Spirit of the Horse

by William Shatner

  I was to lie behind, though handy, until we came to the descent to the stream and then make the pace down and home as hot as I could,—to find out the “dicky forelegs,” he said, knowing that Jerry’s were like steel.

  We all got down to the post pretty punctually, and, of course, in a race of this description, the starter had no difficulty in dropping his flag at the first attempt.

  I gave Jerry his head, and to my joy he took the first fence as straight and quietly as possible, so taking a pull at him, I was at once passed by some half dozen men (the gallant “Gardener” amongst them) going as hard as they could tear. It was lucky for them that the fences were light and old, as most of the horses rushed through them. When they got to the bullfinch, one horse refused, and another attempting to, slipped up and lay in a very awkward looking lump, jock and all close under it. The rest having been a little steadied took it fairly enough. Jerry jumped it as coolly as possible, like the regular old stager that he was, in spite of Captain Lane coming up at the time with a great rush, evidently hoping to make him refuse.

  When we landed on the other side a ludicrous spectacle presented itself, the gallant “Gardener” being right on his horse’s neck, making frantic attempts to get back into his saddle, which were quite unsuccessful, and the horse coming to the next fence, a post and rail, quietly took it standing, then putting down his head slipped his rider off and galloped on without him.

  The field now began to come back to us very quickly, and soon the leading lot were Vincent of ours, a splendid rider, as I thought, and as it turned out, my most dangerous opponent, with a Carabinier in close attendance; then myself, with Captain Lane waiting on me, and watching the pair of us most attentively, so that it seemed almost impossible that I should have any chance of slipping him. However, an opportunity did present itself at length, which I took advantage of—hearing a horse coming up a tremendous “rattle” on my right.

  I looked round to see who and what it was. Lane, noticing what I was doing, looked round too. Seeing this I loosed Jerry’s head, and giving him at the same time a slight touch with the spur, he shot out completely—slipping the Captain, passing the Carabinier, and getting head and head with Vincent. Down the hill we went as hard as we could, clearing the water side by side. At the grip in the fields beyond I gained slightly by not taking a steadier at Jerry, trusting to his eyesight and cleverness to avoid grief.

  As we got to the best fence, the ugly boundary one, I did take a pull, the jump looking as nasty a one as could well be picked out; however, the old horse did it safely, and Vincent and myself landed side by side in the winning field, amidst most tremendous shouting and cheering from our men, who were standing as thick as thick could be on each side of the course.

  The excitement was terrific as we came up, apparently tied together, but giving Jerry a couple of sharp cuts with the whip, I found my leg gradually passing Vincent’s, until at length I was nearly opposite his horse’s head, and thus we passed the winning post, to my great relief. I did not know how much my opponent’s horse had left in him, and expected him to come up with a rush at the last, in which case I doubted whether I should be able to get anything more out of Jerry in time, as he was rather a lazy horse, though possessing enormous “bottom.”

  I had scarcely pulled up and turned round to go to the scales, before I met the Major, who told me I was “not to make a fool of myself and dismount,” before the clerk of the scales told me to, and then he pitched into me for riding at the “Grip,” as I did, apprising me at the same time that he did not care how I risked my neck, but “I might have hurt the horse,” adding, after a pause, and with a grunt, “but you won.”

  The delight of our men was so great at two of their officers being first and second, that it was all that Vincent and myself could do to avoid being carried about on their shoulders after we had weighed in.

  The gallant captain was most awfully disgusted at being beaten by “a couple of boys,” and went off immediately—resisting all invitations to stop and dine at mess. I subsequently found out that when I slipped him (at which he was particularly angry) he gave his horse a sharp cut with his whip, which seemed quite to upset it.

  On coming down to the water the horse jumped short—dropping his hind legs in, and at the “Grip,” nearly got in, only saving itself by bucking over it, and at the big boundary absolutely came down on landing, though his rider managed to keep his seat.

  As for myself, I need not say how delighted I was at winning my first steeplechase, though the Major did tell me that a monkey would have ridden as well, and helped the horse as much as I did. “But I won” was always my reply.

