Whispering Back

by Adam Goodfellow

  He had just come down from about his third rise when Basil simply erupted in about the worst fit of bucking I have ever seen. There was no chance that Adam, or almost any other rider, could have stayed on even if he had been expecting it and within a second he was flying through the air over Basil’s shoulder, landing like a sack on his face.

  Basil did not stop. His head so close to the ground that his nose was almost thrusting into the sand, he threw his entire body into the next buck and then let out the most anguished sound I have ever heard a horse make. Less shrill than a horse’s neigh, it sounded more like a pig being stuck by a knife, a desperate, terrified scream of fear. He belted past me around the pen towards where Adam was lifting his body out of the sand, bucking wildly all the way.

  I don’t think there are many people around who are better at stopping a charging horse than Adam. I saw him turn towards Basil and prepare to block him. Shoulders square, eyes on eyes, raising his hands into the air, he took a confident step forwards, before leaping smartly out of the way as Basil galloped past like an express train ready to blast its way through anything.

  After he had careered round the pen several more times, still in a blind panic, we managed to slow Basil down and eventually stop him. He was dark with sweat, which showed in lines of white froth around his tack and the folds of his skin, as he shuddered with the effort to breathe. Adam was shaking too, more from adrenaline than from exertion. He was all right, but it would have been very unpleasant indeed if he hadn’t been so quick to throw himself out of the way. There was no question of getting back on Basil that evening, and it took quite some time just to cool him off sufficiently to put him back in his stable.

  Not that we had planned it, but there was a bright side to all of this. Adam was still in a virtual state of shock by the time we got round to Henry’s for our rent meeting. We had a pretty good excuse for being late, we felt, and it probably didn’t do our cause any harm to attract sympathy from our landlord at this precise moment. As Henry fixed him a strong whisky, Adam described what had happened, before proceeding to slip into a dazed state, unable to participate very coherently in the discussion as the shock wore off and the whisky wore on.

  Even with occasional little incidents like that, it seemed from the moment we first saw Moor Wood that we were meant to be here, belonged here. From the beginning, when I saw the ad in Horse and Hound, the first time we came down the driveway, or maybe even the day I went out for that bike ride and met Sensi, how could so many coincidences and chances have occurred without being scripted? Without Sensi, without Adam’s chance comment, we would never have got involved with horses; instead we would almost certainly have been sucked into the rat race and moved to London to find work like most of our friends. Having a horse meant we couldn’t stay in a city, and, all the time, Moor Wood was waiting, a destination where we could fulfil our lives in so many ways. Even Leslie, who drove us out of his yard, and Sarah and Peter, who left Moor Wood so suddenly, made it all possible.

  But our landlord need not have seen it like that, and a great many would not have had the foresight and generosity to freeze the rent for yet another year, to enable us to establish ourselves more solidly, maybe even start to make a little money, hopefully without falling off too many horses in the meantime.

  NINETEEN

  Back to the sky

  (Adam)

  Clients come to Moor Wood in a variety of ways. We met Liz, a student who had started recently at university in London, because her cousin came to live in the village and walked down past the stables one day in January. There was an instant connection and it transpired that Liz was looking for a place to keep her two horses. Sky, an ex-race-horse, and her retired childhood pony, a venerable-looking arthritic Dartmoor pony called Koala Bear, moved in a few days later.

  At first I thought Sky was going to be just another ex-racehorse. Indomitable, proud, majestic but vulnerable, with the kind of eye that tells you so much in an instant. By now, I was getting to see patterns in flesh, and even before I looked for it I was resigned to seeing the usual. The drawn muscles, tight all down the neck, that familiar dip behind the withers, and damaged legs all stood out as testimony to years of use. Not what most people would call abuse, I guess, just too much use, and from a very early age, which amounts to the same to me. Put it this way: if punters were given a sufficiently comprehensive history and veterinary analysis, and were sober enough, I don’t think many would feel happy that a horse running for them had ended up like this. Sky looked incredibly like Joe, being a 16 hand high bay thoroughbred, but he was not in as bad a state. He hadn’t met too closely with any buses, and his tendons hadn’t been fired. And he had landed on his feet, so to speak, because he couldn’t have asked for a more wonderful owner than Liz.

