The Horse

by Wendy Williams

The domestic horse is a generalist, bred by us for millennia according to our own wishes in order to meet our own needs. One reason why this has worked so well for us is because of the horse’s evolutionary malleability. We’ve been blessed by this flexibility. We’ve been able to breed huge Shire horses, capable of carrying knights into battle; quarter horses with heavy haunches who can spin on a dime; light-boned trotting horses who can pull carriages; and lithe ponies able to jump high fences despite their short legs.

  Where did all these qualities come from? We do know that Equus, our modern horse and “the best running animal on the planet,” according to the paleontologist Darrin Pagnac, appeared at least 4 million years ago. But he’s a marvel descended from 56-million-year-old ancestors who arrived on our planet in a far different form. Since that time, he has been shaped and reshaped by tens of millions of years of global heat spikes, fluctuating ice ages, tectonic upheavals, volcanic mega-explosions, and many other planetary forces until, today, he has mastered the art of adjusting. Extremely intelligent, he can fend for himself in the most challenging environments or be coddled in our barns, pastures, and twenty-first-century cities. He can, like Whisper, learn new skills and cope with problems even when the barn manager, like me, leaves much to be desired.

  All horses large and small stem from only a few Pleistocene survivors. (arjecahn, Catch Me If You Can, February 4, 2006, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution)

  “Horses today,” Ransom once told me, “occupy an anthropogenic niche. They’ll live wherever we let them live. If you give them enough space, they’ll figure it out.”

  * * *

  One long-ago afternoon in California’s Death Valley, I watched two free-ranging horses standing very still, trying to weather the midday sun. Death Valley is named for the potential effect of its blistering heat, and when temperatures are at their worst, you want to put a damp cloth over your face when you breathe to keep from searing your lungs. The horses stood stock-still, surrounded by hot sand. Under the merciless sun, I understood their behavior. Like them, I moved as little as possible.

  It was too dry for horseflies, but some insect was bothering the animals. They stood head to rump, a bonded pair, swishing their tails back and forth to help each other out. I’d seen this behavior a thousand times before in my life and never given it more than a passing thought until then.

  But something struck me that day. Despite the miserable heat, I wasn’t alone. Other horse watchers were there. It was then that I realized what an inestimable gift horses are to people in the modern world and how bereft we would be without them. Even today, long after that ivory carver created the Vogelherd masterpiece, we take so much pleasure in watching wild horses that, all around the world, we let them roam free, giving them their own unique status—part wildlife, part domestic livestock, part companion animal, part guide into the mysterious world of nature. We need horses in our lives.

  In one barn where I rode, a retired couple brought their rescued horse with them for a few weeks of vacation. I thought this so charming that I asked them about it. It turned out they never went anywhere without their horse. He was so deeply bonded to them that he became overwrought if they weren’t there. I suspected that the partnership was a two-way street and that the process of caring for the animal, which in their case involved an elaborate two-hour daily grooming ritual (he had his nostrils and ears sponged out daily and in the course of this enjoyed many carrots), was equally soothing to them.

  Every morning the husband and wife showed up to brush the horse, clean his teeth, and wash his eyes. They talked to him and handed him treats. Apart from the Lipizzans I visited at Vienna’s Spanish Riding School, this gelding was the cleanest horse I’d ever seen. He was rarely ridden, but when he was, the wife rode the local trails on the horse’s back and the husband accompanied them on his motorcycle. The parade was a wonder to behold.

  Horses evoke something ineffable in the human psyche, something at once both exciting and calming. Just looking at a painting of horses, on a museum wall or on a cave wall, can be heart-stopping. Their presence in our lives makes the world so much more grand, even if we only see them from a distance. When the U.S. National Park Service wanted to remove some horses from protected riverbanks in the impoverished Missouri Ozarks, the mountain people objected. The horses themselves were nothing unusual, having apparently found their way onto national parkland after being abandoned by farmers during the worst days of the 1930s Depression. These horses were just like the horses that locals had in their own barns and pastures. But still, many in the region wanted the horses left alone. They found comfort in their presence.

  “As long as the wild horses continue to roam,” said one man, “then maybe there’s hope for us as well.”

  Perhaps this is the significance of the horses created by the Ice Age artists: They represented hope. And just simple companionship. What are the roots of such a partnership?

  2

  IN THE LAND OF BUTCH CASSIDY

  If you want to sense the evolution of the modern horse, you can grasp a horse’s fetlock and still feel the remnants of toenails that his ancestors had.

  —RICHARD TEDFORD, American Museum of Natural History

  One day while I was still in Wyoming, Phyllis Preator drove me in her heavy-duty, fire-engine-red ranch truck, complete with American flag and rattlesnake pistol, up to the top of Polecat Bench. It was late afternoon, and on our way up we passed a line of oil field roustabouts and roughnecks getting off work and heading in the opposite direction down into town.