  OUR HORSES, OUR SELVES

  I love riding in a sulky behind a trotting horse. That’s a light, two-wheel, one-horse, one person carriage. I’ve won championships, and guiding a horse from behind comes somewhat naturally. My muscles knew it quite well, almost from the start. That doesn’t mean I was a chariot driver in some hypothetical previous life. For one thing, in a sulky it’s like you’re on a bike. You’re on two parallel wheels and you’re pressing into those stirrups … it’s like you’re on a motorcycle. With a chariot, your stance is more like skiing.

  It could mean that maybe my connection is with the horse itself, spiritually, not through the reins. Or maybe I was a Cossack, challenging myself and a horse on the Russian steppes.

  I don’t know. But I do know I have a connection with horses that I cannot explain.

  I was reading, recently, about LUCA: the last universal common ancestor. According to scientists, this is an organism that lived about four billion years ago around volcanic vents deep in the ocean. These organisms became the ancestor of all life-forms.

  Assuming that this is true, all of us—humans, horses, the whole panoply of life—have that in common. Those of us who open up to people, horses, trees, you name it, make special connections with them. Born in the saddle? Green thumb? Maybe it’s a matter of being sensitive to some aspect of your own ancient gene pool.

  I have talked a lot about spirituality in this book and I know that these energetic connections exist among the living. What about the dead?

  When I am in the field where Great Day is buried, I am alone with my memories. There is a Navajo verse about a dead horse, which goes in part:

  In the mist of blessed pollen hidden, all hidden he;

  How joyous his neigh!

  I don’t feel that—not because I don’t want to, but because I’ve accepted that my bond, my connection through LUCA, is with the living horse. Perhaps when I’m gone, we’ll be united, both neighing joyously.

  I don’t know.

  Our concept of death is skewed by what we feel over the loss of another. It is possible, even likely, that the lingering pain of that loss, the refusal to completely surrender that connection, obscures our “outreach” to the departed soul.

  I don’t know.

  Many actors—most?—experience that same thing in a small way when a play closes. You’ve bonded with other actors, exchanged energy eight times a week, hung around in a cast house, in the dressing rooms, and then, suddenly, it stops. You walk around for a while, looking for a place to put your key. Then, hopefully, another job comes along and you form a new connection. Sometimes you stay in touch with the other actors, have reunions. The connection survives, at least a little.

  Not so with death. At least, as far as I can prove.

  The irony is, if many paranormal scholars are right, it takes about twenty days for the spirit to find its way to heaven or wherever it is in accordance with one’s form of belief. At a time when we could make a connection, in theory, we’re blocked, impeded, too busy grieving.

  My belief is that a spirit or soul has got to go someplace, somewhere that human-conceived physical, psychological, and ethical rules don’t apply. It’s way, way beyond that. I believe that when a beloved companion or parent or child or animal dies, it goes somewhere—and when you die, you go to that same place. Perhaps the bond you forge
d in life is what leads you there. Perhaps we’re all following that first LUCA. (Though I wonder if those volcanic vents are somehow, in our DNA, the origins of hell?)

  There’s a reason I bring all this up.

  I’ll be talking more about the spirituality of the horse in the final chapter. But writing this book, thinking about the spirit of the horse and its relationship to the spirit of human beings, all got me thinking—or rather, not thinking, just feeling: if I could time travel, if we had that portal from Star Trek in “The City on the Edge of Forever” through which I could just hop somewhen else, where would that be?

  Keep in mind, I am a man of the twenty-first century. By that I mean I love to ride, and my favorite rides are those filled with the romance of the West. You go out to a place like Red Rock Canyon in Nevada, and it looks great, epically great, and it’s appropriately dusty and dry and harsh. Time vanishes while you’re out there. But then, astride my well-conditioned horse, I ride back to a really neat hotel, and I have somebody take care of the horse, and I get in the swimming pool and then have a great dinner. So maybe this question shouldn’t be posed to my eighty-six-year-old self, but to a much younger version.

  Oddly enough, if I could send that youthful, White Comanche–age William Shatner somewhere, it wouldn’t be to the time of Alexander or Genghis Khan, though that would be wonderful to witness, of course. It would be to ancient Minoa, which arose on the island of Crete around 3600 BCE. That predates Alexander by three full millennia.

