Wild About Horses

by Lawrence Scanlan

  But the wide-eyed gelding, silent through it all, was not done yet. He leaped the fence, the other way this time, picked up the foal by her neck and shook her — “as a dog would a rat,” Vickie said. The gelding had one thing in mind. Kill the foal. Kevin picked up a fence rail as thick as a fist and pounded the gelding over the head. At this the attacker relented and the foal fell hard to the ground, but the gelding again bent low and took the leggy little horse in his jaws, and once more gave her that savage shaking. Kevin cuffed the gelding with renewed vigor, this time breaking the fence post over the horse’s head.

  Throughout, the other horses had maintained their positions two hundred yards away at the far end of the adjacent field, minding their grazing business as horses are wont to do. But then came Hayla, Vickie’s daughter’s pony, the thirteen-two-hand offspring of an Arab sire and a Welsh pony mare. Ears pinned back, she had seen enough. Hayla put herself between the gelding and the foal and drove the foal at a gallop, their sides so close they touched, into another field. Then she nuzzled the petrified foal and laid her head on the wee horse’s back as if to say, “There, there. It’s over now.” The rescue had bought enough time for Kevin’s pole to give the gelding pause and for Vickie to close a gate. It was indeed over.

  The foal did survive the attack: the hideous swelling on either side of her neck where the gelding had closed his teeth eventually subsided, though dents would remain to remind Vickie of the day the gelding declared such uncharacteristic yet deadly purpose. As for Hayla, Vickie told me, “she was, funnily enough, not the nicest pony in the stable.” Like some of her kind, she was a little mean tempered, but if there is such a thing as pony heaven Hayla has surely earned her place in it.

  What to make of the episode? Vickie said she had seen other incidents of altruism in the wild. To the film footage she once saw of a hippo rescuing a springbok from an alligator she could now add the story of the Arab-Welsh pony who came to the aid of a beleaguered, terrorized foal.

  For many of us our first moment in the saddle — rocking horse and carousel aside — is a rent-a-pony at the county fair. A dollar a ride: beaming toddler grips pommel, proud parent grips toddler, bored handler leads bored pony in circles. All very tame, but for the young rider, all very heady. The lineup for such rides is always long.

  A clever cartoon once turned upside down the cliché of the young girl begging for a pony of her own: mare pony addressing her foal, says, “Yes, I know you’d love a little girl of your own, but where would we keep her?”

  9.1 A young girl’s obsession with horses often begins with ponies. (photo credit 9.1)

  At first blush, love for the horse is actually love for the pony. What I have come to feel, after reading about ponies and after talking to pony-handlers, is a deep respect for these often maligned and much misunderstood creatures. The sense of surprise in the epigram to this chapter — “I never felt such power and action in so small a compass” — mirrors my own. The burly man who said those words expressed astonishment that the little Exmoor pony he rode was able to jump a fence, with him aboard, when the fence was eight inches taller than the pony. Man and pony then galloped the eighty-six miles from Bristol to South Molton quicker than the fastest stage-coach of the day.

  The Romans rode Exmoors when they ruled what is now Britain. The Bayeux Tapestry shows William the Conqueror riding an Exmoor when he landed in Britain in 1066. Elwyn Hartley Edwards, the British equestrian authority, praises the Exmoor pony’s independent nature, adding that when properly schooled the pony makes a brilliant mount for children. The best competition horse, he muses, might be a pony-horse cross (Exmoor-Thoroughbred), one that offers a strong constitution, hardiness and intelligence and “that peculiar sagacity that contributes to the ‘streetwise’ quality of the pony breeds.”

  Throughout history, ponies have been ridden to the hunt, to flocks, to market and to war. Did our ancestors ride ponies because horses were not available — or did they actually prefer ponies? And when is a pony no longer a pony but a horse? The distinction is a tricky one. Polo ponies and cow ponies are typically horses but may also be ponies. Many North American experts say that a pony is typically under fourteen hands two inches.

