Spirit of the Horse

by William Shatner

  They were now in the ranks of the Knights of Columbus, and the marching boys were making room for them with shouts of sympathetic glee. Must they back through the Red Cross, where all the girls in town were marching, and into the Daughters of the Revolution float where our mother sat with a group of ladies around the spinning-wheel? Geoffrey remembered that the Red Cross had a band, if it would only play. It struck up just in time. The horse instantly became a fugitive in the right direction. On they sped, the reviewing stand almost in sight. The drum-corps had not begun to play. Could they reach the cavalry before it was too late? Geoffrey hated to pass the reviewing stand in the guise of a deserter, yet here he was cantering among the Odd Fellows, undoubtedly A.W.O.L.

  But Heaven was kind. The drums waited. Through their ranks dashed Geoffrey at full speed, and into the midst of his companions. The reviewing stand was very near. At a signal, all bands and all drums struck up together. The horse, in stable equilibrium at last, daring not to run forward or to run backward, or to bolt to either side, fell into step and marched. Deafening cheers, flying handkerchiefs; Geoffrey and his horse stole past, held in the ranks by a delicate balance of four-cornered fear. If you fear something behind you and something in front of you, and things on both sides of you, and if your fear of all points of the compass is precisely equal, you move with the movements of the globe. Geoffrey’s horse moved that way past the stand.

  People took their pictures. Our father, beaming down from the galaxy on the stand, was pleased. Later he told Geoffrey how well he sat his horse.

  But that evening Geoffrey had a talk with his mother, as man to man. He told her that, if these Victory Parades were going to be held often, he should vote for compulsory military training for the horse. He told her the various things his horse had done, how he went to and fro, going to when urged fro, and going fro when urged not to.

  “Probably he had been trained to obey the opposite signals,” said our mother. “You must study your horse as an individual.”

  That horse was an individual. Geoffrey studied him as such. He is quite willing to believe that he had been trained to obey the opposite signals. But Geoffrey says that he still cannot stifle one last question in his mind:—signals opposite to what?

  BLIND FAITH

  Some horses are products of fantasy, like Pegasus. Some become legends in fire, like Bucephalus. Some grow in the heart, like my own Great Day—and like this next horse, who was nothing less than miraculous.

  His name was Blind Faith, and he belonged to Judy Bonham, a California trainer who acquired him in 1964 from someone who had spent money training him and then decided he didn’t want to ride. Judy got the horse when he was three and took him to the Appaloosa shows, where she did so well that he was champion in the Appaloosa division in 1966 and 1968. She traveled all over, turned him into a champion reiner, and when he was thirteen years old he began having trouble with his eyes. They started watering a great deal, and a cloud formed on one eye. The vet said it was cataracts and that he would eventually lose his eyesight. His advice?

  “Keep riding him.”

  Judy was surprised to hear that.

  “He trusts you,” the vet told her. “He’ll go where you tell him. Just keep him in a box stall. As long as he knows his area, he’ll be fine.”

  Judy knew when the horse had lost his sight because she’d put his food down and at first he couldn’t find it. Then he learned, by scent, how, where, and when to locate it.

  During this period, Judy continued to ride him. He acted as though he were sighted because he had formed such a bond with Judy that he trusted her to be his eyes. And not just by signals from the reins or her legs when she was riding. She recalls:

  “When traveled and I led him to the trailer, I’d go ‘Step, step, step,’ and he’d step his foot up and put it on the ramp and then walk on in.”

  So his cues were olfactory and auditory. And that’s not all. When Judy took him to a show, he would measure the length he would have to run. He would somehow remember the number of strides it took or he’d recognize the different sound near the wall or possibly he’d notice the change in the air circulation, possibly all of the above—and he would know when to stop or turn or execute another reining maneuver.

  “And I never cued him,” Judy remembers. “Never once. He would slow down when we neared where he knew he would have to stop and I did the rest.”

  The trust was absolute. But soon, Judy realized, it became more than that. When she would put him in the trailer to travel, he would kick, or he would buck, or he would throw himself from side to side. But if she sat in the horse trailer with him, he would ride quietly. This big, powerful animal … this small, gentle human … in his mind, balance was restored.

  When Judy finally decided to retire Blind Faith, in 1979, it was solely due to his age, not his blindness. He lived with Judy on her ranch. Throughout the early 1980s he suffered from almost chronic bronchial sickness and—I’ll let Judy tell the rest.

  “I just couldn’t let him suffer, so I had him put down,” she says tearfully.

  “The vet came and I held him, and they just gave him the drugs to put him to sleep and he just went down and I just sat there with him and petted him until he was not there anymore. I wouldn’t let the renderer come to take his body until after he was gone. It was heartbreaking but, you know, I looked at it this way: I said, ‘I know I’ll be riding him again someday.’ He just did so much for me.”

  That is a fascinating, wonderful comment: “He just did so much for me.” One might think, on the surface, that it was the other way around. Judy took care of him, never lost faith in Blind Faith despite his affliction, helped him to lead a very full life. Yet he did so much for her. Again, as she puts it:

  “He made me who I am,” she says. “My total empathy for animals, my outlook on them, and the fact that he made me grow and mature as a horse trainer. That was why I gave him the name I did: he had so much faith in me. I had a deeply spiritual connection with that horse and he just—I think there are certain horses that are so sensitive to you and your feelings that they become a part of you and your desires. Blind Faith was that horse.”

