Summer of the Horse

by Donna Kane

  Wayne’s bargaining skills were honed from logging for his father. “It required a high level of firmness to get my paycheque signed,” Wayne says. “If you could get the old man to take a buck from his pocket, it was squeaking all the way.”

  In 1992, once the campaign to protect the Mount Le Moray area (which would become the Pine Le Moray Provincial Park) had moved into the planning process, Wayne turned his attention to the northern Rockies, the Muskwa–Kechika.

  It was the same year I completed my associate of arts degree. It was also the year I was selected to attend the bc Festival of the Arts as both a visual artist and a writer. It had taken years for me to believe that my passions were worth pursuing. I started a spreadsheet plotting out how I might complete a graduate degree.

  In 1998, through a land and resource management plan (lrmp), the Muskwa–Kechika Management Area was established. In his address announcing the creation and protection of the Muskwa–Kechika, New Democratic Party Premier Glen Clark announced: “Perhaps no single land-use decision anywhere has moved sustainability forward so dramatically through conservation, resource development and cooperative management … In turn, we challenge the rest of the world to follow our example.”

  By 1998, my children had become teenagers. They were getting their driver’s licences, they were falling in and out of love, they were thinking about what they would like to do with their lives. I could see they had already moved beyond the home they’d grown up in. By then I had turned my creative attention away from visual art, toward writing.

  In 2001, the Muskwa–Kechika Management Area was expanded by way of the Mackenzie Land and Resource Management Plan, bringing the total area to 6.4 million hectares—one of the largest, most diverse wilderness areas in North America.

  For Wayne, those early days at the lrmp tables were charged and uncertain. There was no guarantee that after all of their work the government would approve their recommendations.

  “We used to tape the meetings so the secretary could transcribe them,” Wayne says. “I’d listen to those tapes on my way to the next meeting. You gotta love that stuff to do that.”

  What he loved most was the Muskwa–Kechika. When I first met him, he said it was only when he was in the m–k that he felt at home. “When I’m not there,” he said, “I’m just treading water.”

  As my son left for school in Vancouver, and my daughter soon followed, I cherished with a fierce attention the times when everyone was home and sleeping under the same roof. As those times grew rarer, it was my writing that kept me afloat.

  Fifteen

  Horseshoe

  A horseshoe isn’t a natural part of the horse, but mountains are a place where horses don’t naturally go. In the mountains, horseshoes are necessary.

  The horseshoe is aerodynamic, shaped so that its front edge banks toward the direction of travel, its bevelled curve cutting the air as sleekly as the starship Enterprise slicing through interstellar space.

  When I swing a horseshoe in my hand, it reminds my body of gravity, of the comfort of the earth’s metal. The horseshoe is a U, it’s a C, it’s a sickle of moon and shines best when nailed to the hoof of a horse whose movement polishes it against the surface of the earth.

  The shoe is the interface between the horse and the earth—the horse transfers its flex and muscle through the shoe onto the moss and boulders, and the ground transfers the qualities of the moss and boulders through the shoe to the flex and muscle of the horse. On the underside, the shoe becomes scored—by rocks, flakes of metal shaving off in travel, tiny sparks snapping when the shoe flints a boulder—thinning over time like a wedding ring. Tony (short for Antoinette), one of the mares on Wayne’s pack string, has a slightly heavy-to-the-left step so her shoe is thinner on the left edge. If a shoe is put on so that the metal of the shoe extends even a hair’s breadth beyond the hoof, a thin raised rim will occur where the bottom of the shoe, hammered by the ground with every step, and without a hoof to stop it, pounds upward a thin ridge or lip, as if it’s been squeezed like a wax seal.

  Eventually, though, the hoof grows beyond the shoe, and the shoe no longer sits firmly on the hoof. The shoe starts to unseat. Sometimes the heads of the nails that fasten the shoe to the hoof pestle off from constant grinding against the earth, and without the nail heads, the shoe loosens, creating a thin crack between shoe and hoof. Rocks or sticks catch in the small gap and slowly the shoe is pried away. The material most likely to unseat a shoe is mud, just like gumbo sucks my gumboots off. A horseshoe falls off the hoof of a horse because it is an inanimate object mated to something alive.

  Being on the trail in the mountains with a string of horses means that if a horseshoe comes off, it has to go back on right away. It’s a big deal when a horse loses a shoe on the trail. If someone spots a horseshoe sunk like a cookie cutter in the mud or hears the ping of metal on stone, it is the one time they will be applauded for getting off their horse mid-ride. That shoe will be their lucky charm, the toy inside the crackerjack box, their Cinderella slipper. They will be complimented on being alert (also having common sense—proof they don’t think horseshoes appear out of nowhere, are dispensable—and how would you feel if your hiking boot came off and someone saw it but trotted on by?).

  When a horse has lost a shoe, someone has to help Wayne put the shoe back on. Their job will be to retrieve the tools from wherever Wayne tosses them and to predict as best they can the tool he will need next and have it at the ready, while never losing sight of the fact that their stooped head is in the path of the flying horse hoof nippers. Here is the general order of things:

  Wayne will take a hoof knife and clean the hoof of dirt and pebbles. He will also look for any injuries.

