Why did horses in San Francisco on April 18, 1906, thrash around and break free of their stalls hours before the earthquake struck? How to explain the many documented stories of horses getting their riders safely home through unfamiliar jungles and in winter whiteouts?
A horse being ridden at a gallop across a thin cover of snow may suddenly leap, as if over an invisible brook. Returning to that spot to know why, the rider discovers a groundhog hole. How did the horse detect it, and, stranger still, in a full gallop? Was it the sense of smell, or some other faculty beyond our ken?
Let’s revisit that incident in Black Beauty when the horse balks at crossing the bridge. Beauty himself narrates the book, of course, and though there is no real explanation offered, he, like the Spanish cart horse, is determined not to go forward. Beauty had an inkling: “The moment my feet touched the first part of the bridge, I felt sure there was something wrong.”
Was it a sixth sense, or something more actual? The editors of Equus magazine in the United States have published numerous reference guides, including one called Understanding Equine Behavior. In that little book, the authors consider the scene of Beauty at the bridge and list any number of equine sensitivities that might have offered fair warning. The storm itself would have put the horse’s entire nervous system on full alert. The bridge, though familiar, would still have commanded the horse’s respect because of its vibrations and hollow footing. Perhaps the break in the middle of the bridge altered the usual give and sway of the timbers, which might have been creaking. Black Beauty’s night vision, abetted by his memory of previous bridge crossings, might have spotted a change in the angle of the rails. We can only guess at what might have informed the horse, but such radar is likely both real and a great deal more complex than humans have ever imagined.
Lacking a clear explanation, we put it down to horse sense. That said, we might also be on the lookout for horse manure.
Did some streetcar horses earlier this century really stop outside the offices in New York of the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) until an officer came out to alleviate their suffering?
Did Dr. Le Gear — claimed to be the tallest horse in the world — really exist? The Percheron gelding, who died in 1919, was listed at twenty-one hands and was said to weigh 2,996 pounds.
Did a horse called Ben Holt really jump nine feet six inches at the Sydney Royal Horse Show in 1938?
Was Topolino, a Libyan-born mount who served in the Italian army, really fifty-one years old when he died in 1960?
And during the Mexican Revolution earlier this century, could a palomino called Canelo ridden by a Mexican general really smell Pancho Villa’s rebel soldiers fifteen miles away?
The word canelo means, in Spanish, cinnamon — too dark for a palomino and perhaps our first clue that the story is not to be trusted. Allowed to graze unhobbled around the camp, Canelo would sense the enemy and then, good bodyguard that he was, awaken the general (Esteban Falcón) by nipping him and pawing the ground.
One night, the story goes, the general was inside a house. It must have been a very large “house,” for it also contained Canelo and a three-hundred-man army. At 2 A.M. the horse began to whinny, and the general, thinking him hungry, had a servant bring him corn. But the horse ignored it and finally kicked open the door. The general, perhaps anticipating Lassie movies of the future, somehow understood Canelo’s message; he and his men saddled up and waited on a nearby hilltop. Some six hundred rebels were killed in the ensuing ambush.
Equally strange is the story of Fred Kimball, a California horse psychic used by many horsemen and -women, including some of the top-ranked horse trainers and riders in North America. Anne Kursinski, who rides for the U.S. equestrian team in show jumping; the former Lisa Carlsen (now Lubitz), who has ridden for the Canadian team; and Barb Mitchell, an outstanding Canadian trainer, have all used Fred Kimball.
Born in Massachusetts, Kimball worked as a sailor most of his life. He traveled the world and met monks and sages in Tibet and India, where he learned all he could about mind reading, an art he claimed to have mastered. Until he died in 1996 at the age of ninety-one, riders would call him up at his home near Idyllwild, California, give the name and sex of their horses, and Kimball would diagnose the horses’ physical or psychological ailments. The fee was $25; he trusted clients to pop a check in the mail.