  There’s a lot of oil in this region. Long before the modern Rocky Mountains started growing about 66 millions years ago, seas covered what is now Wyoming, off and on, ebbing and flowing with continental drift, tectonic collision, and changes in global and local climate conditions. The prevalence of these shallow and well-lit seas in which large and small marine organisms flourished helps to explain why early wildcatters found in these High Country deserts layers of “shale so black it all but smelled of low tide,” in the words of the inimitable John McPhee. Because those ancient seas ebbed and flowed, then ebbed and flowed again over tens of millions of years, layers of earth are now interspersed with pockets of oil—dead, decayed, buried, and cooked-by-the-heat-of-the-planet sea life compressed into a fluid form of carbon that’s easy for us to transport and to burn.

  The sea life that transformed into that fuel varied from place to place, so the oil from each region has its own thumbprint of sorts. The oil pumped out of Polecat Bench stinks. Distinctively. It’s seriously sulfurous. Hence the name Polecat, which is Wyoming for “skunk.” Preator’s friend Nettie Kelley, who had tagged along for our day of wild-horse watching, explained that when the oilmen working there come home, “the first thing their wives do is wash their clothes. They can’t stand the smell.” Breathing in the dust, I had a hard time imagining the place covered by early oceans or the swamps that carpeted it after the dinosaurs who lurked here in great abundance became extinct (except for the birds).

  Preator had her ever-present baseball cap smashed down over her medium-length blond hair, which stuck out the sides like feathers. She wore a shirt covered with miniature galloping horses and with lots of words like “spirit” and “stallion” and “free” and “beauty” written in cursive. Busy with family and bringing in the hay and keeping her own horses fit, she hadn’t been working on her Sage Brush Annie blog lately (the nom de plume derives from her admiration for the original Wild Horse Annie who advocated for mustang protection in the mid-twentieth century), but the horses roaming the range still pluck at her heartstrings. Now in her mid-sixties, she remembers that when she was just five years old her father brought her first horse into the kitchen for her to meet. Since then, she’s never been without a horse. Or two. Or six or seven. (Preator is not alone. The owner of a bed-and-breakfast where I stayed told me he had adopted eleven range horses: “I don’t have a dozen, because that would be excessive.”)

  We had been watching horses
on McCulloch Peaks and now we were replaying what we’d seen. The horses had been all bunched up on a ridgeline, using the cooling breezes to get rid of the flies. Thinking about how much time barn managers spend trying to ensure that horses pastured together don’t hurt each other, I wondered how these guys could get along in such tight circumstances without human oversight.

  “They’re always talking to each other,” Preator said, reminding me of our “think different” conversation. “They’ll draw the proverbial line in the sand, then stand on one side and stand on the other side and treat it like it’s a backyard fence. They’ll line up and talk to each other for hours like that. They’re always working things out.” There’s a lot of snorting and stamping of feet, but injuries are rare. Even the stallions rarely resort to extreme violence, although screams and biting are a common aspect of the negotiations.

  An eminently practical and pragmatic Westerner—she once butchered a bison by herself in the backcountry with only a knife made from obsidian, just to make a point—Preator is also a definite believer in the competence and integrity of free-roaming horse bands. And she has a soft spot for the Peaks horses, recent arrivals descended mostly from saddle and draft stock brought in by early ranchers. She has even meticulously researched and written their history by interviewing a number of old-time ranchers in their later years. The result is her book Facts and Legends: Behind the McCulloch Peaks Mustangs.

  The Pryor Mountain mustangs with their Spanish coat colors may get a lot of great press, but the Peaks mustangs have genetics you won’t find in the Pryor Mountain animals—strains of imported English Shire horses and of French Percherons and some Morgan horses and even, maybe, a few Thoroughbreds. It’s thought by local cowboys to be a good thing to have a Peaks horse. Hardened by life in this rugged area, Peaks horses are said to be high-quality, versatile mounts. Cowboys used to earn pocket money by rounding up the best of them, putting a bit of training on them, and then selling them on.

  By the time we got up on top of Polecat Bench it was scorching hot, about a hunnert degrees (“hunnert” being a meteorological term commonly used throughout the American West), just like everywhere else along the Front Range that summer. The wind blew almost seventy miles an hour, not in gusts but steadily, like the flow of a mighty river.

  Preator and Kelley assured me that this was typical Wyoming: “Windier than the state of Wyoming is what we call people who talk too much out here,” Preator said.

  I got out of the truck and the wind ripped the door handle from my clenched fingers. I’d hoped to sit and enjoy the view, but quiet contemplation was out of the question.

