Summer of the Horse

by Donna Kane

  The weather these past few weeks has been spectacular. The temperature hot, the yellow stubble of the harvested crops against the blue sky a confection of fulfillment. Today I rode Sally to Emilie’s. I led her across the road that goes past our house into the first field, then the second and through the break in the bush that leads to the field before the highway. Once across the highway, I got on. And we rode, just me and Sally. Maybe not completely calmly: for sure there was a simmering excitement in me that I was doing this thing on my own, on a horse far from Wayne’s lead or Emilie’s, and Sally seemed to need my reassurance, her ears swivelling to my words. But as we rode along—my mind always on the next few feet; glancing, when I felt confident, at Emilie’s ranch in the distance; feeling Sally’s muscles as they moved—we were calm enough. When we rode into Emilie’s driveway, I tied Sally up to the hitching post. And then, after I’d had some time to take it all in, Emilie and I rode back. After she left, I walked around the yard, the air still warm but dusk coming on. I carried a glass of wine and I looked at the flowers, at Sally’s shed, at the apple trees and the lilac trees. I sat on the fence and I watched Comet and Sally. I was tired, but I was happy.

  Parts of Comet’s wound have closed altogether and the parts still open are only a few inches wide. I still hose him, but not every day. When I do, I know it is as much for me as it is for Comet. I also know that the pleasure I gain from this time together, from seeing the changes in the wound, rubbing away bits of straw or dead skin, is a pleasure beyond my affection for the horse. It has something to do with seeing things through. I am proud of the way Comet’s healed.

  After seven years of being a part-time rider on the trail, after a summer of hosing Comet, I have become more relaxed. I know that I am beginning to trust my ability to communicate with a horse and to let the horse communicate with me. But there’s something else too. At the end of it all, there still isn’t anything I really want from a horse. There is nothing I really want a horse to do.

  “I disagree,” Emilie says. “I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

  But here’s the thing: When I’m out in the pasture, I’m keyed on the horses. But when I’m elsewhere, I still think about that Italian bicycle and the Vancouver seawall.

  Riders lead their horses up Steeple Pass.

  Twenty-Eight

  Tying Off

  A knot is a line looped into itself until it binds, a topological solution to a fastening problem. As a mathematical construct, knots possess elegance and clarity. They are an example of the human intellect at work. Most knots used today have been used for thousands of years, and that is one of the reasons Wayne loves them, for their visceral connection to history—and for the way they do their job, and, when you get good at it, for the pleasure of loop and lock.

  On the trail, the diamond hitch is the knot that holds the panniers and soft packs on the back of the horse. It’s an art, and outfitters will eye each other’s knots as a way of assessing worth. Part of what I love about the diamond hitch is that it is not just Wayne’s fingers that move—his whole body is engaged in a union with the rope, a dance of tug and twist, the horse the object of the knot’s enclosure.

  Knots are anything but wild. If knots are tied correctly, they have the last word. They stop things and they hold them fast. Some people welcome answers that can contain their panicked moments. It keeps them from losing their minds. Others lose their minds because their ideas get all knotted up—a knot encloses a hole. Is the hole something or is it nothing? If it’s nothing, is that not still something? Some of us drive ourselves crazy because we want the perfect answer to our problems.

  Novelist Edith Wharton famously wrote, “I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.” We tie the knot and then we try to untie it.

  When the last pack horse is packed, and Wayne is nimbly braiding the daisy-chained tail, it is the signal that the day has begun. Waiting for that last pack horse, for that final daisy chain to bind is both spectator sport and stopwatch. By the time that last slip knot is spent, you’d better be up on your horse and ready to go.

  “Knots are real,” Wayne will say. “They keep a person honest.” If a knot is incorrectly tied, you’ll know it. The horse will break free of its tree during lunch, the packs will shift on the downhill slope, the hobble will come off in the night.

  Thinking about knots reminds me of Plato and trying to work my way through the “Form” of the forms. The idea being that for every object on Earth, there is a concept of that object. A horse is a form of Beauty. Beauty is the Form of the horse. And the Form of the Form? The idea of the idea? I felt trapped inside my skull, a physical discomfort from trying to wrestle my way out of logic. Aporia. To be stunned. To have nothing to hang on to. In Plato as Artist, philosopher poet Jan Zwicky writes, “Thinking leads to skepticism: that is its only defensible result. But it is not an acceptable result—not only can it precipitate cynicism and its attendant lassitudes, it cripples thinking itself.” And that’s not good. I need to think. If I don’t, if my thoughts can’t move, I might as well be dead. “The aim, then,” Zwicky writes, “must be to contain thinking, while keeping it alive. And—Plato’s insight—it turns out that life-sustaining thinking is impossible without hope.”

