The Shire is as completely English as John Bull. And, appropriately, the name of the first one to be imported into America was John Bull. He was as big as his name and twice as powerful, and so well was he liked that a constant stream of Shires was imported during the next fifty years.
Some Americans objected to their heavy feathering, worried about keeping it clean. Yet when the Shire was used to “grade up” the small American horse, that is, when he was bred to American mares, the colts foaled had height and substance, and in many cases the feathering became modest little tufts.
In the cornbelt of the Midwest, farmers have found widespread use for the Shire. And in the Far West, on the great ranches, five- and eight-horse hitches may be seen. Here the Shires work as they did in England, in their slow-moving, powerful way.
How can we tell the Shire from the other drafters? Especially when he often wears the same bay or brown color as the Clydesdale? This is how. We look for size first. Then we look for more subdued markings—a star, perhaps, or a streak of white down his nose instead of a broad blaze, and white boots instead of long white stockings. We look, too, for the shaggy feather instead of the fine. But most of all we note his mountainous size and bulk.
Everything in any way connected with the Shire is big. The men about him are big, and the carts he draws are big, and the loads and the logs he hauls are big. And a big Shire horseshoe hanging above a barn door, so the English say, is almost certain to invite great good luck.
In the tiny village of Oakham, between the shires of Leicester and Lincoln, there is a quaint custom which goes back hundreds of years. Whenever a noble or peer comes to town, he is expected to hang a horseshoe in the ancient town hall as a token of his visit. The biggest shoes, the people say, bring the biggest luck. And whose are they? The ponderous big Shires’, of course!
The Suffolk Punch
IN EASTERN ENGLAND, BETWEEN THE North Sea and the fens, there is a sunny stretch of land set quite apart from the hurry of the world. It is a land of wide fields and windy skies, and within its boundaries is a kind of peaceful excitement. It is the land of earth artists, the land of the Suffolk man and his Suffolk Punch horse.
When a Suffolk countryman strolls by a tractor-plowed field, he walks unseeing, as if he wore blinders. But a field plowed by a Suffolk Punch—ah, here he stops to let his eye caress the land. He looks across the upturned earth and nods his head at the smoothness of it. Here is the work of artisans! No choppy waves of dirt, but each furrow sliced with such a nicety it seems the hand of God had reached down and neatly combed the land.
The Suffolk Punch belongs to eastern England. He is part of the landscape, part of the economy, part of the history. Merely to look at, he is a satisfaction to the eye. His color is bright chestnut—like a tongue of fire against black field furrows, against green corn blades, against yellow wheat, against blue horizons. Never is he any other color. Of course, the shade may vary up and down the scale from burnt chestnut to bright, but chestnut it must be! Someone once kept a record of twelve thousand Suffolks, and each and every one was a chestnut.
When the wind lifts his forelock, a Suffolk Punch may show a star or a snippet of white on his forehead, and sometimes on his heels there is a touch of white, but often the chestnut bodycoat is so vivid that such markings go unnoticed.
For centuries the Suffolk men have bred Suffolk horses for the fields of Suffolk. Today’s farmer may own a tractor, but more than likely he has a Suffolk Punch, too. And his father before him owned a team of Suffolks for every fifty of his acres, and his grandfather before him drove three Suffolks without rein, hitching one ahead of another. And his great-grandfather worked side by side with Suffolks. And so on back for generations the Suffolk man and his chestnut horse together have made eastern England a land rich in grains and grasses.
The Suffolk Punch is the oldest of the draft breeds, and the only reason there are not more of them in other parts of England and in other parts of the world is that the Suffolk countryman wanted a specialized farm horse for his own farmland. He produced the Suffolk to till his own lands and harvest his own crops, and seldom was there any surplus of horses to sell.
To look at the Suffolk is to know at once he is different from all other draft breeds. He is shorter-legged than the Shire or the Clydesdale, and he has a rounded-up body, a rotund plumpness which the English describe as a “punched-up” look; hence his name, Suffolk Punch. He is not so hairy as the other breeds, either. In fact, there is always a clipped and silky neatness about him as if he had just been groomed.