  He will then trim the ends of the hoof. With the big nippers, he will clip away any excess hoof. The nippers cut through the hoof as silently as a knife carving through a rind of cantaloupe.

  With the rasp, he will even out the bottom of the hoof, shreds of hoof grating off white and thick as soap shavings.

  Wayne will then take the horseshoe and place it on the underside of the hoof, testing to see if it sits flat as a plate on a table. If not, he will hammer the shoe on a rock until it does.

  Then Wayne will place the fitted shoe on the hoof, take the hammer and pound each nail (eight holes, eight nails) at an angle so each nail exits the top of the hoof at the angle of the sun’s rays in December. The nails are, like the shoe, bevelled so they naturally exit the upper side and veer toward the outside of the hoof.

  When the nail comes through, Wayne’s assistant will take the small blue nippers and clip the sharp ends of the nail off to a square. The assistant will pick up the butt ends of the nail and pocket them so they don’t lodge in a horse’s hoof.

  Wayne will then rasp underneath the cut ends of the nipped nail to prevent the hoof from splitting when the nail is bent over.

  Next, the assistant hands over the clinch block, which Wayne will brace against the cut off end of the nail.

  Wayne will hammer the nail against the block, starting to bend the nail down against the hoof and setting the shoe solidly in place.

  With the clincher, he’ll finish bending the nail down flush against the hoof.

  Shoeing a horse on the trail is a challenge. If part of the hoof exceeds the edge of the horseshoe at the end of the process, Wayne will take the big nippers and nip the hoof flush to the shoe.

  Finally, Wayne will take the rasp and smooth the edge of the hoof against the edge of the shoe. Not only will it look pretty, but it will keep things from catching on any rough edges (which could put the horse back to where it started, that is, missing a shoe, and that’s a bad refrain).

  When I’m back home, headed to Emilie’s for a visit or out to weed the garden, I will find the butt ends of horseshoe nails in my pocket, metal castings that are so sleek and shiny, so sharp—in contrast to the grains of dust and sugar suc
ked by dew into a crust that clings to the inside seams of my pocket or the string of leather, stiffened by salt and grit, that I keep in my pocket for practising knots—that the metal, with its nature to transfer rather than absorb, seems wide awake and always at the ready, just like the body’s senses.

  I like to think of myself this way—that just as a horseshoe is the interface between the horse’s hoof and the earth, my senses are the interface between my body and the material world. The material world, with its moss and boulders, exerts itself on my senses and my senses transfer those qualities to my body—How green and lush the moss is! And in the same way the horse’s hoof is protected by its shoe, my body is protected by my senses—Look out for that slippery rock! Here’s to the horseshoe! Here’s to my bright and silvery senses clinched to my body, transferring the shape of the birch leaves, the sound of horses as they move through the buckbrush and pine, the sshh of their hides against the leaves like rain coming in from the north, horseshoes glinting as they go.

  Wayne, Chancey and I relax in the alpine.

  Sixteen

  Oh, How You Fit Me

  Never have I put my body beside a man’s and had it fit so well. Bespoke. Your arm under the crook of my neck can be there for hours and still my neck is not sore. You turn toward the back of me; I turn toward the back of you. I am home. I love that you are patient and calm and don’t mind if I drink though you haven’t touched a drop in nearly twenty years. I have autonomy with you—we both go where we want to go when we want to go there. Tricky thing is I don’t get to go where I want very often. But still. I love watching your profile when you sit at your computer. Because you are lean from packing horses and walking up mountain passes and then back down, all summer long, the bones of your body jut out. Maybe because of this, you look even taller than you are already; when I hold you, the blades of your shoulders are like climbing grips or handlebars on a midway ride. Even the bones in your fingers are chiselled. When a mosquito lands on your arm, you lift your finger with such calm assurance the insect doesn’t know to move. You are deadly rational. When you’re sitting in the kitchen chair putting a battery into your headlamp, glasses pushed down the bridge of your nose, your moustache white, I think of Geppetto, but when you’re in the mountains with your red-checked neckerchief and cowboy hat, then I think of Indiana Jones. Sometimes, late at night when you’ve got your headlamp on because we’re in bed and I’ve been trying to sleep, I watch you read about people who have been thrust into extreme situations—Scott’s failed return from the South Pole, or the more exuberant Shackleton, your books piled on your bedside table, precariously, all non-fiction, all things explorational, geological, paleontological—some nights I look at you and think, How did this man come to be with me?

  Seventeen

  Glassing for Poodles

  How close do you have to be to a bear to count it as a sighting? Does a bear viewed through binoculars as it heads up a mountain pass count? Or does its breath have to fog the lens so you know yourself as prey and have an out-of-body experience as you pull the bear banger? At some point, an animal through binoculars is no more than an abstract statistic. At some point you have to tell yourself you are looking at a bear. What some say is a sheep on a ridge near the top of a pass on the other side of the valley could be, as someone once told me, a poodle for all they could tell.

  Of all the things people take on the trail, one of the most coveted seems to be binoculars—oh, for the finely ground lens, the graphite mould—as though binoculars tucked into a saddlebag were a symbol of humankind’s eternal yearning, always reaching beyond our grasp.