  We are trapped inside our skulls, limited by our own particular way of thinking. But within that space we make room for hope. Hope, Zwicky suggests, is the oxygen that gives thought breath. But unlike recognizing the Form of Beauty, where we can look at a horse and say it is beautiful, pointing to a single material object and saying it is hope is a lot harder. Maybe hope is the material world all told. Maybe hope emerges from our apprehension of the natural world’s persistent and enduring qualities. After all, what hope tells us is that it may not be over; there might be another way.

  “All men by nature desire to know,” Aristotle said. Humans love to think. When I do find a solution, when I learn something new, I feel something open while at the same time snug up inside me.

  I love the physical pleasure of tying a knot too, and the knot I love most is the one used to tie off. More intricate than tying a lead rope to a tree, but unburdened by the strength required to hold a soft pack together, tying off is a sensuous pleasure. In practical terms, tying off holds the pack horses’ headgear together—the halter, the nose basket and the hobble that is stored around the horse’s neck during travel, all of the straps gathered and bound and enclosed by the lead rope so that the straps of the headgear are less likely to catch on a branch of a tree or on another horse’s gear as the horses tussle for position or one tries to scratch an itch.

  To do this, to tie off and collect the gear together, you must first toss the lead rope over the horse’s head and then bring the end of the rope under its neck. Then, with your left hand, you shape the rope into a sideways U held against the horse’s cheek, and with your right hand bending the belly of the rope into its own smaller U, you pass the U behind the rope of the hobble, the strap of the nose basket, the crown strap of the halter, pushing that U-ed rope behind every last strap and then pushing it through the larger U that’s been waiting on the other side; then you repeat that, then snug everything up and, with what’s left of your lead rope, make a half hitch and put the tail through.

  There is no way I would be able to tie the knot on that description alone. I need to be able to see the rope, to feel it in my hand. My body remembers the motions of the knot better than my thoughts do. And my body learns knots best when I make up a story—the gopher goes through the hole, the fox chases its tail—a story made up of the material world. When my body takes over, the pleasure of the knot takes hold. And once the knot is tied, I want to tie another one.

  Wayne surveys his pack string. sarah haggerstone

  Twenty-Nine

  Coming Home


  The thing I love most about meeting Wayne at the end of each summer is how I do everything I did in the spring but in reverse. In retracing my steps, I feel like I’m tying things up. The lawn that has been mowed countless times in Wayne’s absence has now turned brown. The weeping birch, which I watered all summer long, trying to keep it lush while the woodpeckers perforated its bark, is drawing in its sap, its leaves turning orange. The flowerbeds that were just getting started when Wayne left have flourished and grown; the leaders of the new spruce trees extend like articulated tent poles; the fleece flower having burst into bloom, now drops its seeds. It is like a door opened in the spring, and I entered it, and now, early fall, I have come back out. And Wayne is coming out too. This year, he will come out at the Tetsa River.

  I know when I see him I’ll make strange. On the one hand, it’s exciting to discover his body anew, but on the other, I worry. What if we’ve both changed in ways we don’t like? And I don’t just mean in a carnal way, though I mean that too. What if we don’t like each other in any way? And what about those female clients who spend so much time on the trail with him? There’s a life-and-death quality to the experience. Crossing a river or leading a horse up a pass can be a life-changing experience, and when the group shares that experience, the bonding can be profound. I’ve mentioned this to Wayne, always careful to make it seem as though I’m teasing, nothing serious. It’s a delicate line we draw. A part of him is likely reassured that I am concerned, though he never comes out and says that. What he does say, and what, at the end of the day, I believe to be true, is that there is no one else.

  I park in the pullout, an hour ahead of his estimated time of arrival. I want to prepare for it, be ready for the moment when he emerges from the trees. But somehow, no matter how carefully I watch, he always surprises me, and this time too, appearing as if out of nowhere on Bonus, a firefly let loose from its jar. Because of the routine of the trail, even now, even after three months, Wayne and I barely have time for a hug. Along with the rest of the crew we set to unpacking the pack horses; and because we are now beside the highway, we have to tie them to the trees and feed them flakes of hay, just as we did on their way in.

  I have so much to tell him. My news padded with the clicks and whirs of electricity and vehicles and news wire—I flew to Vancouver to visit my kids, Mavericks Night Club burned down, my dad had another stroke, bc Hydro’s proposed dam has moved into the joint review stage. Wayne’s news will be more focused, the world revolving around his pack string: they watched a grizzly chase two elk calves who deked the bear out in the willows; they glassed a stone sheep coming out of a set of cliffs, then another one, until they’d counted fifty. Michael Coon, who’d been on the trail twelve times, confessed he’d never been to the top of a mountain, so the next chance they got, they climbed one. And a turquoise down jacket, lost the season before, was found in perfect shape, in a patted-down patch of grass where bears had been playing.