Other horses would starve and grow gaunt if worked all day long without stopping for the nosebag at noon. But the Suffolk Punch stays sleek and fat on two meals a day—one in the morning and one at night. Between times he goes out to plow or plant or cultivate or mow, depending on the season. And always he walks at a good swinging pace, seemingly enjoying the springiness of the earth. He is not an especially airy walker, but he steps over the nests of skylarks as cautiously as if he knew the treasure they hold.
He can go without eating for a longer period than other horses because he has what the farmers call a bigger “bread basket.” That is why he is so valuable to the Suffolk farmer; he can keep right on going until it is too dark to work any more.
Farmers of eastern England will admit that other drafters are “good drawers,” but they say that only the Suffolk Punch never gives up. What is truly magnificent about his pulling is that he will get down on his knees and tug and drag until the load moves—or until he drops in exhaustion. And so powerful are his muscles that he can pull on his naked shoulders, without any collar at all.
Where else could the Suffolk farmer find an untiring worker, an easy keeper, and a creature so docile that a little knee-breech lad could manage him?
In this country, in New Jersey, there was once a Suffolk mare imported from the very heart of the Suffolk country. Her name was Finally and she lived up to all the attributes of her breed. She worked the sun up and she worked it down, and she ate her fill only at dawn and dusk. Year after year she appeared in fine fettle and her chestnut coat glistered in the sunlight like water on a millwheel. And year after year she took only a little time out from her work to foal a colt. Even when she was twenty-seven years old, she had a little filly bright as a copper penny and with that characteristic “punched-up” look. Her owners named the foal Finish, and they were proud as punch to think that a mare so old could be so young in spirit and could go on producing such fine children in her own image.
The men of Suffolk, however, were not surprised when they heard of Finally’s prowess. To them it was only to be expected. Was she not a Suffolk Punch? Did not the Americans know that Suffolk horses are famous for their longevity, that Suffolk mares have colts when they are even ten years older than Finally?
Suffolk countrymen are chary of their praise, and the words of Thomas Crisp of Ufford are a fine example. In advertising his famous Suffolk stallion he said of him: “He is a fine bright chestnut horse standing fifteen and a half hands high, and there is no occasion to say anything more in praise of him.”
Yet it is to this very horse of Mr. Crisp’s that nearly all Suffolks today go back in direct line. He was the greatest Suffolk of his time, and as Mr. Crisp surmised no one needed to sing his praises.
Suffolk farmers spend so many hours in quiet comradeship with their horses that talk seems wasteful. They could tell you that King George V owned Suffolk horses and “had a capital eye for understanding their character.” And they could tell you that the King, like their own fathers, was a Suffolk countryman and that he chose to die within sight of its wide fields and windy skies.
But this, too, is taken for granted. A king rightfully knows that the land of Suffolk holds peace in its loamy goodness and that the place for a Suffolk man or horse to die is in the sun-filled land where he was born.
The Lipizzan
THE LIPIZZAN IS A POWERFULLY built animal, yet he is the ballet dancer of the horse kingdom. T
o the Old World music of gavottes and mazurkas he performs the most difficult routines—springing along on his hind legs without touching ground with his front ones, pirouetting in delicate canter motion, leaping upward into space and, while in the air, kicking out his hind feet. So perfect is his rhythm one would think he had a metronome for a heart!
These leaping, thrusting movements are called courbettes, caprioles, levades, ballotades. Spectators often forget the names, but they never forget the breathless moment when a Lipizzan turns himself into a flying white charger.
Lipizzans are a very old and pure breed. They may be traced back to the year 1565 when Maximilian II, emperor of Austria, decided that his knights needed a riding school like the one he had visited in Spain. The horses trained in it would be beautiful to show in times of peace, and in war they could spring at the foot soldiers of the enemy until they fled in fear. Accordingly Maximilian imported Arabian stallions into Austria and crossed them with Spanish mares. Their descendants became the dazzling white Lipizzans, so named because they were foaled in the little town of Lipizza near the Adriatic Sea.
