A somewhat similar case occurred in Virginia in the 1920s when a horse named Lady Wonder was claimed to be capable of reading minds. Someone would whisper a secret to the horse’s owner, who then stood well back and looked on as the horse used her nose to move wooden blocks and spell out the secret. Many people expressed amazement, including an academic who published a glowing article about the horse.
But where von Osten was a completely honest man, Lady Wonder’s trainer was a scam artist. A professional magician called in to investigate caught the trainer tapping the air with the whip in his hand when the horse hovered over the right block. Lady Wonder, like Clever Hans, was simply an acutely alert horse. But once again, high expectations were dashed and the horse, of course, got no credit.
Less well-known is the fact that a disciple of von Osten’s, an affluent manufacturer named Karl Krall, who lived near the German town of Elberfeld, continued to teach horses. He even took sad old Hans into his stable. If we believe the reports of Maurice Maeterlinck in his book The Unknown Guest, published in 1914, Krall taught horses impressive feats of spelling and mathematics.
Maeterlinck, alone one day with a Krall-trained Arab horse, dictated the name of the hotel he was staying at. The horse, using his hooves to stamp out the alphabetic code he had been taught, correctly (one letter was wrong) spelled out the name. Maeterlinck credits a combination of equine intelligence and telepathy to explain his findings. Modern doubting Thomases like me dismiss this as simply too tall to be true.
I asked Vicki Hearne, a notable horse trainer, to respond. She neither dismissed nor endorsed the Maeterlinck claims: “You hang around dogs and horses and you come to realize that things go on. Animals read people so minutely and when people are coherent, you might as well call it telepathy.” She remembered seeing footage of Colonel Alois Podhajsky, the famous trainer of Lipizzaner stallions. “He was an emblem,” said Hearne, “of what it is to ride. I could hardly breathe as I watched that film. There were closeups as he did pirouettes and jumps, and you could not see his hand or leg move.”
You might as well call it telepathy. The more we learn about animals, and the communication possible between and with animals, the more we are inclined to chip away at the human arrogance that for so long has kept Us and Them in distant camps.
In the late 1940s, the Union Milk Company in Calgary still delivered milk by horse-drawn wagon. A new horse, likely a massive Percheron or Belgian, with feathered feet the size of pie plates, had been given a route near the dairy so he could learn the ropes. At one point the driver ducked into a house to make a delivery, and when he returned he clucked to the horse.
The horse refused to budge. Three times the driver slapped the horse on the back with the reins, but the horse stood statue still. Finally, the driver got out to investigate. Clutching the legs of the horse was a three-year-old child. The horse had not only tolerated this but, apparently out of concern for the boy’s safety, ignored commands to proceed. This is a story about the horse as guardian angel.
10.4 Milk wagon in Berlin, 1909: the cart-horse has been known to display astonishing horse sense. (photo credit 10.4)
Then there are stories about the horse as creature of habit. During the same era, at the Palliser Hotel in Calgary, a doorman daily offered sugar cubes to the milk-wagon horse passing by. One day the doorman fell ill and someone else took his place. When the horse arrived he stopped, and waited. What? No sugar? Up the steps he went, looking for the sugar man. He got halfway there before finally abandoning the plan. A photograph of milk wagon on hotel steps made The Calgary Herald the following day.
Horses, we know, like routine. For years at the stable where I learned to ride, my partner in the ring was a willing but often cranky mare named Cassie. The routine went like this: I would groom her; my instructor, Maria, and I would tack her up; I would ride her for an hour, walk her for a bit; and then came carrots — my fee for services rendered.
One day I brought house guests to visit the horses. I took carrots along, and the youngsters among us fed one to every horse. Every horse, that is, save Cassie. I was scheduled to ride her in an hour and her carrot would come after the ride.
We were not long in the ring before she did something she had never done before — she tried to buck me off! Possible explanation: what Cassie had observed was that every horse had gotten a carrot — except her. And now she was supposed to work for the architect of this insult? Forget it. Buck him.
