Album of Horses

by Marguerite Henry

  Along with the new color, spirits soared high. What was once a haphazard fox chase became an organized hunt, with meets held fortnightly.

  Often a meet began while stars still pricked holes in the sky, while grass lay drenched in dew, holding the faint oily smell of Monsieur Reynard’s prowling footpads. By candlelight men put on their pinks. By lantern light they mounted their stouthearted hunters. Then out they went into the gray mist, heading toward Honey Hill or Squire Higby’s place. And just as morning exploded, firing red the maple leaves and barns and pink coats, there they were. All of them: the Master of the Fox Hounds consulting his watch; the Kennel Huntsman, his hounds closely packed around his horse; the two Whippers-In, one ready to scout the fox, the other to round up any hounds that strayed; the Field Master, a little apart from the others, counting noses as it were, taking charge of the big field of mounted followers. There they were, all of them, eager to be off.

  A breeze stirs, whetting the excitement. Horses flare their nostrils, hounds look to the Huntsman for a signal, riders take another notch in their girths.

  Monsieur Reynard, however, is at ease, licking his chops and lolling in the sun only a little distance from the hunt. He has had a good night of it and his belly is stretched tight with the pickings of Squire Higby’s chickens. He lies sprawled on the sunny side of a knoll, protected from the little wind by a boulder and deep woods beyond. Unmindful of the plot against him, he dozes and snores until suddenly he is torn out of his bliss by a single sharp note. The Huntsman’s horn! “Run for your life!” it says. “Run for cover! Run!”

  Meanwhile the Kennel Huntsman is approaching, signaling the pack, fanning them out. “Leu in!” he cries, and the hounds enter the woods, their sterns upright and joyous. As they begin working to right and to left, a yip of happiness escapes them, as much as to say, “This is our whole life!”

  Behind them the Huntsman, the Master, and the followers wait with ears tuned. Many know each hound by voice, by name—the babblers and the dependable ones. The pack is moving ahead now, scouring the covert. Minutes pass, and more minutes, with no sound but leaves and twigs crackling. And then the small sounds are as nothing; one bell-toned hound sings out as she touches the scent. It’s Melody’s voice!

  “Hark!” the Huntsman cries, and he shouts to the pack, “Hark to Melody, hark!” The other hounds move in toward her, noses down tighter than ever. Now she’s singing out in earnest, and, one after one, the hounds give tongue until they burst out full of song. All the while the Whipper-in is scouting the open side of the covert, eyes darting, waiting for Reynard to appear. He’s up in his stirrups! He sees the fox! With an exultant cry he jerks off his cap and points to the bushy tail streaking across the meadow. “Tally-ho!” he shouts.

  And away goes the pack in full cry. The Huntsman lifts his horn, blowing a choppy string of notes. “Gone away! Gone away!” The notes echo and re-echo until the followers know the hounds are on the line and their horses know, too, and they go wild with the chase. Nothing can stop them. Not ditches, nor creeks, nor fallen trees. Up and over them, across miles of country, through meadow and brook.

  Only minutes? An hour? Who knows? The scent lost, then found, and lost again while horses take a breather and hounds potter and Reynard leaps onto the top rail of a fence, teetering happily. Does he know his scent has stopped abruptly? He rests a little, then springs to earth for another run. Again the pack gives tongue, and again the earth quakes to the thunder of hoofs. And again the fox baffles his enemies, jumping on the backs of running sheep, wading a shallow stream, backtracking to the woods, running, running, until at last he can run no more. Breathing deep with weariness he makes a last try for home, his tail dragging over the grass, leaving a strong scent. He can hear the hounds on him, can hear them panting.

  And just as they are ready to tear him to pieces, he reaches a side entrance to his den, darts in, and is swallowed by its blackness.

  Monsieur Reynard is victor! But strange as it may seem, no one is disappointed—not the hounds nor the horses nor the riders, and least of all the fox. He’s had his fun, too, and he will give them another good run some other day.

  This is the story of fox hunting—in ancient, tradition-loving England and in young, modern America, too.

