Author: Elaine

Last weekend, I went into the paddock to put a halter on Lily so I could lead her out. She was standing too close to the feeder for me to reach her head without stretching from where I was standing by her shoulder. Before I could raise my hand to touch her chest (the signal I give her when I want her to back) she took a step backward so she was in the correct position for me to halter her. I was taken aback: Lily is one of the brighter horses I’ve handled, but it seemed a bit much for her to realize that I couldn’t get to her head easily so she had to help me out.

Back in the early 20th century, Clever Hans was a horse that was purported to do arithmetic and other intellectual tasks. After an investigation, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was actually reacting to the involuntary cues of his trainer, which were not perceptible by human observers. Even more interesting: Pfungst could not suppress the cues when he was handling the horse himself.

So I think what actually happened when I thought about asking Lily to back, I gave her a cue without realizing it, caught by her peripheral vision. Which is rather amazing in and of itself. But then there was a time when I had a hard time remembering the correct aids for the canter when I rode any horse but Hap. Hap didn’t need no stinking canter aids: I thought “canter,” and he cantered.

It wasn’t love at first sight.

When I first saw the tall, leggy mahogany bay Thoroughbred gelding I thought he was kind of cute, though skinny. And I thought it was a pity that his blaze was so asymmetrical, sliding off to one side of his face.

I was no longer too excited when I went to look at horses, because by then I felt I had looked at every big lame horse in Colorado. Why do people even bother to show horses for sale that are obviously lame? Do they think it won’t be noticed?

In this case the owner had brought the horse by the barn where we were boarding Rags. He was immaculately groomed, and seemed very calm for a Thoroughbred. He also seemed alert, so I doubt he had been drugged. In retrospect, though, I suspect he had already been worked hard at least once that day. And probably had been worked hard every day for the previous week. Maybe the previous month.

The owner started riding him around the arena. I liked the way he moved, though I was a little concerned that he carried his head with a slight twist. After she walked, trotted and cantered the horse around the arena for a while, and even jumped a few small obstacles, she asked me if I wanted to try him.

She was a tiny woman, so we had to put a saddle on the gelding that would fit me. I mounted with a certain sense of caution. From my point of view, one of the worst parts of the horse buying process was having to ride strange horses, sometimes even without a proper introduction.

Within five minutes of trotting and cantering around the arena, I was at war with myself. One part of me was trying to stay objective and cool about this horse. The twist had me worried, because I knew that this sort of thing could be hard to fix in a horse. I also wasn’t all that keen on getting a Thoroughbred. My original guideline to the woman who was acting as my agent had been “Anything but a Thoroughbred, anything but a gray.” I had only reluctantly started looking at Thoroughbreds since we had been coming up dry with other breeds.

The other part of me was saying, “This is my horse. This is MY horse. THIS IS MY HORSE!”

I asked my friend D who was there watching if she would ride the horse, because I wanted to see if she could fix the twist. She couldn’t, but said later that the running martingale on the horse interfered with using the direct rein which might have helped. I also took the horse on a short trail ride, and I cantered him beside D on her big Thoroughbred Havoc. (D was not yet my trainer, but she already had a knack for keeping me calm in situations that would normally worry me. Cantering a strange Thoroughbred in the open was guaranteed to worry me.)

The cool, objective part of me told the owner that I wanted to talk to my agent, and of course we would want a pre-purchase exam if we decided to buy him. The cool, objective part of me knew it was folly to bond to the horse before a vet had even seen him. The other part of me wanted to give her a check on the spot, so she wouldn’t put MY HORSE in her trailer and take him away.

After a very long eight days, Hap came home. At least he wasn’t a gray.

Last week, some friends asked me why I rarely write about my horses anymore. (I have been part of an online journal writing groups with these friends for over ten years.)

Hap was an adventure. As much as I dote on him, I sometimes felt about Hap like the Ashley Brilliant postcard epigram: “We’ve been through so much together, and most of it was your fault.” Hap was so quick that half the time when he ditched me, I would land standing, not really aware there was a problem until I was on the ground. I finally learned to stay with him through most of his big moves, but it never failed to impress the hell out of me each time I managed to do so. (Impressed a fair number of onlookers, too.) Hap was the horse who could be behaving very badly at a show and people would come up and compliment me on how beautiful he was. I would be thanking them through gritted teeth and thinking “handsome is as handsome does.” Hap was good copy even when he was an intimidating mount.

Hap is currently semi-retired on our five acres. I mainly ride Lily, my twelve year old Paint Breeding Stock mare. Lily has been a different sort of frustration. I bought her as a four year old, and things were going quite well, and then we just got stuck. People who do the sports horse types of things that I like to do are very keen on having a horse go “forward.” Lily didn’t. She was lethargic and didn’t seem to be very comfortable. She acted colicky a lot, and we tried all the stuff that the vets recommended, and she didn’t improve. We spent a lot of money on vet visits when she had her spells. My trainer and I thought it might have something to do with her cycles, but no vet ever thought too much of that idea. I had just about made up my mind to haul her to one of the major diagnostic centers here in Colorado when she bowed her tendon while playing one day.

A bowed tendon is a big deal in a horse. Some horses never recover. We nursed her through her immediate convalescence when she had to be kept in a small area while she wore a gel cast, and then through the hand walking endless circuits around the arena. When the vet said I could walk her under saddle I did so once. Then I brought her home and put her out to pasture for six months. It was getting on toward autumn and I couldn’t deal with her any longer.

Unfortunately, right before she bowed her tendon, I came off of her in a rather nasty fall, only the second time I haven’t been able to get right back on the horse. I didn’t ride for several weeks, and then she got hurt, so I had a lot of worries stored up between me getting hurt and her getting hurt.

When I started riding her again in the spring, she was a lot more forward than she had been. However, as she got better I got worse: three summers ago I had so much heel pain that I was unwilling to dismount from a sixteen hand horse. Plus, as she got stronger, I felt more and more over-horsed, and since I wasn’t riding enough to develop my strength we got in this vicious cycle where I would feel intimidated by her and ride even less. One circuit of the arena each direction at a trot and then at a canter doesn’t get you very far. Lily’s spooks were actually easier to deal with than Hap’s, she would just levitate and hang in the air for a while, then carry on whatever she was doing. However, despite the fact that it looked worse than it felt, I didn’t have people lining up for the opportunity to ride her.

This year we finally seem to be getting in sync. There were a few times in the early spring when I decided, after longing her, that I would put her up and go ride another horse, but I progressed to riding her consistently a lot sooner in the year. In past years, I kept telling myself I would lesson with my trainer when I became a little stronger, and ended up taking very few lessons. This year, I decided that I would lesson even if I wasn’t in good enough shape to make it worth while. And I found out that after the first ten minutes when I want to whine and quit and apologize to my horse for being such a crummy, overweight and out of shape rider, that we just get past that and start getting some pretty damn decent work.

And I am sure, from Lily’s point of view, she thinks, “We’ve been through so much together, and most of it was your fault.”