Riders remember him as odd but often accurate. A few years ago, a horse bucked off a rider at an eventing competition in Orillia, Ontario, and galloped away. After three days, all attempts at finding the horse had failed. Call “Indian Fred,” someone said. (Though he had no Indian blood in his veins, that appellation persisted.) Kimball described a particular valley by water and said the horse was suffering with a shoulder problem. A local person identified the place, and there was the missing horse, all right — sore shoulder and all.
Nancy Page, a rider in Battersea, Ontario, told me she called Fred Kimball on a dare. Though he was quite ill and would die soon afterward, he told Page many things about her horses that she found eerily correct and she felt her skepticism draining away. In essence, Kimball claimed to converse with each horse and then reported the burden of that conversation to the owner.
Page learned, for example, that her two-year-old colt Brady took great pride in his feet, for he fashioned himself a jumper one day. Right after her chat, Page went to the paddock and brought Brady — a horse she had raised as a foal and who was as loyal as a dog — into his stall. “Nice feet, Brady,” she told the horse in a mocking way, whereupon the horse, who had been quietly eating his hay, lunged at Page and bit her on the shoulder. He had never done anything like that before and has not since. Page, to be safe, has since refrained from making inflammatory comments about Brady’s feet.
Help for horses can come in all shapes and sizes. Some horses, especially racehorses, walk nervously in their stalls and need “mascots” to calm them and keep them company. Exterminator, the 1918 Kentucky Derby winner, grew attached to a Shetland pony named Peanuts. Over the course of twenty-one years, the lean and lanky gelding had three such ponies (Peanuts every one). He loved them all and mourned them when they died. A famous racehorse of the eighteenth century, a major player in Thoroughbred genealogy called the Darley Arabian, befriended a cat who used to sit on his back in the stable or nestle against him. When the horse died, the grief-stricken cat refused to eat, until he, too, died.
Native Dancer, the splendid “gray ghost” of the 1950s, also displayed a great fondness for cats, and in particular a black stray who wandered into his railway boxcar during one of his many road trips and eventually became his stablemate.
Examples abound of horses — social creatures, after all — bonding with humans and even other animals. I read of an Appaloosa who adopted a certain chicken, shared meals with the bird and forbade other chickens to seek her company. Racehorses have bonded with goats, dogs, rabbits, potbellied pigs, burros and roosters. A Thoroughbred named Hodge, who ran in the 1914 Kentucky Derby, loved a talking crow who used to sit on a fence along the backstretch and yell, “Come on, Hodge! Come on, Hodge!”
In the world of horses, the true tale is only a horse tail removed from the tall tale. Just hanging around stables, I have heard stories about horses who could slip the bolts on their stalls, slip Houdini-style out of warm-up blankets; horses who loved to eat hats and buttons, or mischievous horses who would hide brushes and other grooming tools in the straw. I have heard of horses who removed ladders, leaving their owners stranded on a roof. A rider told me of a horse who bites on the halter in his rider’s hands, hoping to engage her in a little tug of war. A Canadian Thoroughbred called Le Danseur used to grab a rub bag and play catch with his groom.
Nicolette Engelman of Strongsville, Ohio, tells the story of Deter (short for Determined Effort), a sickly foal whose grand sire was Determine (the 1954 Kentucky Derby winner). Given little chance of surviving, the small black colt somehow pulled through. His stablemate was a six-month-old Rottweile
r called Rolf, whose company he much preferred over horses.
The horse would kick a stall ball with his hooves, and he and Rolf would chase it. They played tug of war with dog toys. More canine than equine, Deter did everything but bark.
If Deter was a horse who thought he was a dog, Whippoorwill Hello! was a horse who thought she was a human. Mary Jean Vasiloff of Old Lyme, Connecticut, tells of this foal born unexpectedly in February of 1968. Vasiloff found the almost frozen foal in the morning near a distressed and milkless mare. After a week in the vet’s incubator, the sickly orphan took up lodgings in Vasiloff’s house. Vasiloff fed her every fifteen minutes, day and night, for a month.
