by Donna Kane
There was a risk that the horses would grow restless with their small patch of grass and decide to travel back over the mountain in search of better food, so we slept lightly—listening for the clanking of the horse bells that marked their grazing. At 5:00 a.m., Wayne heard the bells’ clappers quicken. “The horses are heading out,” he said, waking me. He was already getting dressed. I sat up and watched him leave the tent.
I wriggled into my pants, the bottoms still damp, pulled on my gumboots, gritted my chattering teeth. Once outside, I could see that Wayne had already caught Hazel, the horse who came up with the big ideas that the rest then followed, and was leading her back to camp, sucking most of the horses back down with her.
Wayne’s trips are experiential. “Do not expect a typical ‘tourist’ trip,” is what his brochures will tell you. “Expect to be treated as an expedition member and fellow traveller.” But this morning there wasn’t time to wake the guests up. With the rain lashing down, it was up to me and Wayne to get the other horses tied up. I gathered a few of the halters and moved through the trees by the creek, the branches of wet willows slapping against me, the shallow dish of their leaves tipping water down my neck. I heard a crack of thunder and then the low, muffled rumble of a jet engine. I imagined the passengers up in the plane, warm and dry in their seats, perhaps a woman with a neck pillow ordering a mai tai, heading to Maui.
I spotted Tuchodi by the bank—a hummock of black, the warmth of his hide steaming from the rain. I hesitated. A Percheron cross, Tuchodi was one of the biggest pack horses in Wayne’s string. He was also one of the most excitable and nervous. I was not confident catching him. But I knew that the longer it took to catch the horses, the longer it would be before I could stand beside the fire and warm up. As I drew near, I focused on a patch of Tuchodi’s black mane, made it the only thing that existed in the mist of steam and breath. Be the mane. I fixed my mind on it, and it was as if I’d clasped a tuft of his thick sweep of hair before my hand made contact with it. Believing I could grasp Tuchodi’s mane seemed to help my ability to achieve it. Wayne would say it was because I exuded confidence. I had reined in my insecurities, taken control of my doubting mind and in so doing, had taken control of Tuchodi’s mind as well. Recognizing my confidence, Tuchodi accepted me as his leader and stayed put. Whatever it was, it worked. I reached up on my tiptoes and brought the crown strap over his crested neck, then slipped Tuchodi’s muzzle between the cheek pieces and did up the buckle.
Some people say you should put the lead rope over the horse’s neck before you start to put the halter on. Some say you should lead by walking at the horse’s shoulder. On the trail, you need to walk directly in front, a few feet of lead rope between you and the horse so there’s space for the horse to clamber up hills and over rocks behind you. Some say you should be at ease on a horse. Others say no matter how long you’ve been riding, you should always be alert to what might go wrong.
Wayne says we view horses as if we are looking in a mirror—horses are a reflection of our own character. If we like to be in control, then we think the horse is there to be controlled. If we want a horse to be our friend, we think a horse is there to be our friend. Wayne is largely prosaic; he thinks horses are tools. Which doesn’t mean that he thinks they don’t have feelings or needs, but he sees a horse as an animal that, through years of domestication, of selection and culling, has become a useful aid. I am an unconfident, anxious human having a hard time believing I should be in control of another animal. People tell me that horses would be less afraid if they knew I was in charge. Not possible, is what I say. First, I’m not confident, and a horse will know that. And who am I to say when a horse is more or less afraid than me? Can a horse adapt to a rider’s fear? Can we still ride in consensual joy? I don’t know. I’ve spent most of my time riding in a pack string where the horses follow each other and know where they are going. There’s not a lot I have to ask the horse to do.
Ray Hunt, one of the original proponents of natural horsemanship, a method that seeks to create a rapport with a horse, also uses the mirror as a metaphor for the horse, suggesting that when he looks at a horse, he sees the rider too.
Maybe it’s as simple as saying that how you treat a horse will affect the way a horse treats you. A horse becomes a reflection of our character through our interaction with it. But what is it about a horse that makes it so willing to absorb us, to allow us to change the way it behaves?
The evolutionary physiologist and geographer Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, lists the six criteria that animals must meet for domestication. They can’t be strict carnivores—it’s too economically inefficient to feed a picky eater. They must mature quickly relative to us. They must be willing to breed in captivity. They can’t have “nasty dispositions”—they can’t want to eat you. They can’t be flighty. Animals who panic easily and flee are hard to control. Finally, they should be herd-bound. They need to recognize you as their leader.
Horses fit these criteria, and thousands of years ago humans began to breed the horses who demonstrated those qualities best, culling the ones who didn’t.
In a 2014 email, writer Luanne Armstrong said:
It is actually amazing how few animals will accept or have accepted domestication. And horses are weird. What is in it for them? They go wild easily, almost instantly. All that is in domestication for them is basically abuse. And yet they seem to almost crave contact with people. After sixty years, I still can’t understand it. Why, after two hours of riding my horse in circles, does he lean the whole weight of his head on me and stand there and just breathe. It is actually terrifying to have him give me that trust.