  “White Dandy”; or, Master and I

  by VELMA CALDWELL MELVILLE (1898)

  This novel, like the true-life tale of Blind Faith, is a fun and poignant story, and I offer up the first two chapters.

  The selection has another value, one that makes stories written in any other era so important. I remember, growing up, reading novels like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Fiction is often a snapshot of the time when it was written, riddled with customs, habits, tools, and thoughts that are otherwise lost to us. There are props in this tale that evoke what it was like to own a horse well over a century ago. The language, too, is a reminder of another time, when a word like “bungler” was truly an invective.…

  I suspect that the tale (and the title) were inspired by the success of an earlier novel by one Anna Sewell, the classic Black Beauty since White Dandy was billed as a companion piece.

  CHAPTER I.

  Master is Dr. Richard Wallace and I am Dandy, the doctor’s favorite horse, long-tried companion and friend.

  Neither of us are as young as we once were, but time seems to tell less on us than on some others, though I have never been quite the same since that dreadful year that Master was out West. He often strokes my face and says: “We’re getting old, my boy, getting old, but it don’t matter.” Then I see a far away look in the kind, blue eyes—a look that I know so well—and I press my cheek against his, trying to comfort him. I know full well what he is thinking about, whether he mentions it right out or not.

  Yes, I remember all about the tragedy that shaped both our lives, and how I have longed for intelligent speech that I might talk it all over with him.

  He is sixty-two now and I only half as old, but while he is just as busy as ever, he will not permit me to undertake a single hardship.

&n
bsp; Dr. Fred—his brother and partner—sometimes says: “Don’t be a fool over that old horse, Dick! He is able to work as any of us.” But the latter smiles and shakes his head: “Dandy has seen hard service enough and earned a peaceful old age.”

  Fred sneers. He says he has no patience with “Dick’s nonsense;” but then he was in Europe when the tragedy occurred, and besides I suppose it takes the romance and sentiment out of a man to have two wives, raise three bad boys and bury one willful daughter, to say nothing of the grandson he has on his hands now; and I might add further that he is a vastly different man from Dick anyway. It is a grand thing to spend one’s life for others; that is what my master has done, and it is what we horses do. Of course he is looking forward to his reward, but we are not expecting anything, though he insists that there will be a heaven for all faithful domestic animals. Fred says there is no Bible for it, but Dick says that they could not mention everything in one book. He says, too, that while he believes everything to be true that is in the Bible, at the same time he knows many things to be true that are not there; then he tells about a good old minister, who, when asked to lend his influence in the organization of a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, replied that if Paul had written a chapter on the subject he would consider it worth his while to countenance the movement, but as he didn’t, he must be excused.

  For the benefit of such men, Master says he wishes the apostle had had time and inclination to write a chapter, and since he did not—with due reverence for Paul—it would have suited him better, and met a nineteenth century need closer, if he had omitted suggestions on ladies’ toilets and dealt a few of his sledge-hammer blows at the man who oppresses the defenseless. Of course I know nothing about such things myself, but Dr. Dick has always had a fashion of talking all sorts of things to me, and I have a retentive memory.

  But I must begin my story, for I have set out to give you a history of “Master and I” and, incidentally, of many another man and beast.

  I will begin shortly after the tragedy; maybe before I get through I will tell you about that, but to-day I do not feel equal to it.

  Poor Master!

  Well, he came into my stall, where I had literally shivered with terror ever since that dreadful morning four days before, and, throwing his arms about my neck, burst into tears. A long while he sobbed there, and then growing calmer, he began caressing me, and said:

  “Dandy, boy, you are going home with me, to live with me while I live, to walk beside my coffin, and to be shot beside my grave, if so be you outlive me.”

  Sad words, but they were a comfort to me, feeling as I did.

  Presently the boy came in and groomed me until my snowy coat shone like silk.

  “I hate to part with ye, Dandy, fer fact I do!” he said, standing off and looking me over, “but then ye’d a gone anyhow, I s’pose.” Then he put a halter on me and led me out to where the doctor’s horses were standing hitched to a buggy and tied me fast to the back.

  All the folks came out of the house and surely they cried harder than on either of those other days, but the doctor, with his lips white and set close together, hurried into the buggy and, with a backward nod, drove off. I glanced back and neighed good-by, then took up my journey with a heavy heart. I wanted to go and yet I wanted to stay. Certainly it was not enlivening to have to watch my master’s agony all that weary seventy miles to his home.

  Of course we stopped over night, and my first night it was away from home. I assure you that I felt lonely and wretched enough.

  “Give all my horses the best of care,” Master said to the hostler, “especially the white one.”

  The man promised and led us away.

  “Don’t s’pose they’re any better’n other nags,” he muttered, the minute we were out of hearing, and he took us to the pump, tired and heated as we were, and gave us all the water we could drink.

  “What would Dr. Dick say?” Queen, one of the span of bays, said, as we turned away.

