeth Taylor, Charlton Heston, Mickey Rooney and others in a hundred or so films such as National Velvet, East of Eden and My Friend Flicka.

  But Roberts would take no pleasure in watching the breaking of the gray. He is more of the Solomon school. So are his compatriots Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt, Buck Brannaman, Richard Shrake, John Lyons, Linda Tellington-Jones. “Bronco-busters Try New Tack: Tenderness,” went a New York Times headline in 1993.

  Things are changing, and not just on ranches. Monty Roberts is also a world-class trainer of Thoroughbreds (his horse Alleged won the prestigious Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe two years running) who thinks whips should be banned from the racetrack. European show jumpers who use their crops on horses when they balk at fences — once deemed fair punishment — are now met with a chorus of disapproving whistles. And if the gentlers and whisperers hold sway, spurs and crops and rough bits may one day find a place in horse museums, not in stables and barns. Alas, we are a long way from that, as a glance back at centuries of horse breaking will attest.

  Yet here is the curious thing. You can draw a line from modern-day gentlers right back to the ancient Greeks. Through time, infinitely more trainers have been inclined to the Monte Walsh method than to the Monty Roberts method, but you can find gentlers if you look. Those who love horses will anguish to know that the essential wisdom of the horse whisperer is more than two thousand years old. “A good trainer can hear a horse speak to him,” says Monty Roberts. “A great trainer can hear him whisper.” (In folklore the trainer, not the horse, did the whispering. It was believed that a magic word was known only to a select blacksmith-led brotherhood. That word, when whispered in the ear of even a wild stallion, would tame him.)

  The skills required to hear the whisper were there all the time and largely ignored. Why? Why did gentling horses fall in and out of fashi
on? And why have we rediscovered it now?

  Three hundred years before the birth of Christ there lived the Greek cavalry officer Xenophon (meaning, “a person who speaks strangely”). A pupil and friend of Socrates, he wrote a tiny classic called The Art of Horsemanship.

  I first encountered his ideas ten years ago. At the age of thirty-eight, I took up riding for a very practical reason: I was working with the show jumper Ian Millar on his memoirs and wanted firsthand experience in the saddle. Knowing this, a neighbor passed me her old hardback copy, its cover a faded peach brown, of Horsemastership: Methods of Training the Horse and the Rider, written by the American author Margaret Cabell Self in 1952. In her preface, she sang Xenophon’s praises and stressed that almost everything he recommended is as pertinent today as it was in his time.

  “Nowhere,” wrote Self, “did he recommend violence or the use of fear to subdue the animal. One could wish that those who use brutality in breaking and schooling a horse — the method of throwing a horse, tying him up, wearing him out, or flogging him over jumps — that these products of modern civilization who take pride in the strength which has enabled them to ‘break’ and subdue their mounts could have the understanding of the ancients.”

  As I struggled to learn the grammar of his sport, Ian urged me to read the modern-day bible of classic riding, Hunter Seat Equitation. The title struck me as bizarre. How could those three words have anything to do with one another? (A hyphen, as in Hunter-Seat Equitation, might have helped.) That book, written in 1971 by the American show jumper George Morris, features a note of thanks to Margaret Cabell Self — “for putting me on a horse.” And like Self in her book, Morris in his rails against the use of spurs and crops by “butchers” who call themselves riders. Sometimes, it seems, students actually listen to their teachers.