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Maximilian commanded that only the stallions be allowed to attend his new Spanish Riding School on the palace grounds of Vienna. And to this day the mares are never ridden; they and their foals live a life of freedom.
Lipizzan colts are a long time growing up. Thoroughbred and Standardbred colts race in public meetings when they are two-year-olds, but Lipizzans run and frolic with their mothers for the first four years of their lives. A pasture dotted with brood mares and foals is a strange sight, the foals dark brown, the mares milk white. Born dark, the youngsters gradually lighten in color, graying at three and becoming pure white by the time they are ten.
Until all the colty foolishness has gone out of them, the young Lipizzans remain at the nursery. Then, at four, they are sent off to school to learn rhythm and manners and acrobatics. Their first lesson is with the lunge rope. Round and round in a circle the groom drives his pupil at the end of a long rein. Not until the horse is five years old does he feel a saddle on his back and a bit in his mouth. Then he is walked only, sometimes for months. But what a walk it is! Long, free supple strides, neck reaching out, muscles relaxed. A rhythmic movement.
At six the real training begins, the difficult ballet movements. One movement leads into another naturally, for the rider-trainers are superb teachers. Their commands are spoken in low tones. Their homemade birch whips are cues, not punishing rods. And always their pockets bulge with carrots for good behavior.
When the rider sits his horse, he seems to have a ramrod for a backbone. The fact is that, as an apprentice, he rode for days with an iron bar sewed into the back seam of his riding coat. He appears to sit stone-still; yet he is constantly giving signals. In the canter, for example, he sometimes asks his mount to change leads with every stride. If he wishes his horse to take a left lead, he brings back the calf of his right leg, but only a trace. He turns his horse’s head toward the left, but only a hair’s breadth. He shifts his weight onto his right seat bone. He brings back his left shoulder. But all of these signals are so fine that only the horse is the wiser. Muscle control must be learned by the rider as well as the horse! Small wonder, then, that apprentice grooms start out when only nine or ten and are still learning at sixty-five, even though they are masters. The young apprentice learns most from the fully trained horse, and the green horse from the experienced master. Then, all along the years, trainer and horse continue to learn from each other, growing wise together.
As soon as the canter has become habit, then the stallions are ready for the quadrille. In two-four time, to the strains of a Mozart minuet, they are taught to dance in graceful maneuvers. From the quadrille they graduate to the passage. This is a slow-to-medium trot which looks as if the feet approach, rather than touch, earth. Diagonal legs strike out in unison, and the action of the forelegs is extremely high. The passage is not spectacular. Rather it is slow, measured beauty.
The piaffe next! Piaffe is a French word, meaning to prance. The piaffe is just that—prancing in place, not in stiff movements like a toy soldier, but like a ballet dancer getting ready for an especially intricate routine. In the case of the Lipizzan he is getting ready for the levade—the greatest test of a horse’s balance. In this exercise he crouches on his hind legs as if he were sitting on his haunches; then slowly he rears until his body reaches a forty-five degree angle, which is far more difficult than if it were held erect. Forelegs tucked under his belly, a thousand pounds of weight poised, he becomes a white stone statue. The best stallions in the school can stand the strain of this pose for no longer than fifteen seconds.
Not all Lipizzans go further in their schooling. Only the very strong can do the ballotade, which is a spectacular leap with the hind legs tucked under the belly. Or the capriole, in which the horse springs into the air and, while he is at his highest elevation, thrusts his hind legs out until he is the winged Pegasus come alive.