Wayne likes to take the long view. He sees human intervention with animals as a natural outcome of evolution, what he calls “selective pressure.” Not unlike the way ants domesticate aphids: biting off the aphids’ wings or excreting chemicals to keep them dozy, ants have learned to keep the insects close, milking them for their dew, and, in return, protecting the aphids from their predators. In this kind of domestication there rises a co-evolution.
We are drawn to horses and horses are drawn to us.
I remember the first time I heard the term sit a horse. The words came from a guest going on one of Wayne’s expeditions. It was during a party I’d thrown for her so she could meet the locals, and so I wouldn’t have to entertain her on my own. We were sitting around the kitchen table, an old piece of furniture we’d bought at a second-hand store and once painted yellow, then crudely sanded back down. I’d covered it with a red-and-yellow-checked cloth. I remember that because, in discussing the trip the guest was about to go on, the inevitable question arose—“Are you a horse person?”—and she replied, “I’m not an expert rider, but I do know how to sit a horse.” It was a flashbulb moment, like when I heard Elvis Presley had died. Now, whenever I hear the phrase, I think of the guest, the tablecloth, me in my red sleeveless shirt.
How firmly the dropped preposition put her in possession of the horse, how unequivocally it transformed the horse into an object to be acted on. When I told Wayne I didn’t like the phrase, he said, “How come?”
“It sounds pretentious.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re not used to the term.”
“No, no. It’s something else.” I tried to think of what that something else might be. “Okay,” I said, “if I say I’m going to hike on Bevin Pass, there is a kind of meandering implied, a willy-nilly nature to the hike. But if I say I’m going to hike Bevin Pass, it suggests a beginning and an end that I am in control of.”
I’ve heard riders talk about communicating with their horse in a way that gives rise to an intuitive back-and-forthing, a co-being in which the horse and rider anticipate each other’s movements, even each other’s thoughts. I wonder if it’s a bit like the two-step.
I learned this simple dance by standing on my father’s feet as we moved around the living room to songs like “The Cowbo
y in a Continental Suit.” While some dancers lead with their mind, following the two-step rule of quick, quick, slow, my father used the steps of the dance as loose scaffolding behind the rhythm of each song. The difference between the two approaches has always seemed profound. To dance with someone who leads with an intuitive sense of the music seems to give entry to the very emotion and spirit of a body’s engagement with life. At those times I am more than willing, eager even, to follow. My body’s movements are drawn into the rhythm of my partner’s body and the movements of my partner’s body are drawn into mine. We move in an intensified joy.
Maybe a rider moving in sync with a horse creates, for both, a rapport of trust and an intensified engagement with life. Maybe if you’re a really good rider, the horse is happy to follow. Maybe, at some point, the lead is mutual.
The mind and the body are both dancers too. In my case, too often both try to lead. Neither one trusts the other. The two do not ride in consensual joy. My mind becomes nervous and my body stumbles.
Some take the view that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, the result of enough neurons in the brain firing to reach a boiling point the way a pot of water reaches a boil and produces steam. With this theory, consciousness may be superfluous, but still important. After all, steam may be an emergent property of boiling water, but it is the steam, not the boiling water, that shapes the brim of a cowboy hat, unseals an envelope, powers the engine of a train. It is consciousness that tells me who I am.
A domesticated horse may be an emergent property of the modifications we’ve made through selective breeding—an animal that reflects our desires, just as consciousness reflects the brain’s activities—but the instant I walk away from a horse, he returns to his essential horseness. As Luanne Armstrong says, “Horses go wild easily, almost instantly.”
Sometimes I like to think of consciousness this way: it is something my brain domesticates, reins in from some cosmic field. My mind a wild thing. When I die, consciousness will be let out of its corral, returned to its own essential horseness, as Tuchodi, when we’re done for the day, turns away from me, bending his broad forehead to the ground, his whiskered muzzle winnowing through a patch of lupines, his muscled ears swivelling, the rims of his nostrils stiffening in the flare, his hide rippling at the touch of a fly, his spirit surging his body across the plain.
Comet, in the summer before his injury, mills with the rest of the herd at the end of a trail day.
Nine
Comet
After I return from the airport with John, I put on my gumboots and go out to look at Comet. I figure if I spread out my hands, it would take fifteen of them to cover Comet’s wound. And where the wound is deepest, where the muscles are cut and exposed, is a hollow so deep that if I lifted the hide to fully expose it, I think I could stick my head inside.
“Horses have a lot of mass,” Emilie says when she comes over for a look. “It’s not as bad as it seems.”
“Good,” I say. “Because it looks like the horse will die.”
Before I met Wayne, Emilie and I didn’t talk about horses. We might be outside, even walking through her horse pasture, but the interests we shared were more toward art and relationships. We were “figuring out life,” as Emilie likes to say, “like we are sane or something.”
Before I decided to leave my husband and before Emilie decided to stay with hers, she used to say we were on the same journey, that we kept each other afloat. She doesn’t say that as often now. Even though we live nearly next door to each other and horses have become, by necessity, a part of my life and, by passion, have always been a part of hers, I think she sees me on a slightly different vessel, one in which we no longer share the same bail bucket.