It took a mere three days to housebreak the little horse. She would proudly pull at someone’s sleeve, then run to urinate in her stall, with its rubber mats and deep bed of shavings. They called her Whippoorwill Hello! in part because the farm was on Whippoorwill Road and in part because she whinnied every time the phone rang. The foal played in-house tag and soccer with Vasiloff’s sons, drank water from the bathroom sink and chased the cat and dog under the couch.
No surprise, the filly was difficult to train. Convinced her place was in the home and not in the pasture, she hated other horses. Eventually, she permitted some, but not all, children to ride her. “She allowed the slow-witted, the lame or the timid,” said Vasiloff, but let any able-bodied, experienced rider on her back and “she was instantly the Horse from Hell.”
When the then fledgling North American Riding for the Handicapped Association launched a local chapter, Whippoorwill Hello! was donated to the program. She helped dozens of disabled children learn to ride, qualified one rider for the special Olympics and even performed on the White House lawn with Jim Brady in the saddle. (He was the presidential press secretary shot in the head during an attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981).
Eventually, Whippoorwill Hello!, finally content to pasture with other horses, was stabled at a farm in Virginia. “One day,” says Vasiloff, “as she was cantering through the pasture with her friends, she ran into a pile of branches, puncturing her lungs and heart. She died from the injury, and on autopsy they discovered that Whippoorwill Hello! was blind, and had been all her life.”
No one can deny the extraordinary feats of cutting horses, those marvels of western ranches. Quarter Horses, many of them, are neck reined — to turn left, for example, the rider simply applies the rein to the right side of the horse’s neck. Cattle drives require horses capable of quick stops, tight turns and rapid acceleration. The Quarter Horse is brilliantly suited to the task. How brilliant? Cowboys used to engage in competitive storytelling.
One yarn has a riderless lone horse working a herd of fifteen hundred cattle. After he had cut out one big steer three times, only to see him rejoin the herd, the cutting horse wonder finally lost his temper: he grabbed that steer’s tail in his teeth, gave it a twist and him a somersault. The horse then sat on him for ten minutes.
Finally, there was the tale of the cutting horse who was so good, his rider bragged, he “could cut the baking powder out of a biscuit without breaking the crust.”
Other stories serve to remind us of the powerful and intricate bond that sometimes exists between horses themselves. The wild-horse herd, for example, is like an extended family, but not one free of vices. Stallions may rape mares and kill colts after a harem takeover. Yet cohesiveness and even altruism are common. The story is told of a mustang roundup in Saskatchewan earlier this century in which a chased mare ran alongside the stallion, her muzzle always at his flank. They seemed inseparable and only after capture did the truth come out: like Whippoorwill Hello! she was blind.
Doreen Freer tells the story of Jube the Wonder Horse, as they called him in western New York State. Like a stunt horse in a B western, the Arab stallion would sit down, lie down, roll over, nod and shake his head for yes and no, even take bows. Some days he would do all this in his pasture — simply to amuse onlookers.
Shortly before the chestnut horse died, Jube was pastured with his three-year-old son, a paint named Murphy. “You could see the two of them running side by side,” Freer recalls, “tossing their heads, their tails way up and their necks arched with pride. It was a daily ritual, the two of them playing and later, a nap for Jude, always in the same spot.” One day he dropped heavily and never rose again.
Murphy pawed at his father, as if imploring him to play, then took Jube’s mane in his teeth and tried to make him rise. But the head fell back slackly. At that point every horse in the pasture gathered around Jube and stayed there a full hour — “as if to mourn the passing of an old friend.” The last to leave was Murphy.
The ritual mourning seems not to have been an isolated case. D. Lovell Coombs, in the Ottawa Valley, tells the story of Royal Mandy and the manner of her dying. After three foals and a thousand rides, Coombs felt he owed her “the familiar touch of a friend and a goodbye without terror.”
The needle was given, and when Royal Mandy dropped, the other horses fidgeted and her longtime stablemate began a panicky gallop around the pasture. The backhoe was brought in to bury her, and the despondent Coombs walked heavily to the house with the vet. When he next looked out to the pasture, he marveled at what he saw.
