Wild About Horses

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Seeing a woman on a cross-country trek brought out the best in the Russian people. “They were so warm,” said Whittome. “Once I told them what we were doing they nearly collapsed in amazement.” The police stopped them almost daily, but when told of the circumstances, stunned officers never even examined their passports. The weather was fierce in the extreme — from ninety-five-degree Fahrenheit (thirty-five Celsius) temperatures and a fortnight of rain in southern Russia to sleet that came at them horizontally in wintry Poland.

  Russian Ride, Whittome’s book, captures the frustrations of the adventure — maddening Russian bureaucrats, inept guides, soaring costs, sniping among traveling companions. “I am probably running on boiling rage,” she writes at one point in her diary. But the book, like Tschiffely’s, also touches on some of the rewards of a long trek on the back of a horse. The joy of waking to the sound of horses grazing a few feet from your tent. The generosity of strangers, especially the horse-loving kind. The starry nights, the dappled shade in the birch forests, the beauty of the dawn, the fenceless lands that redoubled the sense of freedom and journey.

  And like Tschiffely, Whittome came to know the horses very well. “The horses’ characters are beginning to emerge,” she writes in Russian Ride on day thirty-nine. “Pompeii is still the rather dreamy stallion I fell in love with last year while Malishka (Muffin) is extremely knowing, and very much aware of everything going on around her. She is also a dreadful coward. Masha has the typical Russian pessimistic attitude to everything, and ought really to be rechristened Eeyore.”

  A photograph taken along the way shows a smiling woman on horseback wearing a Russian fur hat. The Cossack ponies would prove their legendary hardiness, though the reputation of Cossack riders took a beating. Whittome is a natural traveler: keenly multilingual, immune to homesickness, appreciative of creature comforts but never their prisoner.

  “It has been the experience of a lifetime,” she said later. “At times it has been incredibly frustrating, but if I had the opportunity to do it again I would like a shot. The thing that sticks out in my mind is the freedom. You just roam wherever you please.”

  In 1998, Whittome, now employed by Lloyd’s of London (perhaps they’ll insure her?), plans next to ride in the footsteps of Carpine, the portly, elderly monk sent by Pope Innocent IV on a diplomatic mission to Genghis Khan. This in 1245, when a sixty-three-year-old man was indeed aged, and well past a two-year, ten-thousand-mile journey from Lyon in France to Lake Baikal north of Mongolia. Easy to see, then, who Whittome’s heroes are.

  In the meantime, she has sold the Cossack mares to endurance riders “who would continue to prove the point I think I have already made.” But she still has Pompeii and the handsome foal he sired with Masha, called Ashibka — the name means “mistake” in Russian. But make no mistake. There will be other journeys on horseback for Barbara Whittome.

  Another British woman, Christina Dodwell, has written widely about her own journeys on horseback through Africa (five thousand miles), Papua New Guinea (eight hundred miles) and Iran and Turkey (fifteen hundred miles).

  Dodwell is a British broadcaster and author who details some of her adventures in A Traveller on Horseback. One of her ancestors was captured by the French in what is now Iran and eastern Turkey during the Napoleonic Wars. He was given his freedom on condition that he not return to England, and so he traveled the region — by mule. Christina Dodwell aimed to go over some of that same ground — alone, on horseback and at a time when the Ayatollah’s revolutionary Iran was at war with Iraq.

  The poor timing meant she was arrested five times, and while she managed to talk her way out of jail, she did spend as long as twenty-one hours incarcerated. A veteran traveler, she kept her wits, using dignity and courtesy and forming alliances as the need arose. During a previous journey in New Guinea, several youths attempted to rob her of her saddlebags but let her bargain for the contents. During the banter that followed, she garnered the name of their village and thus led the boys to fear she might report them to their elders. She kept most of what they had taken.

  Part of Dodwell’s mission in Iran was to research Kurdish Arab horses. Near a Turkoman village she met a remarkable woman named Louise Firouz, who had made it her life’s work to reestablish a breed of miniature Caspian horse, extinct for more than a thousand years. A relic of the ancient Persian Empire, the horse can be seen on bas-relief sculptures amid the ruins of the old capital of Persepolis. Firouz had noticed, among wild horses roaming the region, occasional throwbacks to the breed. She had collected numbers of them, built up a herd and exported some to Britain and the United States.