  Edwards sets the dividing line at fifteen hands but insists that proportion, not height, marks the real difference between pony and horse. Largely because of the horse’s long legs, he says, the distance from withers to ground exceeds the length of the horse’s body. The pony, shorter in the leg, is longer from head to tail than from withers to ground.

  Some pony lovers and fanciers maintain it is quite easy to distinguish pony from horse: the pony, they say, is smarter and inch for inch can far outjump a horse.

  An ocean away from Vickie Rowlands and her cherished Hayla, another woman, Adele Rockwell, heaps praise on the pony, the Welsh pony in particular. The Rockwellian defense of ponies in general and that breed especially — against all who call the pony a lesser cousin to the horse — is spirited, affectionate and unyielding.

  On her pony farm north of Toronto, Ontario, Rockwell talked with me about the longing to ride, citing a proverb that may have its origins in a time when the poor walked and the rich rode. “If wishes were horses,” Rockwell said, “beggars might ride.”

  J. Frank Dobie, an historian of the old West, once turned the phrase on its head to convey the plenitude of wild horses in South America two centuries ago: “Horses were as cheap as wishes: beggars rode.” The original phrase comes from a seventeenth-century gatherer of proverbs named John Ray. Most of us have forgotten his name and his book, English Proverbs, but perhaps thanks to him we still have “Misery loves company,” “Blood is thicker than water,” “Money begets money” and, of course, “If wishes were horses …”

  The publisher of several Canadian horse magazines calls Adele Rockwell “one of the genuine treasures in the pony world.” I took her to mean that there is the real world, there is the horse world and then there is the pony world.

  For more than forty years Adele and her husband, Dick, have bred and trained Welsh ponies at their farm near King City, a grand name for a small place. The Southern Ontario countryside rolls a little crazily up there, like a giant loaf of egg bread, full of creases and valleys but perfectly rounded on the hilltops. On the day we spoke a few dozen ponies, gray most of them, were gathered on the crest of one hill where a young woman was putting out hay.

  Dick greeted me at the door of the farmhouse, or at least, let me in on his way out to the ponies. He is a man in his mid-seventies with a goatee, bushy black eyebrows and a voice that reminds me of water moving over a gravel bottom. The house is like many a horse owner’s house — a little plain, a little cluttered, a house that does the job but is likely not as well appointed or organized as, say, the green barn (home to seventy ponies) where Dick was headed.

  9.2 Dick Rockwell and Ardmore Gangway: seeing the world through the ponies’ eyes. (photo credit 9.2)

  Adele led me into the front room, which, it turned out, was not a room at all but a miniature museum. Shelves were laden with sculptures of pony heads and pony bodies, photographs of ponies alone and with their proud handlers, paintings and sketches of ponies and more ponies, silver trophies and copper plaques — so many that to pluck one (as I asked Adele to) risked a shelfslide among the rest.

  The two north-facing windows in the room let in only a feeble light that gray day, so the several table lamps had been switched on. Reflecting the room’s abiding color — the pink and red of hundreds of horse show ribbons — the lamps cast a warm, liquid light.

  The room was the color of fair skin too long in the sun: ribbons lined every wall where it met the ceiling; great racks of them had been set up on wallboard leaning against chairs and hassocks. The room was effectively wallpapered with ribbons — this one from a pony show in Devon, Pennsylvania, thirty-eight years earlier, that one from last year’s Royal Winter Fair in Toronto. Ribbons covered the hearth and even the lampshades wore garlands of them.

&nbs
p; How could anyone sit where I did and not talk ponies?

  Rockwell sat by a north window, gray sweater buttoned at the front and ending at the neck in a red kerchief; gray slacks; gray running shoes — clothes as utilitarian as the house. Sometimes she would look to the floor or the ceiling — ribbon-free zones — for the answers to my questions.

  Of her childhood in Toronto in the 1920s Adele recalled, “I could draw a horse before I could write.” Adele Davies liked to go out to her father’s Thorncliffe Stable and draw a horse called South Shore, who would win the 1922 King’s Plate — the actual football-sized silver trophy was up on the shelf in the pink room. The Queen’s (or King’s) Plate, the longest running stakes race on the continent, dates from 1860; the first Kentucky Derby came later, in 1875.