  They settled so quickly, it soon felt like Sky and Koala had always belonged here. And not only them, but their entourage of admirers. There was Liz’s cousin and her kids (often accompanied by friends), and three other friends of Liz who came to ride, working in shifts to keep Sky exercised. The problem was, riding wasn’t exactly the kind of exercise we felt he needed at the time.

  I am sure many people who keep horses will have stories like ours about nightmare livery yard managers. But most never make the transition to becoming yard managers themselves. It isn’t easy. Your most natural instinct is to want to butt in. You have responsibilities for the animals that you look after, but it can be hard to find limits. Some things are massive welfare issues; for instance, where a horse is so sore from a piece of tack, or foot imbalance, that you have to recommend the saddle is fixed or a different farrier. But where to draw the line? Sometimes one’s sense of responsibility gets totally out of control. I used to be able to see someone ride past on a horse, and just enjoy the sight in a perfectly normal way. Now I have to stop myself assessing the rider’s shoulder-hip-heel line, and checking to see if the horse looks comfortable.

  Unsolicited advice is not easy to give, but Nicole, Jo and I didn’t really think it was wise for anyone to be riding Sky. He needed help from Pennie, to free up his neck muscles, a lot of quality groundwork to build up his hindquarters, and his saddle badly needed to see Kay. His teeth (and Koala’s) were sorted out first. It wasn’t as if there was any resistance from Liz, or her financiers, who were very supportive, but at first, we kept quiet about a few of the other things.

  It wasn’t long, though, before Pennie and Kay had seen Sky and he was on a completely different work programme. We weren’t surprised that all his team just wanted the best for him, but the dedication they showed was fantastic, as they adjusted to not riding him. Within a couple of weeks, all four of his riders had taken lessons and learned to long-line him, and regularly did so around the school and out on tracks, and this work, combined with massage, began getting him to stretch long and loose, and to rebuild his outline. By the end of winter all the work was beginning to pay off. We were looking at a different horse, and everyone was looking forward to riding him in the summer, especially me, as I had never sat on him.

  All the same, I remember the first few sessions I did with him, and they were some of the hardest I had ever done. For all the sweetness of his character and beauty of his appearance, he was one of the most cynical horses I’ve ever met. He would tempt me into letting him join-up with me, then just wander off or trot over to where he could see his buddies again. It took four sessions before I got to the point where I could just take him up to the school and he would follow me straight away without testing what I was all about. It was as if he could see through every bit of my motivation and took liberties whenever he could, especially if I was only going through the motions. The work he made me do to get his trust was good for my attitude, too.

  But in the fourth session, something changed. He seemed to understand me, in a very conscious way, as if he was taking the time to reconsider whether we humans could actually be helpful to him, instead of simply getting something out of him. Most of the time, a superficial willingne
ss would suffice as he went through the motions of being owned. In spite of the adulation he received from his devoted little group of carers, he had somehow not seen sufficient evidence that they would be all that much better than the rest of mankind.

  This reappraisal of humanity seemed to happen on such a deep level for him. He became so willing to work, so grateful for massage, so easy to handle. The team and I moved on in his long-lining, taking off the saddle so that nothing would block his muscles. I taught them various different types of groundwork, trying to be inventive with single lines, using trotting poles and other tricks to best enhance his recovery. He never seemed to lack enthusiasm for anything, and we began to see just what he could have been.

