White Comanche was shot, fittingly, at the soundstages and back lot of the former Bronston Productions, where El Cid had been made. Like Heston, I had a horse they named El Nervioso as the long-distance horse, the horse I would ride at a gallop, and then they had the close-up horse, El Tranquilo, who would be calm when the clapboard clacked in his face and I had to wheel the horse away and ride off into the sunset.
As it turned out, before too long the horses had to trade roles, because after my guidance and ability to control him, El Nervioso gradually calmed down, became very tranquil. Meanwhile, El Tranquilo was getting real nervous about people jumping up and down in front of the camera, and he became El Nervioso. So then we had to switch the horses.
Of all of the horse stuff that I did over my career, that was the most challenging and also the most fun. I enjoyed “reading” the horses, if you will, knowing just when it was time to swap one for the other.
This would probably be a good time to mention another challenge on the shoot: I rode these two horses bareback, which added to the danger. I learned to do this under the aegis of Glenn Randall, Jr., one of those gentlemen who, like Yakima Canutt (more on that legend later), was born to do what he did. His father had been a renowned rodeo rider and movie horseman before him. Glenn Jr. went on to become a masterly stunt coordinator for films that didn’t have any horses, like The Towering Inferno and E.T., but back then he was still in the original family business of horses.
With Glenn’s help I became competent enough but, obviously, as I said, riding bareback adds another level of danger to anything beyond a trot. And it was very stupid of me to ride El Nervioso that way, across a field, because with some frequency horses break their legs stepping in a gopher hole. And everybody knew that, including me. I had the arrogance going in—but as the days passed, and I became aware of just how many things could have gone wrong, I was forced to reevaluate my skill level. I was also a little more mindful of the risks than I’d been in other films. As on the plains of the American West, there are many potential life-ending scenarios that come from riding a horse full-out on a prairie. I would take time to walk whatever path I was supposed to follow, looking for pitfalls.
Glenn also showed me how to do a stunt that I really loved. It was a trick of rolling backward off the horse as the horse was cantering along, as if I’d been shot. The idea was I’d fall backward, land on my feet, and then fall on the ground—secretly fine, thus luring the enemy in. I pulled it off, though I can only imagine what these Spanish guys who knew and loved horses really thought of me, so eager and cocksure. But then, as I said about Alexander the Great, I didn’t want a stuntman having to double for me in a single scene. I wanted to do it all. And that’s what I did.
Thanks to Glenn and whatever guardian angel was watching over me, nothing happened, I never got hurt on that shoot, but as I look back on it now I think, “How could you have done that?”
There is one more story I’d like to share, one that has nothing to do with riding but with the larger theme of this book, the spiritual magic of the horse.
In 2002, I was directing a movie called Groom Lake, about a woman’s search for extraterrestrial life. We were shooting in Arizona, right near the border between Mexico and Arizona. When we were shooting at night, every so often the lights would pick up some individuals coming over a rise. And we were told that it was dangerous because that location was near a known border crossing. The “coyotes,” the leaders of the border crossers, were taking people across in groups and it could be risky for us since we were there with cameras possibly photographing people who absolutely did not want to be discovered.
In addition, not because we were there, but as a matter of course, border guards would often turn up, walking in the dark, and would come into the frame, and we would have to stop shooting. You wouldn’t think shooting on location, in your own land, could be so difficult and treacherous, but there you are.
Eventually I made friends with some of the border guards, and they invited me to come and patrol the border. That’s the kind of experience you don’t pass up, and when I wasn’t shooting at night, and my preparations for the next day were done, I went with them. My wife Elizabeth was with me.
She and I got into a car and drove to the border to meet these two border guards, and one of them said, “We know both of you are interested in horses, and we have horses here that we took from the ‘coyotes.’” So Elizabeth and I got on the two horses and the border guards were on foot; Elizabeth is an expert rider, having trained horses for most of her life. They handed us night-vision goggles so that we could see—albeit in that eerie, luminous shade of green—and we went into the brush, which had a great deal of cactus. The border guards knew the cactus, the horses knew the cactus because they were desert horses, and we got to that rise where we’d been seeing people all through the shoot. It was a swell in the earth, and the border guards whispered, “The border is right over there, let’s stay here for a moment.”
We all stood silently under the night sky, practically no light at all, just starlight. And the horses too stood, immobile.
And I whispered, “What exactly are we waiting for?”
And the border guard said, “These horses were mistreated by the guys running the people. They hated the people that owned them. When we confiscated these animals, we realized that their ears would move, that they would look in the direction that the ‘coyotes’ were coming, were bringing people across the border, because they were so apprehensive about their former owners that they would immediately be alerted. And only they could hear and smell what the human beings, the rest of us, could not.”
So now we’re in that situation, and suddenly both horses swivel and point in the same direction. And the guards start running off into the dark, and we’re on the horses and we’re riding to keep up—because we did not want to be there unprotected. We’re racing past cactus, over brush, and we can’t even see who we’re pursuing—even though we can “see” in the dark! And suddenly we come upon a group of twenty-five people huddled, getting ready to be moved on into the United States. The guards said, “Now you all sit there and put your hands above your head.” And they arrested the guide. The horses did not relax, but we comforted them, assured them that all was well. The sensitivity of these horses was both impressive … and very, very moving.