  After the hunt each horse is walked slowly homeward, then covered with warm blankets. And at night when the rider, too, is under warm blankets and no more than half awake, he takes the jumps again in his mind. He remembers how his mount flew over the widest one—over the stone wall with brush on either side—and he allows to himself that he owns a pretty fair hunter. What if she does have lop ears and turns her toes in? There’s Thoroughbred blood in her, Man o’ War blood, Godolphin Arabian blood! Perhaps that’s why she throws her heart over the jumps and then goes over after it. And just maybe he’ll show her this winter with the great jumpers at Madison Square Garden. With a slow finger he writes her name on the bedquilt, Circus Rose . . . . Circus Rose . . . . Circus Rose . . . .

  Often the dream spins out to nothing at all, but then again it comes to something. The fox-chasing mare who could jump stone walls did go to New York. Maybe you saw her there, the gray hunter, Circus Rose. She became champion of the year—all because she could “stay the distance and leap like a cat.”

  And now she’s ready for the Olympics, and there will be friends to see her off—huntsmen and hound men, and one among them is sure to call: “Tally-ho, Circus Rose, Tally-ho!”

  THE POLO PONY

  ONCE THERE WAS AN ENGLISH-IRISH-AMERICAN boy with dark unruly hair and earnest gray eyes. He grew up on the marshes of Cape Cod, and his mother wanted him to be a clam digger or an assistant postmaster. Then he could always come home to supper at night and always sleep in his own bed.

  His father, you see, just loved to run across fields. He had come to America with an international track team and he had to travel here, there, and everywhere with his team. You can understand why the boy’s mother needed one man around the house, even if he was only a teen-ager.

  The boy dug clams and painted the picket fence and ran errands and went to school. Then one Saturday afternoon he saw a newsreel in town, and that changed his whole life. Men in white breeches and helmets were whacking a ball as they rode galloping horses. It looked like fun—but the way he said “fun” to his mother over the supper table made it a big word, shot through with speed, excitement, competition.

  He asked questions about the game. Did she know how it was played? How he could get to play? She shook her head, and the next day the clam diggers shook theirs. They had never heard about a game that looked like hockey on horseback. Only one old man could shed any light on the subject, and this was unpleasant light. “Game’s for rich folks, son. Y’got to have a hull string o’ ponies. One gets wore out the first chukker. They charge all outdoors for the critters, and good ones is scurcer than hen’s teeth.”

  “What’s a chukker, Gramp?”

  “I presume likely it’s one round o’ the game. You got to play so many chukkers to the game. Six, maybe eight, I forget. It takes smart ones to play. Ponies I mean. They can spin on a sixpence and just about guess which way the breakneck fools on their backs want to go.”

  The boy couldn’t put the game out of his head. He just had to hit a ball from the back of a fast horse. He thought and thought how he could make it possible. The summer people on the Cape sometimes kept a horse or two. If he cleaned stables for them, they might let him take one short gallop.

  He searched and found a family who owned several horses and he worked all the season for them, mucking out stalls, grooming the horses, and finally exercising them. And that fall, when the family went back home, they left one of their horses for him to keep forever, with no strings attached.

  From then on the boy never walked anywhere. He rode, five miles to school, five miles home. Then he played polo! Equipment was easy to find—trees for goal posts, a baseball in place of a wooden ball, a hockey stick for a mallet. He bandaged his
horse’s legs for protection and clipped his mane so that he would feel the lightest touch of the reins on his neck. He taught him to stop suddenly, wheel, and start off at a gallop in the opposite direction. He rode at a dizzy clip and some days he could swoop down and hit that ball—wham!—right past the goal. Between games he sponged his pony’s face just as the grooms had done in the newsreel and he washed out the horse’s mouth. At first the animal reared in surprise; then he enjoyed the cool fresh water and opened his mouth like a bird.