  Sky gave me a session that was the closest to perfection that I have ever achieved in groundwork. It happened one evening in early spring, and I must confess that working him was a bit of an after-thought at the end of a long day. He had come in for the night but there was still a bit of light. I was only working him once a week, as his fans were around so much, which suited me well enough. But I guess, in spite of having a variety of activities, we were lagging behind in our training. So that evening, when I led him up into the school, I guess he had a right to feel that this would just be more of the same. I got such a strong feeling that this was what he was thinking as I closed the gate behind me, that I stopped for a second and listened.

  I stood for a moment and then hung my long-lines on the fence, feeling sheepish. He was only wearing a headcollar, and it wasn’t as if it would have caused him any pain, he just seemed resigned to the fact that he would be working under the control of the lines, even though he was perfectly happy to work without them.

  I stroked his head and ears and lifted his legs in turn, giving them a loosening stretch in each direction. Then I rubbed him to stimulate blood flow to his saddle-damaged area, the dips behind his withers where years of ill-fitting saddles had taken their toll. I walked off across the school and he came along by my shoulder. His steps beside me were alert and purposeful, and he seemed perfectly content a moment later when I turned and asked him, as politely as I could, to move away at a walk.

  There he was, totally loose in the school, and yet as I danced around with him, he did absolutely every move I asked for, without hesitation, and flawlessly. Rein changes, figures of eight, tight serpentines, circles and straight lines, extending the trot as soon as I moved up a gear, slowing to a walk or approaching me and halting, he did exactly as I indicated. Of course, after a while, I started getting a bit breathless, but he was still up for more, so I let him finish his workout, directing him without moving so much. We finished by just walking around the school together. The whole time, we’d hardly put a foot wrong. It was like a form of dressage, and I felt I’d experienced a dance of perfect understanding and co-operation between man and horse. I was filled with a sense of wonder at what he had just shown me. Finally, Sky was almost free of pain, and showing me his love of movement. Movement for the sake of more than just freedom to move. Movement for the sake of expressing beauty. I’ll never forget it.

  Three days later I had an appointment, to see a woman called Emma who had a young horse she couldn’t control. It was a lovely bright day in late April, and Nicole was off teaching with Kelly, and so was using the car. I had arranged with Jo for her to give me a lift to the appointment, and then Emma would bring me back afterwards.

  Jo greeted me as I came out the door with so much less than her usual bubbly smile that I could see she was ill and wouldn’t make it through the day, and probably shouldn’t have even come in. But she had known I was relying on her for the lift. It was a bad coincidence that our working pupil at the time happened to be on that week’s course, so she had gone in to Witney with Nicole. The horses were out for the day and Jo promised to clean the boxes ready for them to come in, but instead I told her that I would help her finish the yard before we left, so she could go home and rest. This would mean the fort would be unmanned for some time, which is something we hate to do, but on occasions it just can’t be avoided. Anyway, I should be back well before coming-in time, so I could bring all the horses back in from the fields.

  The horse I saw that day, a beautiful black mare called Poppy, was indeed a real handful. Young, barely halter-trained and completely lacking in confidence, she was practically impossible to lead, and Emma, who had several children, was in real danger of being seriously injured any time she handled her.

  It was a tricky job, but by the end of the afternoon, Emma could safely lead and handle her horse, and it was clear the basis of their relationship had changed dramatically. But I had arrived late and we had gone on longer than expected, so we would have to pick up her kids from school and take them up to Cirencester with us when she took me home.

  Strangely enough, given that I was in a car surrounded by kids, I rather enjoyed the journey. Not only because Emma’s company was so pleasant, but her children were actually polite enough not to interrupt immediately if they had something to say. Which is why it was such a surprise when her little son Alfie suddenly announced loudly, with a ghastly edge of panic in his voice, ‘I don’t want to die! Why do we have to die!’

  I looked at Emma across the car, utterly at a loss for words, and stole a glance back at Alfie. He was close to tears. His elder brother tried to say something reassuring, but all he could manage was, ‘But we all have to die,’ and he started to give examples, listing various famous people like the Queen and the Pope, and the trees and birds running past their window. This failed to lift Alfie’s spirits.