  Comet stands behind Sally’s Shak.

  Thirty

  Sally and Comet

  Today I took down the temporary electric fencing I’d put up around the hay bales in the area where the granaries were and where Comet and Sally spent their summer. With Wayne home, we’ve moved Comet, Sally, Ronnie and Bailey into the front pasture, and I’ve been pitching hay there. I can see them now on the little hill where Brian and I, during the summer, would take Comet and Sally for walks around the pasture, then stop to let them eat the grass.

  When I took the electric fencing away, it left a sharp boundary between the side where the horses came to eat, their hooves trampling the ground into pulverized dirt, and the hay side, where the grass was intact but now brown.

  The pitchforks are still leaning against the bales, and it makes me strangely homesick. I realize how rich and full my summer has been, and how attached I’ve become to taking care of Comet. I think of my dad, how he’s still hanging on though it is getting steadily harder for my mom to care for him at home. This week, we put him on the list for long-term care. When I see him, he doesn’t always know who I am. But I can tell, even if he doesn’t know my name or what my relationship is to him, that I am familiar. His eyes still light up when he sees me.

  When Wayne comes home, I try to make my claim. Comet is mine now. I’ve earned him. And he belongs to Sally too. But with the other horses home from the trail, grazing in the harvest field next door, Comet is spending much of his time leaning over the fence whinnying at them.

  “Comet wants to be with the rest of the horses,” Wayne keeps saying. Soon we will ride the other horses across the fields a few miles northeast of our place to a quarter section of pasture, where they will graze through the winter.

  “Ronnie would be better for Sally,” Wayne says. “He wouldn’t boss her around the way Comet does.”

  Which, I have to admit, bothers me too. I feel my resolve start to wane. Also, I don’t like the idea of Comet staying with Sally if what he wants is to be somewhere else. But if he does go with the other horses, he’ll probably end up being a part of Wayne’s herd and next year he’ll be back on the trail.

  “Okay,” I say, finally. “Let’s try it.”

  “Well then,” Wayne says, “go get your horse.”

  Comet and Sally have moved from the hill back to the water bowls. I walk up to Comet and stand beside him. I touch his scar. I press the palm of my hand against him. I could stand and touch his scar all day. I put his halter on and lead him to the fence that separates him from the rest of the herd. I take off his halter and open the gate. He gallops toward the other horses, and they gallop to meet him and then they all run together across the field. Comet is almost lost in the herd, but I can still see his mane, the colour of stubble flashing in the sun.

  Sally is beside herself, frantic and whinnying, running up and down the fenceline.

  “She’ll be all right,” Wayne says.

  And perhaps she would have been. But it was Comet who, after a few hours, left the other horses and came back to the fence. After a few days with Comet still choosing to graze near the fence that separated him and Sally, Wayne let him back in. At least for the winter he’ll stay with Sally. In the spring, we will see.

  Horses survey the Southern Caribou Range.

  Afterword

  The Wild

  Who can know the mind of another being? Who can even know their own? I watch the horses. There is a power and a grace we recognize as beauty, a beauty we want to be a part of. And if that means thousands of years of human intervention, of domestication, to capture even a small part of that beauty, we do it. And the horses let us.

  I watch Wayne. There are aspects of him I’ll never understand. One is how he stays so optimistic about places like the Muskwa–Kechika, how he continues to believe that wilderness areas can be kept from human industry. But then again, it is Wayne who says you can’t be an environmentalist unless you are an optimist. The way Wayne thinks is a mystery to me. It’s one of the things I love about him.

  I watch my dad. It seems that what’s disappearing is his consciousness, as if his body can no longer absorb it. Maybe awareness is leaving my dad’s corral, returning to the cosmic plain from which it came. There is so much about our brain, our bodies, our minds we still don’t understand.

  There are things I never thought I could do, but I did them. At first, the shock of it felt impossible to overcome, but then, the realization that I’d survived built a new and more solid foundation inside me, a foundation that gave rise to infinite possibilities, an endless rolling out of What next? And Why not?

  Like other beings, the natural world keeps me alive, both physically and metaphysically. The Muskwa–Kechika is a place that still feels pristine, exuberant, healthy, still filled with its original potential, its infinite possibilities, its mysteries. When I am there, it restores me. I breathe better. It fuels my curiosity, my desire to always be thinking and in that thinking, to exp
erience the wild. I hope it can stay that way.

  A horse in the wild.

  Bibliography

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