But there’s a coda.
As Elizabeth and I are sitting on these horses, looking at these poor people who are trying to come to America, we’ve got the night goggles on and now I can see this one particular guy, a young Mexican fellow, and he looks up at me and he says with a curious sense of awe and disbelief: “Captain Kirk.”
The Horseman in the Sky
by AMBROSE BIERCE (1889)
A number of years ago, I made two appearances on a television series called The Twilight Zone. It was a consistently ingenious, artful anthology series shepherded by the brilliant Rod Serling, and it featured tales of science fiction and fantasy. Throughout its five-year run—that number does seem to follow me around!—all of the stories were shot expressly for the show … save one. The exception was the chilling “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a Civil War story written by Ambrose Bierce. It was filmed in Europe and won an Oscar for best live-action short subject. Rod Serling snapped it up to present on his series.
Bierce (1842–1914) was a soldier, author, critic, journalist, and all-around misanthrope (his nickname was “Bitter Bierce”) whose works tended to be pessimistic at best, nightmarish at worst. He spent a lot of time on horseback in the rugged Dakota Territory, in Texas, and in revolutionary Mexico—where he vanished, his fate a mystery.
While this story is not about a horse per se, the mount is surely essential … and its role in the tale unique. And it could easily have been an episode of the aforementioned TV classic!
I
One sunny afternoon in the autumn of the year 1861 a soldier lay in a clump of laurel by the side of a road in western Virginia. He lay at full le
ngth upon his stomach, his feet resting upon the toes, his head upon the left forearm. His extended right hand loosely grasped his rifle. But for the somewhat methodical disposition of his limbs and a slight rhythmic movement of the cartridge-box at the back of his belt he might have been thought to be dead. He was asleep at his post of duty. But if detected he would be dead shortly afterward, death being the just and legal penalty of his crime.
The clump of laurel in which the criminal lay was in the angle of a road which after ascending southward a steep acclivity to that point turned sharply to the west, running along the summit for perhaps one hundred yards. There it turned southward again and went zigzagging downward through the forest. At the salient of that second angle was a large flat rock, jutting out northward, overlooking the deep valley from which the road ascended. The rock capped a high cliff; a stone dropped from its outer edge would have fallen sheer downward one thousand feet to the tops of the pines. The angle where the soldier lay was on another spur of the same cliff. Had he been awake he would have commanded a view, not only of the short arm of the road and the jutting rock, but of the entire profile of the cliff below it. It might well have made him giddy to look.
The country was wooded everywhere except at the bottom of the valley to the northward, where there was a small natural meadow, through which flowed a stream scarcely visible from the valley’s rim. This open ground looked hardly larger than an ordinary door-yard, but was really several acres in extent. Its green was more vivid than that of the inclosing forest. Away beyond it rose a line of giant cliffs similar to those upon which we are supposed to stand in our survey of the savage scene, and through which the road had somehow made its climb to the summit. The configuration of the valley, indeed, was such that from this point of observation it seemed entirely shut in, and one could but have wondered how the road which found a way out of it had found a way into it, and whence came and whither went the waters of the stream that parted the meadow more than a thousand feet below.
No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theatre of war; concealed in the forest at the bottom of that military rat-trap, in which half a hundred men in possession of the exits might have starved an army to submission, lay five regiments of Federal infantry. They had marched all the previous day and night and were resting. At nightfall they would take to the road again, climb to the place where their unfaithful sentinel now slept, and descending the other slope of the ridge fall upon a camp of the enemy at about midnight. Their hope was to surprise it, for the road led to the rear of it. In case of failure, their position would be perilous in the extreme; and fail they surely would should accident or vigilance apprise the enemy of the movement.
II
The sleeping sentinel in the clump of laurel was a young Virginian named Carter Druse. He was the son of wealthy parents, an only child, and had known such ease and cultivation and high living as wealth and taste were able to command in the mountain country of western Virginia. His home was but a few miles from where he now lay. One morning he had risen from the breakfast-table and said, quietly but gravely: “Father, a Union regiment has arrived at Grafton. I am going to join it.”
The father lifted his leonine head, looked at the son a moment in silence, and replied: “Well, go, sir, and whatever may occur do what you conceive to be your duty. Virginia, to which you are a traitor, must get on without you. Should we both live to the end of the war, we will speak further of the matter. Your mother, as the physician has informed you, is in a most critical condition; at the best she cannot be with us longer than a few weeks, but that time is precious. It would be better not to disturb her.”