  Dodwell rented and borrowed horses along the way, but in eastern Turkey, she purchased an iron-gray Arab stallion called Keyif, which means “high-spirited.” The horse, who ran more than he walked, would take her through the mountains and to Mount Ararat, reputed to be the resting place of Noah’s Ark. Over the course of several months, Dodwell got “delightfully lost,” dressed as a man to discourage would-be bandits, enjoyed the warmth of peasant hospitality and chanced upon “stunning Christian ruins, lost and neglected, their crumbling domes soaring to heaven.” At the end of her journey, Dodwell sold Keyif to a forest ranger who happened both to need a horse and to be enamored of horses. On a rattletrap bus to Istanbul and thence home, Dodwell knew she would soon be glancing through an atlas and pondering the next epic ride.

  Were there to be such a thing as a long-distance riders’ hall of fame, the membership committee might consider the following for inclusion. Whatever inspired them — duty, fame, daring — they redefine the hard ride.

  Rafael Amador might merit a place in the patriots’ section. In 1834, General Santa Anna of Mexico learned of a plot to seize and sell the California mission lands. It was imperative that a message of warning reach California. He chose as his courier Rafael Amador, who set out on the morning of July 25, 1834. Between Mexico City and Monterey lay more than twenty-five-hundred miles of mountains, jungle, rivers, deserts and hostile Indians. In Mexico he galloped the whole way, stopping only to change horses. Through the Apache territory he traveled exclusively at night. In Colorado he was ambushed by Indians and escaped only with his clothes and the precious message from his general. He was then forced to walk 150 miles through terrible heat. Finally, he arrived, only forty-one days after leaving Mexico City.

  Slim John Brown might also win a place among the bravest of epic riders. Old westerns often set this scene: the cavalry are surrounded by Indians, and it falls to someone — the man who draws the short straw — to make a dash through the cordon and bring help. But in Brown’s case the circumstances were frighteningly real.

  Brown had in his possession a number of cigarette papers, each stamped with the seal of his superior officer and bearing the words “Believe the bearer.” Brown had horses shot out from under him, procured fresh ones using the cigarette papers and rode one horse to death. His wild ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco, six hundred miles, took him four days. And the cavalry did indeed come to the rescue of their fellow soldiers.

  Then there is Felix X. Aubrey, whom one western historian calls the supreme rider of the West. Perhaps only a high-stakes gambler could understand why he almost sacrificed his life to win bets. In 1848, this jockey-sized French Canadian galloped the more than 780 miles between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Independence, Missouri, in twelve days. The locals were astounded. Aubrey then bragged he could cover the same distance in eight days. He did, but he rode three horses to death, walked or ran forty miles, slept only four hours and ate nothing for three days.

  Finally, Aubrey accepted another bet, this one for $1,000, that he could do the trip in six days — if he used a relay system (as the Pony Express would twelve years later). This time he reportedly did not stop to eat, sleep or drink, and strapped himself into the saddle. One mare, a dun called Dolly, took him well over 180 miles after an alternate horse fell prey to Indians. Aubrey arrived in Independence, according to one account, �
�a ghost of a man who could speak only in a hoarse whisper when lifted from his blood-soaked saddle.” Still, Aubrey was right on time and right on the money.

  If Aubrey was the hare, John Wesley was the tortoise, slow and steady. Perhaps no rider will break the record of this eighteenth-century English evangelist. Prints from that time show him in the saddle, with loose reins, and the rider completely absorbed in his Bible. “Though I am always in haste,” he once wrote, “I am never in a hurry.” During his lifetime as an itinerant preacher, he rode 288,000 miles. Consider, too, Len Crow, the mason and “Christian cowboy” from Barrie, Ontario, who rode from Fairbanks, Alaska, to El Paso, Texas, (4,200 miles) in 1996 to raise money for his church’s work in the Philippines. His mount most days was an Arab gelding called General.

  Without doubt, there should also be a place in the hall of fame — among the adventurers — for Fred Burnaby, and especially for his horse. Some long-distance riders have covered the distance more quickly, and no doubt some might have done it more gracefully. But what sticks in my mind about this thousand-mile round trip through central Asia in the dead of winter in 1876 is the image of a very large man on a very small black horse and the pluck of both.