Time and again wars threatened to destroy the Spanish Riding School. In the second World War the Nazis spirited the Lipizzan mares and foals away from Austria and hid them in Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, at the school, Colonel Alois Podhajsky, chief riding master, tried to save his stallions—rationing their oats and hay, building air-raid shelters for them. But even in the shelters their safety was threatened, for the enemy were moving in closer and closer. Finally the Colonel loaded his pupils on freight cars but could not get them out of the danger zone.
Just when the future looked blackest, U.S. General George S. Patton, Jr., came to the rescue. An expert horseman himself, he asked to see the horses perform. So impressed was he that he wanted to save the breed for future generations. He furnished a convoy of armored tanks to bring the mares and foals back to Austria. And when he was killed, General Mark Clark saw to it that the stallions were escorted to the little town of Wels in the American zone of Austria. There, on a peaceful, grassy plain, the Spanish Riding School carried on.
In October, 1950, the same Colonel Podhajsky brought fourteen of his star pupils to America to show the New World the finest horsemanship of the Old. More than a hundred thousand people surged into Madison Square Garden in New York to see the exhibition of the white stallions.
Applause comes easily to Americans but, watching the marbled beauty and the spectacular routines of the Lipizzans, the onlookers sat frozen in admiration. Never before had they seen a horse ballet. The quiet ovation had to come first. Then, like a dike of water unleashed, the applause burst forth.
Before it died away, some horse fans thought, and some said, the stallions must have been severely handled, cruelly treated, to perform so precisely. But how could the casual onlookers know of the long, patient years of training? How could they know that the superb steps are not stunts but that each graceful movement is a copy of high-spirited horses at play or in combat?
And how could they possibly know that, when the white stallions are turned out to grass, they take a busman’s holiday? With no audience at all and no riders to cue them, and no music but wind whispers, they spring into a capriole just as boys and girls turn a cartwheel—for the sheer joy it brings!
The Mustang
HE HAS NEVER LOOKED THROUGH a bridle and has never slept in a stable, this half-wild horse of the western plains. His world is the wide open range, the red desert, and the dark hidden folds of the mountains.
His name mustang is Spanish for running wild, and he is wild as a tornado—thundering over prairies, zigzagging through foothills, flying along canyon ledges, churning up yellow dust until he is lost in clouds of his own making.
Of all things in life he values most his liberty. Yet his forebears answered the pull of the bit and the prick of the spur. They were the Spanish moor horses and they were brought into Mexico by Captain Cortez. One of the captain’s men made a list of them—silver-gray mares, light and dark chestnut stallions, a cream-colored stallion, and a dun with black points. Some he describ
ed as being great racers, and some as fast restless creatures, unfit for war.
Perhaps it was these restless spirits that little by little grazed farther and farther away from camp and, suddenly, they were free! The mustangs must have descended from them, for there were no horses in America when Cortez landed. Truant horses from later expeditions joined forces with the first runaways and they all went adventuring together.
The New World was an ocean of grass that billowed on and on until the mountains put an end to it. Here was room to roam—to live like the true wild horses of Asia, the horses that have never been captured. As their numbers grew, they began traveling in bands, each headed by a king stallion who was all powerful. He marshaled his mares, moving them with the seasons—to cool uplands in summer, to warm valleys in winter. He ruled by might, driving and whiplashing his herd until even the little foals ran squealing at his command. But he was wise and brave, scenting danger from afar and protecting his family to the death.
The Spanish invaders, meanwhile, did not miss the few horses that had strayed. They saw that the native Indians could drag great loads, as much or more than a horse. They saw, too, that the Indians trembled and hid behind trees when the white conquerors charged them on fiery steeds.
The Spaniards laughed inwardly. A fearful people, they thought, would make good slaves, and they made the Indians into pack animals. But the Indians’ eyes were free. They soon discovered that the Spaniards and their horses were not one monster, half man and half horse. They came apart! The Indians watched how their masters mounted and they tried forking their own legs over a horse. Riding was good! In the dark of night they began slipping away from their captors, galloping away with a new prize—a four-legged friend that went on wings of the wind.
Album of Horses Page 6