Emilie was eleven when she got her first horse.
“And you wanted the horse,” I say. “It wasn’t someone else’s idea?”
“Oh, god no, I wanted a horse since I could ever remember. I was real little.”
“How did you know you wanted a horse?”
“Don’t you always know when you want something?”
I think of Plato’s allegory of the cave, how if we were born chained to one spot with only a blank wall in front of us, we’d have no thoughts at all. You can’t know what something is if you don’t know what it isn’t.
“Well,” I say, “you can’t want something you’ve never known.”
“Well, then, I saw a horse. The first horse I saw that I remember was when I was about four. It was at the relatives’ and they put me on this pony and apparently I wasn’t afraid, but they took me off because I didn’t want my brother on it. I remember being a little bruised up about that because I was riding in the front and Brian was riding behind me, he was a year younger, and we were trotting around in this little fenced area, it was probably very tiny, but you know when you’re a kid it’s huge, and then they took the pony away because I wouldn’t share it. I was kicking up a bit and it would go beyond a walk and my brother would fall off and that wasn’t good. That’s the first time I remember riding a pony.”
“You did that on purpose, to get him to fall off?”
“No, I wasn’t trying to make him fall off, I just wanted to go faster. And I didn’t care if he fell off—it was the consequence of going faster. Anyway, they took the pony away. That was the start and after that I always wanted a horse and I finally got one.”
Anyone who has seen Emilie on a horse will say it’s a beautiful thing, a muscled union of animated energy.
There are antibiotics that Comet will need to take orally for ten days. Fly repellent to be applied around the outer rim of the wound. Fura-Zone to the wound itself and a salve to be used in case the Fura-Zone runs down Comet’s leg and creates a rash. The hosing is to begin right away.
When Wayne acquired Comet, the owner told me, “It’s a man’s horse.” Try telling Emilie that, is what I’d thought at the time, but I’d kept my mouth shut. What irked me wasn’t just the implication in his remark that a man could handle a horse better than a woman; it was also that, as with so many things that bug me, I felt an undercurrent of worry that it could be true. And now? Hosing a “man’s horse,” a horse I am in no way comfortable with, twice a day, all summer long?
Brian has already strung garden hoses together so they reach the corral where Comet is to be confined. Brian can see my hesitation. He hands me the hose. He’s attached my watering wand to the end of the hose and my first thought is, That’s my expensive watering wand!
“You may as well start now,” he says. “You’re the one who will be doing this.” And it’s true. When Wayne’s expedition leaves in a few days, Brian is going too. What did I know about wounded horses? What did I know about horses at all?
“There goes my summer,” I say to Wayne when he returns from Vancouver, just a few days before he’ll hit the trail. And as always when I complain, he nods. Wayne is always sympathetic. Also, not once has he suggested that this might not have happened had I bothered to check the horses. In fact, I have never heard Wayne place blame on anyone. I have never heard him speak ill about another being, human or otherwise. I wish I could say the same for myself.
“Well, what should we do about it?” he says.
And as always, I don’t know. On the face of it, the answer is simple. I can’t be with Wayne and remain disconnected from how he makes his living. As long as I live in this house, I am a part of what goes on. I can leave or I can stay, and I don’t want to leave.
I don’t want Emilie to take care of Comet, either. Which she’s offered to do.
“Why don’t you bring him to my place,” she’d said. “The grandkids will be coming and going all summer. They’d love to help.”
I have my mother’s stubborn pride. Maybe I don’t want Emilie to see me give up. Maybe I enjoy being a martyr, which has been suggested a time or two. “You need to be more generous,” Wayne has said when I’ve refused someone’s offer t
o assist. Maybe I need to prove I can do this. Maybe, and this is the thought that settles inside me, maybe I’m curious to know what it is to heal a wound.
The expedition ascends Steeple Pass.
Ten
Hitting the Trail
The morning on which Wayne heads into the hills is one of excitement and organized chaos. The stock truck comes at 7:00 a.m., and the guests and the wranglers pitch in with loading the horses, the saddles, tack and panniers. Meanwhile I’m in the house cleaning up from breakfast, packing up the night’s dinner, checking to see if the irrigation is turned off, if anything is plugged in that shouldn’t be, noting the ball cap and phone charger left behind by one of the guests, making sure the cats haven’t been locked inside a room. When the stock trailer leaves, everyone, including me, who will go up to help with the send-off, needs to be ready to follow. Emilie has offered to take care of Comet until I return.
This year the trailhead is the dilapidated parking lot of the Summit Lake Lodge, 392 miles up the Alaska Highway. Fifty years ago, when the roads weren’t paved and vehicles were less fuel efficient, there were lodges like this one all along the highway. Cinnamon buns and coffee were their claim to fame. Today the main building of the Summit Lake Lodge and all of the accompanying cabins, once painted a bright turquoise, have been abandoned, the paint faded and peeled, most of the windows smashed.