So Carter Druse, bowing reverently to his father, who returned the salute with a stately courtesy that masked a breaking heart, left the home of his childhood to go soldiering. By conscience and courage, by deeds of devotion and daring, he soon commended himself to his fellows and his officers; and it was to these qualities and to some knowledge of the country that he owed his selection for his present perilous duty at the extreme outpost. Nevertheless, fatigue had been stronger than resolution and he had fallen asleep. What good or bad angel came in a dream to rouse him from his state of crime, who shall say? Without a movement, without a sound, in the profound silence and the languor of the late afternoon, some invisible messenger of fate touched with unsealing finger the eyes of his consciousness—whispered into the ear of his spirit the mysterious awakening word which no human lips ever have spoken, no human memory ever has recalled. He quietly raised his forehead from his arm and looked between the masking stems of the laurels, instinctively closing his right hand about the stock of his rifle.
His first feeling was a keen artistic delight. On a colossal pedestal, the cliff,—motionless at the extreme edge of the capping rock and sharply outlined against the sky,—was an equestrian statue of impressive dignity. The figure of the man sat the figure of the horse, straight and soldierly, but with the repose of a Grecian god carved in the marble which limits the suggestion of activity. The gray costume harmonized with its aërial background; the metal of accoutrement and caparison was softened and subdued by the shadow; the animal’s skin had no points of high light. A carbine strikingly foreshortened lay across the pommel of the saddle, kept in place by the right hand grasping it at the “grip”; the left hand, holding the bridle rein, was invisible. In silhouette against the sky the profile of the horse was cut with the sharpness of a cameo; it looked across the heights of air to the confronting cliffs beyond. The face of the rider, turned slightly away, showed only an outline of temple and beard; he was looking downward to the bottom of the valley. Magnified by its lift against the sky and by the soldier’s testifying sense of the formidableness of a near enemy the group appeared of heroic, almost colossal, size.
For an instant Druse had a strange, half-defined feeling that he had slept to the end of the war and was looking upon a noble work of art reared upon that eminence to commemorate the deeds of an heroic past of which he had been an inglorious part. The feeling was dispelled by a slight movement of the group: the horse, without moving its feet, had drawn its body slightly backward from the verge; the man remained immobile as before. Broad awake and keenly alive to the significance of the situation, Druse now brought the butt of his rifle against his cheek by cautiously pushing the barrel forward through the bushes, cocked the piece, and glancing through the sights covered a vital spot of the horseman’s breast. A touch upon the trigger and all would have been well with Carter Druse. At that instant the horseman turned his head and looked in the direction of his concealed foeman—seemed to look into his very face, into his eyes, into his brave, compassionate heart.
Is it then so terrible to kill an enemy in war—an enemy who has surprised a secret vital to the safety of one’s self and comrades—an enemy more formidable for his knowledge than all his army for its numbers? Carter Druse grew pale; he shook in every limb, turned faint, and saw the statuesque group before him as black figures, rising, falling, moving unsteadily in arcs of circles in a fiery sky. His hand fell away from his weapon, his head slowly dropped until his face rested on the leaves in which he lay. This courageous gentleman and hardy soldier was near swooning from intensity of emotion.
It was not for long; in another moment his face was raised from earth, his hands resumed their places on the rifle, his forefinger sought the trigger; mind, heart, and eyes were clear, conscience and reason sound. He could not hope to capture that enemy; to alarm him would but send him dashing to his camp with his fatal news. The duty of the soldier was plain: the man must be shot dead from ambush—without warning, without a moment’s spiritual preparation, with never so much as an unspoken prayer, he must be sent to his account. But no—there is a hope; he may have discovered nothing—perhaps he is but admiring the sublimity of the landscape. If permitted, he may turn and ride carelessly away in the direction whence he came. Surely it will be possible to judge at the instant of his withdrawing whether he knows. It may well be that his fixit
y of attention—Druse turned his head and looked through the deeps of air downward, as from the surface to the bottom of a translucent sea. He saw creeping across the green meadow a sinuous line of figures of men and horses—some foolish commander was permitting the soldiers of his escort to water their beasts in the open, in plain view from a dozen summits!
Druse withdrew his eyes from the valley and fixed them again upon the group of man and horse in the sky, and again it was through the sights of his rifle. But this time his aim was at the horse. In his memory, as if they were a divine mandate, rang the words of his father at their parting: “Whatever may occur, do what you conceive to be your duty.” He was calm now. His teeth were firmly but not rigidly closed; his nerves were as tranquil as a sleeping babe’s—not a tremor affected any muscle of his body; his breathing, until suspended in the act of taking aim, was regular and slow. Duty had conquered; the spirit had said to the body: “Peace, be still.” He fired.
III
An officer of the Federal force, who in a spirit of adventure or in quest of knowledge had left the hidden bivouac in the valley, and with aimless feet had made his way to the lower edge of a small open space near the foot of the cliff, was considering what he had to gain by pushing his exploration further. At a distance of a quarter-mile before him, but apparently at a stone’s throw, rose from its fringe of pines the gigantic face of rock, towering to so great a height above him that it made him giddy to look up to where its edge cut a sharp, rugged line against the sky. It presented a clean, vertical profile against a background of blue sky to a point half the way down, and of distant hills, hardly less blue, thence to the tops of the trees at its base. Lifting his eyes to the dizzy altitude of its summit the officer saw an astonishing sight—a man on horseback riding down into the valley through the air!
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