  One night the boy rode over to his teacher’s house, where he found an old, old book on games. There was just a small piece on polo, but he read it once and then once again until he knew the words:

  Historical Summation of the Game of Pulu or Polo

  This being a game conducted on horseback with a ball and stick. Designs in early tapestries bespeak evidence of pulu being played in Persia centuries before the coming of Christ; thus no one can doubt its being the most ancient of ball and stick games. An introduction to this wild riding sport was presented to British Hussars in the Punjab by a tribe of Hindu horsemen who raced afield thwacking at a roundish willow root, called a pulu. The period for their play was known to them by the Hindu word, chukker.

  Upon returning to their native heath, the British Hussars continued to have a go at this sport. It has never lost favor, albeit only men of great wealth may pursue its pleasure, requiring as it does a stud of horses so that there may be a fresh one for each chukker.

  The game is played in this manner: First, the choosing up of sides, four mounted men to each, then play begins, the object being to drive the ball between the goal posts of the opposing side. Each team acts as a body and the ability of the four players to work together is more effectual than dazzling play by individuals.

  There were no pictures at all, so in the margins the boy drew sweeping sketches of horses and Hindus and Hussars and was surprised when the teacher objected.

  “Ma!” he shouted, before he went to bed that night, “you got to know about this game. It’s a team game, Ma. You just support the man with the ball. You ride the opponents off, like interference in football. All you do, Ma, is get the ball through the opponent’s goal posts. I’ve got to get a job and go where I can play polo.”

  The mother nodded and smiled and gulped down her dreams, letting the words go in one ear and out the other, feeling only the earnestness in them. She knew the boy was little no more. And when the time came, she sent him off to the big city of Boston with her blessing.

  He went to work there for a department store, and because he was used to the marsh grass and the sea, he felt boxed-in and lonely. At noon he would draw pictures on packing cases. The manager saw him one day and pushed him right upstairs to draw advertising pictures of men in neat new suits.

  The boy turned practically his whole pay check over to the man who stabled his horse, but it was worth it. Visiting polo teams sometimes let him practice with them.

  Afterward he would listen to the players talk, the quick-thinking hard-riding men who had records of hitting six, eight, and even ten goals in a game. They told how the great Tommy Hitchcock, the first man to earn a ten-goal rating, started out to practice as a youngster, swinging a stick from the back of a rocking horse; and how later his mother designed a huge wire cage where he and his friends practiced their shots from the back of a dummy horse.

  But the talk the boy liked best was about the ponies. He got up courage enough to ask why they were called ponies and he learned it was a courtesy, just as grandfathers, for example, speak of their white-haired sisters as girls. Those first Hindu horses actually were ponies, and the name hung on even though ponies gradually gave way to the big horses required by big American men.

  He learned too that Thoroughbreds crossed with cow ponies made the speediest and handiest mounts. One player said he wouldn’t have a pony unless it had first been toughened and seasoned by years of hard and fast riding on the range. The boy noticed that the greater the player, the more credit he gave his ponies. He liked that.

  In Boston, too, he joined the National Guard because the army encouraged polo. It made men stronger, braver, better horsemen. Now for the boy there was no more stable cost. The National Guard men played Harvard, and in indoor polo with only six chukkers and a small field the Guard men could hold their own. But the Harvard men had better horses and they won the eight-chukker outdoor games on the big fields. The important thing, however, was not so much the number of goals as the thrill of playing—the speed, excitement, competition.

  The boy is man-grown now and he has two polo ponies of his own. He plays with a local team, as hundreds of other men are doing today. No longer is the sport reserved for the men with great strings of ponies. Anyone can play if his heart is set on it.

  Only in America could this happen. And it did. The boy’s name is Wesley Dennis.

  The Morgan

  TONY WELLING, THE MOUNTED POLICEMAN, knew he had a good horse in Skippy. But it took a circus fire to prove it to a whole city.

  One noonday, in 1942, Tony and Skippy were traveling their regular beat in downtown Cleveland when they saw fire engines racing toward the lake front. Tony put Skippy to a trot and, as they wheeled around a corner in the wake of the engines, a puff of smoke-laden wind struck them full in the face. It came from the circus lot at the foot of the street, and in a quick flash of seeing, Tony singled out the one tent sending up licks of flame. It was the menagerie tent!