  Rockwell’s father managed the Don Valley Paper Company (now known as Domtar) and her grandfather owned the old Thorncliffe Race Track and farmland in what is now urban Toronto. It was there that he and his six horse-mad sons raised Thoroughbreds.

  Look in The Plate: A Royal Tradition, the flashy history of the Queen’s Plate, published in 1984, and you will find the Davies family well represented. There’s Adele’s Uncle George in his tux — top hat in one hand, trophy in the other — as he offers a muted smile to the camera after South Shore’s victory. The horse was unique in Queen’s Plate history: she was one of only a very few mares to win the plate and the only one to produce offspring who did the same — the colt Shorelint in 1929 and the filly Sally Fuller in 1935, Thorncliffe Stable horses both.

  The Davies family’s connection to horses goes back to the nineteenth century and Adele’s grandfather, Robert Davies. The author Louis Cauz, in The Plate, calls him “one of Canada’s most respected horsemen.” A breeder and twice winner of the Queen’s Plate, he personally rode a horse called Floss to victory in the 1871 running of that race.

  The family colors had always been canary yellow with black stripes and Shorelint’s jockey, Jaydee Mooney, wore them in the 1929 victory. Mooney also rode Black Gold to victory in the 1924 Kentucky Derby, inspiring Marguerite Henry’s novel.

  “I was bred into the horse world,” said Rockwell. E. P. Taylor, the legendary builder of Windfields Farm, where Northern Dancer was born, also felt a genuine passion for horses and bought his first riding horse, Blue Wave, from Adele Rockwell. Although she would breed and school horses, her first love was, and remains, ponies, specifically the Welsh ponies — which makes sense, given Adele’s very Welsh maiden name of Davies.

  At one point in our conversation, she disappeared into a back room to fetch one of her many fine paintings (she is also an accomplished sculptor) and Dick had come back in from the barn. Both eyed the rendering of a pony called Delphi, and offered it as proof of “pony character.” It was there in the face, in the eyes, as clear as day.

  “Do you see it?” each asked in turn.

  Lips pressed, eyes set in a muscular squint, I dutifully considered the painting. Saw the ears pointed attentively. Saw a brightness in the eyes. Saw … well, a pony. Just a pony, really. I felt like a student who plays cymbals in the high-school band (which, in fact, I did) being asked by two conductors to read a sheet of music from a symphony. I could pick out the percussion notes but not much more.

  So I countered their question with one of my own.

  “What is it that you see — even in a photograph, never mind a painting — that I don’t?”

  “If you can look at a horse and judge character,” said Adele, “you have accomplished a lot. Many people look at the legs first. But when I meet a person, I look to the face, to the head. It’s the same with a pony.” To which Dick added, “When we speak of a pony, and whether it’s a good one, we use the phrase ‘pony character.’ This is unique to ponies and it’s difficult to explain. We think of ponies as living persons in their interactions with other ponies and with people.”

  What the Rockwells saw in the painting of Delphi, what they saw with absolute clarity, was the pony’s temperament — a kindness in the eyes, attributes of sweetness, gentleness and friendliness and an overall impression of quality.

  The Ultimate Horse Book refers to the Welsh pony’s “quality riding action, adequate bone and substance, hardiness and constitution and pony character.” However, the author, Elwyn Hartley Edwards, another fine Welsh name, does not define “pony character.”

  Though both Dick and Adele tried hard that day and later on the telephone to make me understand pony character, I fear it eludes me yet. I understand that horse and pony, though members of the same species, are not members of the same family, and that while most ponies have pony character, no horse does. Pony character, Dick maintained, is something in the pony’s look and disposition, something passed on in breeding, a quality but not necessarily good quality. I imagine that a pony with pony character has a strong sense of his own self — Dick brightened appreciably and laughed when I told him that. But he knew, and I knew, that my education in ponies had only begun.

  Why is it, I asked him, that in many stables ponies win rotten reputations — mischievous, cantankerous, Napoleonic little biters who sometimes boss horses twice their size?