  We spoke before about Centaurs, but there were also legends about the Minotaur, the half man, half bull, and you look at these vases and terra-cotta figurines they left behind and read about their history—

  These people jumped over bulls. Their culture was such that they did not stick the bulls as a torero does, but they athletically leapt over them, men and women both. And we’re not talking about jumping like hurdles. They came at the bull from the front, grabbed the horns, and were typically flung upward by the bull. The leaper would then disengage and land on or behind the bull. It was the ultimate test of courage.

  They had horses, too, of course, but as far as I know they only rode those.

  When I think of the reckless daring I had in my youth, I think I might like to have been a horseman and athlete in the Minoan culture.

  Perhaps I was. Perhaps I will be, yet again, depending on whether reincarnation exists and whether it works backward as well as forward.

  Why not?

  Which leads to an interesting question: will geneticists one day create a human-horse hybrid?

  As an actor in science-fiction pieces, I know something about cloning, about genetically created superhumans. On Star Trek, those traditionally did not work out too well.

  How would it be, though, if we were to start cloning horses in the real world?

  Right now, I’m riding four great horses. In terms of dollars, they’re priceless. And by that I mean, in terms of my ability to ride at my age, these horses are invaluable to me. That aside, by any measure, by ability, by temperament, by size, by beauty, and by talent, these horses are great.

  If you could clone these horses, if you could get an exact physical replica of each, that would be extremely valuable. A horse starts training at about two years of age. They get really good around eight. And they stay good until about seventeen, eighteen. That’s when most of them start to decline and are retired (though not always; I have ridden horses and seen horses that were great up to the age of twenty, twenty-two).

  So to have that same stock, as it were, would be a great starting point. If you could clone them you would be getting another horse made of the raw material that made the original horse so great.

  On the other hand, you can’t clone temperament or talent. That doesn’t work. You can only clone physical characteristics. And there’s the potential rub.

  Horses need three things. First, they need the conformation. That means the perfection or correctness, as it were, of the legs, the body, the head, the shoulders, individually and in their relationship one to the other. If a horse is crooked-legged, it’s liable to go lame. If it wings, which is throwing a leg out to the side, then generally it can’t run fast, because of its excessive motion. You’ll find very few great Thoroughbreds winging.

  So conformation is huge. Then there’s another thing, and that’s talent. Can that horse run, if it’s a Thoroughbred? Will that horse jump? Some horses have a talent for some of that, a natural talent. Other horses will refuse to go over a fence or wall. So if he’s got conformation and a talent, that’s a great start.

  The third thing is heart. Some horses resent training. They may not resent it at the beginning. You get them going and say, “My God, that’s going to be a great horse.” But as you increase the training, many begin to burn out. And at some point the horse says, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I am not going to stop when you ask me to stop. I’m not going to jump. I’m going to refuse to jump. Kick me! Hit me! Smack me! I am not going over that jump!”

  So horses, like people, need heart. They need talent. And, like human athletes, they need conformation.

  Cloning can only guarantee you the conformation. The other two come from countless other factors, interactions, nuances. Right now, cloning those is beyond the ability of science to achieve.

  Tomorrow? Who knows. I’ve written and starred in enough science fiction to know that predicting anything is difficult. There is, however, at least one reliable yardstick: looking back. As we know, as much as things seem to change … they don’t, really.

  “Whooping” a Race-Horse Under the Wire

  TAKING CHANCES, BY CLARENCE LOUIS CULLEN (1900)

  Here’s another tale by Mr. Cullen, who gave us “A Race Horse That Paid a Church Debt.” It captures an era long gone with a sport that is nonetheless unchanged.

  “I see they hollered an old skate home and got him under the wire first by three lengths out at the Newport merry-go-round the other day,” said an old-time trainer out at the Gravesend paddock. “Don’t catch the meaning of hollering a horse home? Well, it’s scaring a sulker pretty near out of his hide and hair and making him run by sheer force of whoops let out altogether. This nag, Kriss Kringle, that was hollered home at Newport a few days ago, is a sulker from the foot-hills. He was sold as an N. G. last year for $25, and at the beginning of this season he prances in and wins nine or ten straight races right off the reel at the Western tracks, hopping over the best they’ve got out there. Then he goes wrong, declines to crawl a yard, and is turned out. They yank him into training again awhile back, put him up against the best a-running on the other side of the Alleghanies, and he makes ’em look like bull-pups one day and the next he can’t beat a fat man. He comes near getting his people ruled off for in-and-out kidding, and then, a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a bit less, he goes out and chews up the track record, and gets within a second of the world’s record for the mile and three-eighths, I believe it was.