From ancient Greece comes another story about horses and routines. The Greeks loved to race horses, as we do, and made horse racing an Olympic event. A mare called Aura threw her jockey early in an Olympic race but galloped on, just as horses in steeplechase races — even when the jockey is eight hedges back in a heap — often continue round the course. Aura went further: she did precisely the required number of loops around the track, beat all the other horses, then stopped in front of the judge’s stand. To receive her prize, of course.
Then there are the stories that flatter us. These are stories, or so we think, of horses displaying affection, even devotion, to their riders.
Lucy Rees, author of The Horse’s Mind, has coined a phrase to describe the bond between rider and horse. She believes that when you gain the trust of a horse, you enter that horse’s society — his equine society. You become what Rees calls “an honorary horse.”
J. Frank Dobie in The Mustangs sketches an ex-slave named Bob Lemmons who spent all his life gathering range mustangs. He did so alone, never in a gallop, and always by winning their trust until the herd actually let him lead them. “I acted like I was a mustang,” Lemmons, then eighty-four, told Dobie in 1931. “I made the mustangs think I was one of them. Maybe I was in them days.” When convinced he had been accepted as a senior member of a particular equine tribe, Lemmons would lead the wild horses to water, let them see him smelling for danger and then sleep in their midst with his own horse on a picket (a means of tethering a horse with a rope and stake in the ground).
The following story is told by a woman — perhaps an honorary horse herself — who offers it as proof of the protectiveness of horses, or at least of one horse in particular. And it reminds me very much of the story of Colonel — another draft horse — told at the book’s beginning. The woman was in a corral with two horses when she suffered a dizzy spell and collapsed. One horse panicked and circled in a frenzy. At that point the woman lost consciousness. When she awoke, she was flat on her back and staring up, not into blue sky, but into the massive belly of the other horse, a Clydesdale mare.
The mare had created for the woman the only safe place in the corral; the mare’s body and eyes kept the other, nervous, horse at bay. When the woman finally felt strong enough to rise, the mare lowered her neck, which the woman used as a lifting aid.
Books of the Old West recount similar stories. A cowboy on a cattle drive supposed to be on night watch nods off in his bedroll and wakes up to find the earth trembling and the cattle stampeding toward him. But the cowboy’s own horse has straddled him, and the cattle race by like the wind around an old oak.
The horse-human fellowship has seen some astonishing displays of affection, some of them seemingly mutual in the extreme. In a book called Talking With Horses, Henry Blake describes an emotional reunion with his mare Fearless after his long absence for military duty.
He calls out to the herd and she comes at him in a full gallop with her ears back and her mouth wide-open, and for a moment Blake feels as though he’s standing on railway tracks with an express train bearing down on him. But she skids to a halt about ten feet from him and proceeds to make every sign that she is thrilled to see him: “Then she took two steps forward and licked me all over from head to foot, and when she had done this for about three minutes the tears were running down my cheeks, so she thought that was enough of a good thing. Just to show me the status was still quo, she caught hold of me with her teeth and lifted me from the ground and shook me slowly backwards and forwards four or five times, then she put me down and rubb
ed me with her nose.”
J. Frank Dobie tells the story of Prince, a strawberry roan sired by a French Canadian stallion out of a mustang mare. That Kansas horse saved his owner’s life more times than TV Lassie ever saved Jeff, even led him out of the memorable blizzard of 1887. In his later years, the horse would bring the cows in from the pasture at day’s end. Chester Evans, who owned him all this time, would hitch him to a wagon and send him to town, where someone would load the wagon with supplies, and then Prince would pull the supply-laden wagon home. Prince died at the age of thirty-eight after a freak accident. “No man,” said Evans, choked with emotion as he recalled his horse, “could have had a more congenial companion or a truer friend.”
It is a flattering thing to be loved by an animal. I can let myself be convinced that our dog loves me, too. The face licking, the tail wagging, the way she looks up at me when we’re driving in the truck and her chin is resting on my right thigh. Is that not pure adoration? Yes, but the minute another dog enters the picture, I am second fiddle, or second Fido. As one expert has opined, the prime interest of dogs is other dogs.