  Dick had heard the complaint before, and he worked up a pretty good head of steam as he tackled it. “Ponies have long been viewed as second-class citizens. I was reading something in a magazine the other day — ‘She has now outgrown ponies and graduated to horses.’ That’s wrong. Many people have had a great deal of pleasure and success with ponies. When they can’t ride them any more because they’ve gotten too big, they spend five or six years trying to find a horse as good as the pony was. Lots never find one.” Dick argues (with more passion than proof) that ponies, pound for pound, hand for hand, can far outjump a horse. He cited the case of an eleven-hand yearling colt who could jump a four-foot fence: “That’s not at all unusual.”

  Seeing the world, as they often do, through ponies’ eyes, has led the Rockwells to two conclusions: one, ponies are smart (which sometimes makes them enemies); two, humans are not always smart (or at least smart enough to realize that the pony is not the problem).

  Witness the conundrum of how to introduce a pony to saddle: the tiny rider has too little experience; the experienced trainer, too much bulk. “The result,” says Dick, “is that many ponies are not sufficiently schooled. Because of his intelligence and disposition, the pony is generally willing to do what is asked of him. But if the trainer is not capable and the pony lacks confidence in him, then the trouble starts.”

  Diane L. Huber, a veteran teacher in U.S. Pony Clubs and now living near Ithaca, New York, echoes those sentiments. “Ponies are honest,” she told me, “they have a lot of integrity, but even a good pony in the wrong hands …” She offers a story to illustrate her point.

  Huber had loaned her own pony (by a Standardbred-Shetland stallion out of a Welsh mare) to a young rider for a summer. The pony, called Tinsel Time, was highly trained, fearless and dependable, a ten-year veteran of Pony Club rallies. “I think the absolute world of her,” said Huber, who has spent a lifetime around horses and ponies. But that summer, the unsupervised little rider jumped the pony willy-nilly and got her so flustered she began to stop at fences. “Unheard of,” said Huber, who eventually set the pony straight again.

  “There must be a million ponies out there in the same circumstances or worse. A little kid on a nice pony can do a lot, especially with good, decent guidance. You’ll see a kid on a pony, and he’s frustrated, and so is the pony — it works both ways. Then all of a sudden, the harmony comes. What’s true on a horse is true on a pony — every minute is different. There’s something always going on.”

  Adele Rockwell’s father bought her first pony, a Shetland, when she was two. She painted an arresting and nostalgic picture of a time seventy or so years ago when she and her brother rode ponies in the middle of a city and felt a freedom and a carefreeness that may now be gone forever — at least from the urban landscape.

  “My brother and I used to rid
e our ponies in the Don Valley,” part of a heavily treed greenbelt that still winds its way through the city of Toronto. “I must have been five or six, and Bob was seven or eight. We were not supposed to leave the forty-two-acre property, but Mom and Dad would have gone to the races in Hamilton or Fort Erie and we’d have been babysat by an aunt. We’d go off and ride the ponies — we’d be gone for the whole day!” Their destination was a certain tree in the middle of the Leaside Flying Field and they would spend hours there watching the biplanes, and later the monoplanes, land and take off.

  “We had to cross railway tracks to get there,” she continued. “The ponies would step on the ties and make their way across. We were so young, but we were in the hands of the ponies. The ponies would look after us.”

  By 1935, Rockwell had become a competent rider and had learned from her father how to judge quality in a pony. She went to the Royal Winter Fair that year and came back astonished by the dressage horses she had seen. A Captain Tuttle, an aspiring Olympian and American cavalry officer, had shown what balance and sensitivity his horses were capable of. One called Si Murray could canter backward; another called Vast he reined by a thread.

  Like many people born to ride, Adele Rockwell has a photographic memory for the ponies and horses in her life: Creta, the eleven-two-hand Welsh pony, a bay: Pico, a pinto pony from the rodeo; Cellophane, her first horse.

  In time she met and married Dick, who was as passionate about horses as she was. They bought a farm in Toronto not far from the original Windfields Farm (both farms were long ago carved up and paved over). The choice was between having horses and having a car: Ford lost out to the feed store.