  In the seconds it took to break through traffic, Tony gauged the fire. Wind coming from the north. The Big Top would be next. Then the horse tent. He began talking to Skippy, thinking all the while of the three things a horse fears—elephants, fire, snakes. “Steady now, Skip. Up the driveway. Past the horse tent. You’ll be all right.”

  The circus lot was mad with confusion. Giraffes and ostriches racing at large; trainers, barkers, clowns trying to capture them. A brave elephant line, marching trunk-to-tail, came so close to Skippy that the burned shreds of their hides brushed his legs. He only shuddered his coat and kept right on toward the menagerie tent.

  “Into it, Skip! Into it!” Tony yelled above the screaming of wild animals.

  But Skippy was halted by flames. The entrance of the tent was the door to a furnace, and inside the glare only a tiger cage showed clear. A mother tiger, making a fire shield of her body, was trying to protect her cub. All else was ablaze. Tony and Skippy were too late!

  Now sparks from the menagerie tent arced over to the Big Top, and with nightmare swiftness the heavy canvas began shriveling like tissue paper. Tony breathed a prayer of thanks that it was too early for the matinee; no children would be inside. He pressed his heels into Skippy’s side and urged him toward the horse tent, his voice a mountain of strength.

  “Get in there, Skip! That’s where we can help!” But could they? The horses, crazed with fear, were pulling their picket stakes out of the earth, milling around in circles, some dragging the stakes along at the end of their lead ropes. They were stumbling, falling, getting up again, breaking away from the grooms who were vainly trying to lead them out. One man, pointing to a white mare, shouted out: “That one leads the parade!”

  Now Tony knew what to do. Cut out the white mare! Lead her away, then hope the others would follow.

  “Now, boy!” yelled Tony. “Get her, Skip.” Again and again Tony rode Skippy into the bunch, darting this way, that way, trying to outsmart the mare. But she was quicksilver, sliding between the dark horses. Second after second went by while the smoke billowed in, silent, black, deadly. Skippy, sensing the increased danger, hurtled into the mob, threatened the dark horses with bared teeth, got close enough to the mare so that Tony could grab her rope. Tony leaned far out of his saddle, reaching. He had it!

  Now for the test. Would the panic-stricken horses follow Skippy with the white mare at heel? They did! As one, the troupe swung into line. But just at the crucial moment of their leaving the tent, a guy wire snapped. It hissed and writhed across Ski
ppy’s hoofs.

  “Get on!” Tony yelled, impelling him forward with voice and legs. “Get on! It’s no snake.”

  Skippy flinched for only a second. Then, as if he could not show fear before the white mare, he stepped gingerly over the wire and maneuvered his way out through the gate of the circus lot.

  Hundreds of spectators lined the exit, and all traffic stopped to let a strange parade go by—a parade of twenty frightened circus horses, without their trappings. At the head of the parade pranced a police horse. His tail and fetlocks were singed and he was shiny with perspiration, but in his eye was a look that told he enjoyed leading the grand spectacle.

  • • •

  Where did Skippy get his bravery? From Tony, of course—through his hands, his voice. But was there something else, too? Some quality far back in his pedigree? Tony thinks there was, and he calls it the Morgan blood.

  Skippy was a Morgan horse, and he inherited from the first Morgan his closely coupled body and his sturdiness; but he inherited, too, a great calmness and courage for facing things as they come.

  Never before and never since has there been a whole breed named in honor of one horse. And never before or since has there been a whole breed named for one man. For, in this case, both the man and the horse carried the same name.

  The man was the frail singing master, Justin Morgan. In the fall of 1795 he journeyed all the long way afoot from Randolph, Vermont, to West Springfield, Massachusetts, to collect a debt. But when he arrived, Farmer Beane who owed the money couldn’t pay up in cash; so he gave the singing master a strapping big colt. For good measure he threw in a small one. This undersized colt was a dark bay with black mane and tail, and, in spite of his littleness, his eye was bold and his way of going was big and lively.