  Burnaby, captain of the Royal Horse Guards, weighed about 224 pounds. The son of a clergyman, he was born with what his nanny coined a “contradictorious” nature. He seemed to possess a healthy contempt for authority, represented by his father’s church, and he joined the cavalry at the age of seventeen. The world was indeed his oyster, and for fifteen years he served in Central and South America, Egypt, Spain, Russia and Morocco.

  On leave in the Egyptian city of Khartoum in 1875, he spotted a notice in a British newspaper that the government in St. Petersburg had declared a ban on all foreigners’ travel in Russian Asia. An Englishman had recently been expelled for defying the decree. Captain Burnaby had long wanted to go there, and now that it was forbidden, it seemed more enticing than ever.

  He set as his goal the ancient town of Khiva, in what is now the republic of Uzbekistan. Worse than the ban on travel was the forbidding area to be traversed — a vast snow- and salt-covered track. “The cold of the Kirghiz Desert,” Burnaby wrote in A Ride to Khiva in 1877, “is a thing unknown I believe in any other part of the world, or even in the Arctic regions. It blows on uninterruptedly … [like] the application of the edge of a razor.”

  In Kasala, after he let it be known he needed a horse, a series of sorry mounts were paraded before him. “Their ribs in many instances almost protruded through the skin … Except for their excessive leanness they looked more like huge Newfoundland dogs.”

  Burnaby typically rode large and powerful horses to convey his bulk, but none existed in Kasala. In the end he selected a fourteen-hand black horse with a thick coat and a rather elaborate gilded saddle. When Burnaby and his retinue set out on January 12, he wore several layers of sheepskin and other clothes and further weighted the pony with huge iron stirrups. The little horse was heard to groan as the full 280-pound weight settled onto his insubstantial back. A Tartar servant on a camel carrying food packs confidently predicted that Burnaby’s horse would soon collapse under the great weight and they would all make a meal of him.

  The little horse, though, plodded on, into blinding gales and over frozen rivers, through mountain passes and across great plains. After one morning trek of seventeen miles, at times through snow close to three feet deep, Burnaby marveled at the endurance of the horses. “The one I rode, which in England would not have been considered able to carry my boots, was as fresh as possible after his march.” Three hundred miles and thirteen days later the horse was thin but still full of vigor. Burnaby’s reward at journey’s end was that the khan, or ruler, of the city of Khiva did indeed welcome him, and after a nine-day rest the little black horse turned back for home stronger than ever. Over that forbidding terrain, Burnaby and his horse averaged forty miles a day and even galloped the last seventeen miles.

  The fate of the black horse, never mind his name, was not recorded. We know only that after buying him for five pounds Burnaby sold him for just over three.

  Worthy of a place among the marathoners, too, are all those who traveled by covered wagon across North America. Classic chronicles of their journeys, such as Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, still make for chilling reading today. “It’s a serious thing to be travelling through this cursed wilderness,” one man says to another around a campfire in 1846 as all contemplate the fate of four men gone missing and last seen being dogged by Indians “crawling like wolves along the ridges of the hills.” The horse-drawn wagons, which Hollywood would help make a symbol for quest and journey, moved at a snail’s pace through the terrible beauty of the plains. The toll on both horse and human was terrific.

  Parkman refers to the “ragamuffin cavalcade” that followed the banks of the Upper Arkansas River: “Of the large and fine horses with which we had left the frontier in the spring, not one remained: we had supplied their place with the rough breed of the prairie, as hardy as mules and almost as ugly,” yet even they grew foot-sore. Worn saddles, rusty guns, buckskin-clad riders — they looked a sorry sight.

  “The cursed wilderness,” on the other hand, was undeniably breathtaking. Parkman describes the “undulating ocean” of grass, its seed “as sweet and nutritious as oats” and impossible for their hungry horses to resist, its fronds almost as tall as the horses themselves. And when the sun set, the western sky was left “all in a glow.”