10.5 The horse-human bond: what poet Maxine Kumin calls “the right magnificent obsession.” (photo credit 10.5)
Certain horse books contain similar reminders to check our more romantic notions. In The Nature of Horses, Stephen Budiansky observes that his own horse behaves one way at home (where only one pony offers him “equine company”) and another way at a large riding stable with fifty other horse neighbors.
At home, says Budiansky, the horse is often quite affectionate and apparently eager for human contact in the paddock and at the fence line. At the stable, on the other hand, Budiansky and his children are more inclined to get the equine cool shoulder. “Our horses’ affection for us, their owners,” he says, “is unquestionably real, grounded in a basic instinct to form friendship bonds. It is slightly bruising to our egos, though, to realize that they bond with us only for lack of better company.”
The horse-fevered do not dwell on such realities. We prefer tales like the one told to me by Anne Zander, who rides near Cookstown, Ontario. Zander, who had ridden as a youth, years later acquired a husband and a farm, and her zeal for riding returned. She only lacked a horse.
Enter Dr. Broom, a sixteen-three-hand Thoroughbred with impressive training times and bloodlines (by Bold Ruckus, a grandson of Bold Ruler). Despite that, he had been banned from the track for refusing to leave the starting gate. “All redhead with an attitude” was how Zander described him in a letter to me.
Professional trainers had washed their hands of the wired horse, so what luck would an amateur have? No luck at all, it seemed. Zander hauled that horse to shows, but only after spending hundreds of hours simply teaching him to enter a horse van. The horse kicked and bit, stepped on, lashed at, bucked off and ran away with his rider. In the fall of 1994, she took him to an entry-level horse show and the good doctor — Broom, that is — kicked Anne’s husband, Claus, so badly he had to be treated by ambulance attendants and later wound up in hospital. Anne rode Dr. Broom in the trial, but they were eliminated in both the stadium and cross-country events. Though the jumps were small enough to step over, Dr. Broom would not deign to go near them.
As determined as she was apparently daft, Zander stuck it out with Dr. Broom. One day the prominent New Zealand rider and trainer Mark Todd — a two-time Olympic gold medalist in eventing — was giving clinics in the area, and Dr. Broom made his acquaintance. In the saddle, Todd took the measure of the horse and pronounced him one who “likes to get a bit uptight.” Zander laughed at the understatement, but those few minutes of schooling by a skilled and sensitive rider may have launched a turnaround.
In 1996, Dr. Broom consistently went clean in both cross-country and stadium rounds. “He was no longer,” wrote Zander, “a $5 horse.” The real test was yet to come. While haying that year, Zander injured her back and required surgery. She lay abed for weeks and imagined Dr. Broom in his stall — an alarm clock wound tighter and tighter and set to go off.
When Zander was finally released from hospital, her back still ached and her left leg felt useless, but she was bent on riding. And how did Dr. Broom react to his essentially disabled rider?
“My wild horse,” says Zander, “was a perfect gentleman. He stood stock-still for me to haul myself up. He did not move until I asked. I had no balance and had to hang on to his mane. If I started to lose my balance, or the pain was intolerable, I just said ‘Whoa’ and he would stop. We tried a few trot steps and a few at canter. He was a letter-perfect Pony Club horse.”
Later, her coach mounted “Doc” who promptly tried to buck him off. Anne is left amazed by all this, and grateful. “He can still be a red-hot chestnut, but he came through for me at a time when I needed him most.”
Though mechanized horsepower has supplanted the horse-drawn wagon in many places globally, a few eccentrics in the Western world, such as Don and Vi Godwin of Mulvane, Kansas, still put their faith in hay-burners.
On October 3, 1982, the retired couple took to the road in a pickup camper turned backward and set on a four-wheel farm trailer, the whole thing pulled by two Belgian draft horses, full brothers named Barney and, well, Brother. By 1993, when they finally ceased wandering, the Godwins had traveled more than eleven thousand miles crisscrossing the continent. They typically covered twenty-four miles a day (top speed for “the boys,” as they called the young chestnut horses, was four miles an hour). Daily fuel consumption amounted to one bale of hay and a bucket of grain.