  A few years ago I attended a writing colony at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, Saskatchewan. While there, I experienced a chickadee landing in the palm of my hand. The monks, with their patience and peanuts, had habituated the birds to feed from their hands. A chickadee in your hand is amazing—the way the bird darts into your palm, a clean and muscled weightlessness, the tips of the beak spearing the halved nuts, then the body lifting with a purr of wing takes me a bit outside of myself. The first time one landed, I lurched. But that’s what I kept wanting, that ping of unexpectedness. So I braced myself again and again, wanting to feel the whir of something wild.

  In Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness, Don McKay says there is “the sudden angle of perception, the phenomenal surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments of haiku and imagism … we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy—its rawness, its duende, its alien being.”

  In Tim Lilburn’s Living in the World as if It Were Home, he writes of a deer who appears to know Tim is watching him. The deer returns the gaze—“Their look seems a bestowal,” he writes. “I feel more substantial, less apologetic as a physical thing from having been seen.” Lilburn seems to speak to a desire to be himself subsumed, made part of something else. As if to receive the gaze of a non-human animal makes us feel, for a moment, a part of their world, a bit less exposed, self-conscious, which is magical in one way but is, in another, perhaps one more manifestation of our acquisitive soul, our yearning to make everything a part of us or for us to be a part of the other. “The weirdness, unreachability of things, is not abolished by any sudden aberration of intimacy, fluked into being by a deer’s look, but is intensified by it. The desire to feel otherness as selfhood, to be the deer seeing ourself, remains.” In other words, or at least this is my interpretation, if we feel like a deer, then we are the deer; we are no longer the human.

  Binoculars compress distance while keeping a distance. Binoculars provide us with an opportunity to observe a wild animal without it knowing it is being watched. And maybe that is the closest we will ever get to allowing a wild animal to remain itself: being far enough away so that it doesn’t know we’re there, and is therefore still wild, its behaviour unchanged by us.

  Mayfield Lake is the place where Wayne feels at home.

  Eighteen

  The Way a Wound Heals

  Wayne has been gone for ten days. In that time, I’ve mowed the lawn three times, weeded the garden two, and hosed Comet twenty. Twice a week, after work, I stop in to see my parents. One day I walk in just as my dad is coming out of the bathroom, a cockeyed grin on his face. There is no question that he still knows me and is glad to see me. “Just sit down!” my mother says. “Don’t come near here.” And both my dad and I move toward the living room as my mom rushes into the bathroom with rubber gloves and disinfectant. It’s difficult to see them this way. I’m sure my dad knows he has made some kind of a mess, but he doesn’t know how to stop it. And my mom, whose strength and vitality, whose love of travel and adventure, has always been an inspiration, is also starting to show signs of wear. But you can’t tell my mom what to do. While my sisters and I have tried to make casual remarks about home care or other kinds of support, any decision will have to be hers. In the meantime, life for both of my parents feels very trapped.

  I’ve heard from Wayne twice. Because his satellite phone has to be turned off to save batteries, I have to wait for him to call me. I make lists of the things I need or want to tell him—messages from clients, questions I have, the most recent one being, “Where is the temporary electric fencing?” I’ve decided that Comet needs a better place to live. There’s nothing for him to do, nothing to explore. I figure I can put him in the bigger fenced-in area where the hay is stored. I’ll put temporary electric fencing around the hay bales so Comet can have the rest of the space, which includes granaries that he can stand beside for shelter and an open area where grass is growing. He can eat grass. It’s summer, for god’s sake.

  Each day I take a picture of Comet’s wound, but after ten days, I can’t see any improvement, just an ongoing saga of change. The stitches have come undone, just like the vet said they might, and now the wound is bigger than ever. It is its own continent, a land formed by an underlying geology of flesh and muscle. In the upper east i
s a thick frothy yellow ooze that seems to continually pipe out from beneath the hide, as if it were the mouth of a geyser. Ooze that I hose away and that, almost right away, comes back. Adjacent and to the west is a scape of cracked flesh, reddish and grey like the parched bottom of a riverbed. And to the south is the cavernous territory made up of the deepest part of his wound, gullies and ravines, the cut muscles below directing the flow of blood.

  Comet’s wound is a conversation piece. When people come to visit, they all want to see it, and even if they don’t, and if Emilie’s around, she will insist, “Have you seen Donna’s horse? You have to see it.” Donna’s horse.

  I no longer tie Comet to the fence rail when I hose him. It’s easier for both of us if I hold the lead rope in one hand and the hose in the other, the water’s spray tearing small perforations into a greyish tissue that is forming over the wound, the water entering beneath the tissue and then spurting out other slits in the film. Some days I feel like I’m washing my car, the hose working away at bits of loose flesh like the last bit of gumbo clinging to the mud flaps, clinging and clinging and then off it goes. Sometimes, hosing Comet is the most relaxing part of my day. When he is calm, hosing is a bit like Zen, a practice I fall into, fade in and out of. Comet must feel it too. When we’re about ten minutes in, he will heave a big sigh.

  A many-plumed moth settles on a book.