  “Then, Tuesday they have him in at a mile and a sixteenth, with a real nippy field, as Western horses go. The right people, knowing full well the old Springbok gelding’s propensities, shove their big coin in on him anyway, and take a chance on him being unable to keep up with a steam roller after his swell race awhile before, and the whole crowd fall into line and bet on Kringle until the books give them the cold-storage countenance and say, ‘Nix, no more.’ Then they get up into the stand and around the finishing rail and they see the aged Kriss, who’s a rank favorite, begin like a land crab, when he usually goes out from the jump and spread-eagles his bunch. They begin the hard-luck moan when they see the sour son of Springbok trailing along third in a field of five, and they look into each other’s mugs and chew about being on a dead one. Turning into the stretch, the old skate is a poor third, and stopping every minute, a plain case of sulks, like he’s put up so many times before. The two in front of him have got it right between them, when Kris comes along into the last sixteenth, still third by a little bit, and then
the gang let out in one whoop and holler that could be heard four miles. It’s ‘Wowee! come on here, ye danged old buck-jumper!’ and ‘Whoop-la! you Kringle!’ from nearly every one of the thousand leather lungs in the stand and up against the rail, and the surly old rogue pins his ears forward and hears the yelp. Then it’s all off. The old $25 cast-off jumps out like a scared rabbit at the sixteenth-pole. The nearer he gets to the stand the louder the yelping hits him and the bigger he strides; and he collars the two in front of him as if they were munching carrots in their stalls, and romps under the string three lengths to the good. That’s what hollering a horse home means. It’s a game that can only be worked on sulkers. The yelling scares the sulker into running, whereas it’s liable to make a good-dispositioned horse stop as if sand-bagged.

  “I’ve seen the holler-’em-in gag worked often at both the legitimate and the outlaw tracks, and for big money. One of the biggest hog-slaughterings that was ever made at the game was when an Iroquois nag, a six-year-old gelding named McKeever, turned a rank outsider trick at Alexander Island, Va., in 1895. The boys that knew what was going to happen that time surely did buy it by the basketful for a long time afterward. McKeever was worth about $2 in his latter career, and not a whole lot more at any stage of the game, according to my way of sizing ’em. As a five and six-year-old, he couldn’t even make the doped outlaws think they were in a race, but his people kept him plugging away on the chance that some day or other he might pick up some of the spirit of his sire, the royal Iroquois, and pay for his oats and rubbing, anyhow. When he was brought to Alexander Island in the spring of ’95, and tried out it was seen that he was just the same old truck-mule. One morning, after he’d been beaten a number of times by several Philadelphia blocks, when at 100 to 1 or so in the books, his owner had him out for a bit of a canter around the ring, with a 140-pound stable boy on him. A lot of stable boys and rail birds were scattered all around the infield, assembled in groups at intervals of 100 feet or so, chewing grass and watching the horses at their morning work. This old McKeever starts around the course as if he’s doing a sleep-walking stunt. The boy gives him the goad and the bat, but it’s no good. McKeever sticks to his caterpillar gait, and his owner leans against the rail with a watch in his mitt and mumbles unholy things about the skate. There’s a laugh among the stable boys and the rail birds as McKeever goes gallumphing around. Then a stable lad that’s got a bit of Indian in him leans over the rail just as McKeever’s coming down, and lets out a whoop that can be heard across the Potomac. McKeever gives a jump, and away he goes like the wind. It looks so funny to the rail birds along the line that they all take up the yelp, and McKeever jumps out faster at every shout. He gets to going like a real, sure-enough race horse by the time he has made the circuit once, and he keeps right on. The owner gets next to it that it’s the shouting that’s keeping the old plug on the go, and he waves his arms and passes the word along for the boys to keep it up. McKeever does six furlongs in 1:14 with the assistance of the hollering, and the owner takes him off the track, gives him a look-over and some extra attention, and smiles to himself.