Don Godwin had worked delivering mail and as an auctioneer, but all his life he had trained draft horses and nurtured a childhood dream of crossing the country in a covered wagon behind horses “with flaxen mane and tail.” His great-uncle, a horse trader who toured the Midwest in a horse-drawn wagon, once took six-year-old Don with him for a day and a night. That planted the seed. Retaining a piece of land in Kansas as a home base, the Godwins sold everything to finance the voyage. Because they traveled at such a leisurely pace and because the sight of a horse-drawn trailer invited conversation with strangers, they met new people every day.
Now sixty-seven, Godwin told me the horses were virtual passports on the road. “There are a lot of horse lovers out there,” he said. “Those horses got us into more homes and caused us to meet more people …” Locals driving by would see the horses, brake, and pretty soon the brother Belgians had hay and grain laid on, the Godwins had a meal and local radio stations had their lead news item — thus paving the way for more generosity down the road.
Godwin finally sold his beloved Belgians to a fellow in Nebraska, where he visits them on occasion and delights when they recognize him and come to his whistle. The trailer went to a man in Alberta with a similar notion of horse-powered travel. It seems the man had written a letter to Draft Horse Journal seeking practical information. A magazine staffer put him on to Godwin, and the deal was struck.
“You’ve got to love horses,” Godwin says to anyone pondering a similar pilgrimage. “And you’ve got to have the right two people.” The Godwins come from large families (thirteen in hers, nine in his) and were taught resourcefulness during the Great Depression, along with the saving grace of wit, which he clearly still possesses. “When we were kids,” he explains, “we ate so much wild rabbit that every time a dog barked we ran under the porch.”
Set aside your fear, Don Godwin advises, and have a little faith in your own vision. He and Vi have written a book about their travels, with proceeds going to their church. The book’s title? Faith vs. Fear.
Fearless, too, are the Grant family from Scotland, who left home in 1990 to circumnavigate the globe in a horse-drawn caravan. David Grant, his wife, Kate, and their three children, Torcuil, Eilidh and Fionn, now eighteen, sixteen and thirteen, respectively, crossed Europe, Asia and North America before flying home from Halifax in the fall of 1997.
When I talked to him early in 1998, David Grant was sorting out the fourteen journals that will
form the basis of what promises to be an extraordinary book. A central character in that book will be Traceur, the seventeen-hand, eighteen-hundred-pound Breton-Percheron cross who took them most of the way around the globe (two other horses did stints at the beginning and end). Grant described him as a gentle, temperamental bay gelding who in six years was never once tied up at night and was always there in the morning — save one time in Mongolia when Grant “got cross with him” and Traceur, perhaps sulking, repaid him by wandering off that night.
“He died of a brain tumor in America,” Grant recalled, “at the Missouri River. We had gone ten thousand miles with him, and when Eilidh found him in the morning it was horrendous for her. She and I were closest to that horse. It was like losing a member of the family. The only time on the whole trip I considered quitting was when Traceur died.”
A breezy man with a quick wit, Grant said the seven-year odyssey was occasioned by “cold, wet Scottish winters” and seeing, in a tourist magazine, a picture of a skewbald horse pulling a round-top Gypsy wagon through the Irish countryside. They took just such a trip in Ireland as a test run and embarked soon afterward.
The Grants arrived home, many years later, to no home, having sold theirs to finance the trip. But they had stories to tell — of the Balkan War, of drunken Mongolian horse thieves, deportation from China and encounters with a splendid array of people.
Grant’s children learned, firsthand, lessons in geography, politics and history from living the gypsy life. “I’d recommend it,” Grant said. “Sure, do it. Do it while you may.”
Horse sense is a mysterious thing. Years ago a cart horse in Spain stubbornly refused to enter a mountain tunnel she had passed through countless times before. Traffic backed up behind her, and you can imagine the driver’s anger and the stern tactics employed to move her. When the tunnel collapsed shortly afterward, the mare was hailed as a heroine.
Wild About Horses Page 27