  Centuries before the long line of wagons inched west, the Gypsies had begun their diaspora from northwestern India into Europe. The Rom (“the people,” in Romany, the Gypsy language), traditionally lived in tsara, covered wagons pulled by horses or donkeys. Nomads all their lives, they worked as tinsmiths, horse dealers, chimney sweepers, peddlers, scavengers, basket makers, farm laborers, fortunetellers and musicians. “Tinkers,” the Irish called them, and a “tinker’s dam” (as in “I couldn’t give a …”) originally referred to a ring of dough placed around the leak in a pot when the Gypsy tinsmith was using solder to repair it.

  8.5 Gypsy talking to grey horse in Romania: the gypsy diaspora was horse-powered and horse-centered. (photo credit 8.5)

  Burdened with reputations as thieves and connivers, the Gypsies suffered horrible persecution (five hundred thousand died in Nazi gas chambers), which only made the open road more attractive. In the United Kingdom, Gypsies are known as “Travellers.” “We have to travel. It’s in our blood,” a Gypsy once said. “I wouldn’t mind a house,” said another, “as long as it had wheels on it.” For many centuries, the image of the Gypsy camp has centered on a clutter of caravans at the side of the road, washing hung on trees near an open fire and a horse or two nibbling on grass.

  The Gypsy connection with horses is well-known among horse people. Nicholas Evans came by his idea for The Horse Whisperer during a trip to the Dartmoor region of England, where a blacksmith told him about Gypsies who talk to horses.

  The best long-distance horse is sometimes not a horse at all but a pony. In 1897, a twenty-four-hundred-mile endurance race between Sheridan, Wyoming, and Galena, Illinois was won by two brothers who simply caught and broke two mustang ponies running wild on the plains. During the arduous ninety-one-day trek, competing horses were allowed no grain and were to forage along the way. “Praise the tall, but saddle the small” is an old Mexican saying: the two winning horses, as fresh at the end as at the beginning, weighed 750 and 900 pounds.

  Then again, sometimes neither horse nor pony wins the marathon ride. To mark 1976, the bicentennial year in the U.S., the Great American Horse Race started in Sacramento, California, and ended in New York. Each entry, and there were one hundred, was allowed a remuda of two — one horse to ride and one to follow. The race began the last weekend in May and ended Labor Day in September. The winner was a man named Verl Norton — riding a mule!

  CHAPTER 9

  MY KINGDOM FOR A — PONY

  I never felt such power and acti
on in so small a compass.

  A BRITISH RIDER, WHO WEIGHED 196 POUNDS, PRAISING THE TWELVE-THREE-HAND EXMOOR PONY HE RODE TO THE HUNT IN 1820

  HER FARM AT Plettenberg Bay, some five hours east of Cape Town, affords a compelling view of the fertile valleys where the pink heather grows as high as the sixteen-hand gelding who would figure in this tale. As impassioned a horsewoman as I have ever met, Vickie Rowlands runs nine-day riding treks over a three-thousand-acre territory. The photographs she showed me left me enticed; her descriptions of the rides seemed ethereal: “I like to sleep outside under the stars … it’s quite safe … we have leopards and snakes, but they won’t bother you, and with the horses you can get close to the wildlife … you can hear the sea up there.” But one morning in 1990, she told me over coffee during a recent visit to Canada, her little patch of paradise turned rather hellish.

  Vickie awoke at dawn to the chilling and unmistakable sound of equine assault. A former national distance-riding champion in South Africa, a horse breeder and lifelong trainer, she knows all the sounds — sweet and otherwise — that emanate from horses. The one coming from the near paddock filled her with dread. She screamed. With her husband, Kevin, she ran outside, the two of them ludicrous in their underwear, both alert from the adrenaline pumping in their veins.

  A small fourteen-hand mare had thrown a foal ten days beforehand, and mother and baby had been separated from the twenty-seven other horses and kept in a field by the house. But in that field an awful drama was unfolding, and by the look of all involved had been under way some time.

  A big gelding had jumped the fence, intent on dispatching the foal. The mare, her sides heaving, her flanks in a lather, was too exhausted to help any more and weakly whinnied to her desperate foal. The screaming foal fled the gelding as best she could, darting and doubling back, but she was losing her thin hold on life. Vickie and Kevin looked on, helpless. At one point, though, the little foal lost her footing in the melee and slipped under the fence, like a runner from third who slides past home plate. She ended up on her side in the other field, where she seemed at last safe from the gelding. “Thank God,” Vicki uttered.