  I tried. ‘Well, you know, Alfie, if nobody died then we’d have to make sure no one was ever born, because otherwise we would fill up all the world and destroy it even faster than we are anyway. So that would mean you wouldn’t have any brothers and sisters and you wouldn’t even be alive yourself, your mum and dad would just be getting older and older and never dying. Things could never change. Look out the window and see how all the life is just coming back to the world after the cold winter. All you see are the dead stems from last year’s plants, but in the soil new seeds are just starting to come to life. And they’ll grow and flower and be beautiful, but then they’ll die too, and the whole cycle will start again. Everything passes, everything has to change. You just have to try to make the most of your time, because the moments that pass will never come back again.’

  ‘But I don’t want to die!’

  In the end, I had to agree with him.

  We drove quietly the last few miles past Cirencester and up into the heart of the Cotswolds, but as we came through the gates and down the driveway, the kids began to babble excitedly as they saw Moor Wood. The sun was going down and it was getting gloomy, as the huge silhouettes of the cedar and giant sequoias loomed impressively out of the valley, strewn with horses grazing quietly. When we got out of the car, of course the kids wanted to see the stream and the lines of rambler roses, and I took them to prove how you can punch the sequoia trees without hurting your hand, as the bark is so squishy. Finally they left, promising to come back at the next Open Day.

  As I set off across the field, a half-drizzle was descending while the light slowly faded, and I lowered my face to the wind. At times like this, when it’s getting dark and you’re alone and dog tired from a hard day’s whispering, and there are still several long journeys up and down to the field to fetch the horses in, even being the luckiest guy in the world doesn’t feel like quite such a bed of roses.

  The first thing that made me realise there was a problem was that the fence was down. The electric tape was broken in several places, and I could see there were no longer any effective boundaries between several fields, but everything looked somehow all right. There was a grey horse and a bay shape in the area above me and another grey shape as expected in Amber’s field. She looked fine, as she stood grazing with her boyfriend Sky near the stream. But in the next bit of field it was clear there had been a stampede. The fields, naturally, had been rolled just a d
ay or two previously, and they had resembled a golf course. Now there was a trail of ruts and destruction where a group of horses had galloped down the hill. I went and found all of them and checked them over, before going and seeing Misty, Sensi and the rest of my lot in the back field. Miraculously, everyone seemed intact, and I gathered up the first two to take back to the yard.

  It was only when I reached the gate that I noticed Sky was standing oddly. He hadn’t moved from where he had been several minutes before. He met my gaze and then looked deliberately down at his foreleg. I unclipped my two horses and went to look closer, an uneasy feeling creeping up my stomach as I noticed that the grey horse that was in with him and Amber wasn’t the right grey.

  It wasn’t until I got round on the other side of him that I could see the hole in his leg. It was only about half an inch across, but it was clearly serious. A thick dark rope of blood oozed out. Somehow I managed not to recoil, but touched his neck softly and quietly asked him, ‘What’s happened, old boy?’

  He looked down very carefully at his leg again, and as he moved a huge spurt of blood erupted from the wound, and he smarted from the pain. My heart plunged and I got back to the house as fast as I could, turning and talking to him as I went, in a desperate effort to reassure him that I wasn’t just abandoning him.

  I was on the phone to the vet when Nicole arrived back from work. Her bewilderment at the fact that the horses had obviously not been brought in yet, although it was by now almost dark, soon turned to horror when I told her Sky was injured. Gathering an armful of first aid stuff, I ran down to Sky while she found a torch and some headcollars.

  I fumbled open a wound dressing and thought about whether I should try to put it on. Quite a lot of blood had come out but the flow seemed to be slower. Then he tried to put a bit of weight on it, and I knew with a shudder as I saw the leg bend limply that it was irretrievably broken.