  Of course the man did not understand, but thinking she was calling for more water he pumped another pailful and offered it to her. In surprise she turned her head aside, which so angered him, that he dashed the whole of the water right on to her.

  Then he led us into dark, dirty stalls, roughly removed the harness from the bays and threw us some hay. When he was gone, at least we could not hear him, Queen said:

  “I am all of a shiver; I believe it was the cold water inside and out. Dear me, I wish Master would come out.”

  “So do I,” said Julie. “One thing is sure, we will have to stand up all night, I can never lie down in this filthy place.”

  “I don’t think I could if I wanted to,” responded Queen, “I am tied so short.”

  Meanwhile, I was nosing the hay, but it smelled so musty and something in it tickled my nostrils.

  Presently I asked them if they could eat it.

  “Oh, yes,” Julie answered, “if you are going to be a doctor’s horse you’ll get worse than this.”

  Being pretty hungry, I nibbled away at it until a groan from Queen startled me. “Ain’t you any better?” queried Julie. “No, I am shaking so I can hardly stand; how I do wish I had a blanket!”

  “Wonder he don’t see to rubbing us down,” I said.

  “Rubbing us down!” Julie spoke with scorn. “Unless Master comes out himself, as he generally does, there’ll be no rubbing down to-night. About daylight they’ll come around with an old currycomb and all but take the skin off us, along with the mud that will be formed out of the sweat and dust that ought to be rubbed off to-night.”

  “Oh, I wish Master would come!” moaned Queen; “I am almost burning up now.”

  “Got fever,” remarked her mate, who seemed to have been around the world a good deal and grown used to everything.

  After what seemed an age, a light flashed into the barn and two strange horses were tied in the next stalls. The same man led them. After throwing them some hay he came into my stall.

  “Here, you fool, why don’t you eat your hay, not muss over it?” he cried angrily, pushing it together with one hand while with the other he dealt me a blow across the nose. It was the first blow that I had ever received, and it hurt me in more ways than one. Just then a boy came in with a peck measure of oats.

  “There hain’t none o’ these critters tetched their hay hardly; ’nd their boss hez gone to bed sick, so I guess we’ll ’conomize on the oats till mornin’.”

  “All right.”

  “Humph!” said Julie, but Queen groaned and I felt like it.

  Before morning of that wretched night I lay down; I could not help it, I was so tired, hungry and sad.

  Sure enough, by daylight (or lantern light in that windowless barn) the man and boy were at us with currycombs as if we had had no more feeling than barn doors. Then we each had a meager portion of oats. Julie and I ate ours readily enough, but poor Queen was too ill.

  When the man noticed this he swore a little, then lengthened her halter strap and ordered the boy to scatter some straw over the filth in all our stalls.

  By and by Master came out looking wan and haggard in the dim light. “Poor girl!” he said, tenderly, running his fingers along the edge of Queen’s jaw to the pulse.

  “Mercy, Queenie, what a pulse—ninety!” Then he questioned the man as to his care of us, but never a word of truth he got in reply, but we could not tell.

  “Lead her out into the daylight,” Dr. Dick ordered, adding: “Haven’t you a lot or yard where all my horses can be turned in for awhile?”

  The man demurred, but Master soon brought the landlord and we were taken out into the sunlight. So busy was the former administering a dose of aconite to Queen that he did not at first notice me, but when he did an angry ejaculation escaped his lips as he pointed to my side. I was astonished, too, when I saw instead of my spotless coat, a great yellow stain.

  “Is that the kind of beds you provide?” he cried, turning to the landlord.

  “
I am sure there seemed to be clean straw in the stalls,” the latter replied, “I’ll ask the man.”

  “No need,” answered the doctor, curtly, “I am the one to blame for trusting any man to take care of these good servants who cannot speak for themselves.”

  It was almost noon before we started and then the bays walked every step of the way.

  Just before leaving, the span of horses that came in after us the night before were brought out, one of them limping painfully.

  The owner unconcernedly seated himself in his buggy and took up the lines.

  The doctor spoke of the animal’s lameness.

  “Oh, that is nothing, Jerry is always lame when he first starts, and nearly all the rest of the time, for that matter,” he added, as if it were a good joke.

  “Why don’t you have the trouble investigated?”

  “Oh, I don’t know; never thought much about it; he’s an old horse,” and with this he drove off.

  Dr. Fred’s first wife and her two boys were waiting to—but you can’t understand what for yet. There were not so many railroads and lines of telegraph then, and no intimation of the news we brought had reached her. She cried and petted Dr. Dick as if he had been her own child. She put her arms about my neck and kissed me, too, making me think of other arms and other kisses. Ah me!

  That Mrs. Fred was a lovely woman, more fit for Dr. Dick than his brother.

  The Wallaces lived in the small country village of K____ and controlled a large practice. The brothers were ambitious, but had started poor, and not until the year before had they felt that either could spend a few months abroad. Fred was the elder, and there were other reasons why Dick preferred to go later, so it happened that the former was the last of the family for me to know.

  The Wallace barn was a large frame building, warm in winter, cool, from having perfect ventilation, in summer, and well lighted.