Mandy’s three pasture mates had formed a semicircle around the freshly dug grave. They stood that way, heads bowed, utterly still for half an hour. “If I ever doubted animals have feelings and compassion and a place in God’s world,” wrote Coombs, “I lost those doubts the day I saw three horses stand silent vigil over a lost friend.”
Mandy was buried in a pasture with few daisies. The following spring, hundreds of daisies — those wildflowers with golden hearts and white petals — bloomed where Mandy lay.
Sometimes a horse story, ostensibly about human-horse affection, bears a hint of something else. The horse possesses a special quality and the rider seeks a share in it; that desire to partake of the horse’s greatness strikes me as an integral aspect of humankind’s intense attraction to the horse. The story is told of Jamal, a Bedouin who owned an Arab mare with legendary speed. He spurned all offers to buy her, guarding her obsessively, and when the governor of Damascus offered a horse’s nose bag full of gold for the man who stole her, Jamal grew even more wary.
Despite elaborate precautions, Gafar, member of a tribe hostile to Jamal’s, did manage to steal her in the night, and before galloping off he woke Jamal and boasted of his feat. Leaping onto his brother’s mare, a sister horse to his, Jamal chased the thief and was actually gaining on his own horse when he said to the thief, “Pinch her right ear and give her a touch of the left heel.” This was the key and the mare shot off into the darkness.
“You father of a jackass,” his tribesmen later mocked Jamal.
“I would rather lose her than sully her reputation,” Jamal explained. “Would you have me suffer it being said among the tribes that any other mare proved fleeter than mine? It still is true. She never met her match.”
EPILOGUE
No one ever came to grief — except honorable grief — through riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them; unless of course they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
He who would venture nothing must not get on a horse.
SPANISH PROVERB
TO THE QUESTION Why are some of us wild about horses? there is no one answer. But the more I inquire, the more I trust my instincts. Certain responses ring vividly true.
That of Vickie Rowlands, for example. Her story — pony rescues foal from murderous gelding, told in chapter 9 — derives from a life in the company of horses. She sleeps in their stalls at foaling time, mourns them deeply when they die, rejoices at their victories and, as the operator of a horse-trek business in rural South Africa, sees to it that each horse is bedded down at the end of the day.
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“The most amazing thing about horses,” she told me, “is that creatures so powerful, so capable of destruction —” and here she began to speak slowly and in italics “— let us ride them.” That, finally and more than anything, is what sustains the horse-human bond: the generosity of horses induces in riders a pure, largely unconscious gratitude.
Bill Barich, who hung around the racetrack for months before writing Laughing in the Hills, reflects on that generosity as he ponders its clear opposite: the terrible injuries that horses occasionally inflict. “Every groom, and almost every trainer,” he wrote, “told such tales, of hoofs flying out of nowhere to bunch an ear like cauliflower or scatter teeth like Chiclets … There was really nothing to protect you from the horses except a sort of grace conferred by the animals themselves.” Grace is a useful notion here. So is faith.
Riding a horse or even getting close to horses — to pick their hooves, groom them, saddle them — is an act of faith. In Wyoming, I was leading Radish and another horse to water when I carelessly let the lead shank lengthen and the rope caressed Radish’s flank: he exploded, swung round, kicked blindly. Pure reflex spared me harm, and despite the words of the smiling wrangler — “You handled it like a pro” — I was reminded of how a dude’s head can split like a cantaloupe.
The cowboys’ apparent casualness around horses, I now know, masks a constant vigilance. Let your guard down even for a second and you may pay a price. But even those hurt by horses, it struck me, rarely lose faith.
Christopher Reeve, an actor best remembered for his role in the Superman movies, fell hard from a horse in 1995 during an eventing competition in Virginia. Barring a medical advance, he will pass the rest of his days in a wheelchair. Every year in the United States, some fifty thousand people are injured riding horses, and some two hundred die from those injuries. But a New York Times reporter went around to the stable where Reeve fell and asked riders, Has the accident given you pause? The answer, invariably, was no.
Wild About Horses Page 28