  Getting sandblasted by the wind wasn’t what I’d had in mind. I must have looked annoyed.

  “Around here we call this easy chair weather,” Kelley said. “Just a little bit harder and we could lay back in it and take a nap.”

  Preator and Kelley and I had spent most of our day watching mustangs on McCulloch Peaks, but I had also wanted to drive up here to Polecat Bench, to see a certain layer of spectacularly bright red dirt that contained the world’s earliest known horse fossils. The bench is famous among local kids as a great place to party and famous among paleontologists as the world’s best place to find mammal fossils from a certain age—about 10 million years after most dinosaurs died out at the end of the Cretaceous period.

  At that time, roughly 56 million years ago, the world’s first horses—the dawn horses—show up in the rock record. Fossils of these horses have a very special status in paleontology: soon after the dawn horses arose, they spread prolifically and ubiquitously, so that their fossils are found in great numbers in many places in North America and, in slightly different versions, in Asia and all over Europe.

  Dawn horses are thus a paleontological page marker, an “index fossil.” Their presence at a dig site is like a chapter heading indicating that the researcher is reading in a special layer of pages in Earth’s history, in a remarkable epoch of time called the Eocene—the dawn time, the beginning of us, the explosion of life as we know it today, the beginning of the age when modern mammal families came into their own and spread worldwide. If it seems coincidental that the earliest known horse is found at the beginning of the Eocene—it isn’t. Paleontologists have marked the beginning of this epoch of time in accordance with the date of appearance of the earliest known horse. That’s how important horses were, and still are, to the science of paleontology.

  Once horses turned up on Polecat Bench, they were suddenly everywhere. There are so many of these dawn horse fossils in so many Northern Hemisphere sites that we are certain that, even during these early days of horse evolution, horses were already a fabulous idea, a true success story. Small as they were, often well under two feet high at the withers, they made up in total body mass what they lacked in individual stature. In some places, they seem to have sprouted forth like weeds. In certain parts of the world, if you’re looking in the right geologic time layer, it’s difficult not to find them. Especially if you have Kelley’s easy-chair wind doing most of the uncovering for you.

  Paleontologically speaking, Polecat Bench is special. In a sense, 56 million years ago the site was like a little nest. To the west, the modern Rocky Mountains, poised to play a key role in horse evolution tens of millions of years later, had already grown enough to at least slightly disrupt the winds that blew from west to east across North America. To the east the Bighorn Mountains were beginning to appear. Other mountain ranges surrounded the area, as the North American tectonic plate pushed relentlessly against the tectonic plates of the Pacific Rim.

  In the midst of these mountains sat the region now called Polecat Bench, well-watered by runoff from the surrounding mountains. The bench today is like a tabletop that you have to drive up onto, but in those days, before rivers eroded much of the surrounding land, it was a riverine region with a variety of habitats. It seems to have been a very nurturing location. Along with the earliest known horse fossil, paleontologists have found here in the same time period the earliest known fossil of a euprimate—a true primate.*

  So where I was standing on Polecat Bench was the spot where the deep-time foundation for the partnership between Whisper and me took a major step forward. Stretching my mind between this past and my own present was dizzying, like trying to imagine infinity when I was six years old. Right where I was standing, a dawn horse might have nibbled on ancient grapes.

  This joint appearance of horses and primates, together in the same locale and in the same deep-time frame, is not coincidental. In those early Eocene days, we both enjoyed the same damp, hot, junglelike environment, which isn’t surprising given that we shared a common ancestor in the probably not-too-distant past. There’s plenty of evidence for this shared ancestor, but the easiest way to grasp this truth is to consider that we share a common skeleton, albeit one stretched in different ways and to different purposes. Today we look dissimilar, but there was a time when we could have been mistaken for siblings.

  We can see vestiges of that kinship in our own skeletons. For example, the ancient horse, the modern horse, the early primate, and the modern human all have a patella. In humans, the patella is also called the kneecap. You can feel it as a rounded bone on the front of your knee. It’s held in place by tendons, and woe betide anyone who injures those tendons. The kneecap will no longer be able to do its job. In horses, this bone is called the stifle. It can also easily be felt, and woe betide any horse who damages the tendons that hold it in place. To find it, run your hand up the front of a horse’s rear leg, all the way up his leg until you nearly reach his belly. There you’ll find the same bone you have in your knee. But in the horse, the bone feels not rounded—but pointed. I remember as a child feeling the stifle with my fingers and wondering why it was so strangely shaped. An early version—the beta version if you will—of the modern horse’s stifle can also be found in the Polecat Bench dawn horses.

  Another bone modern horses and humans have in common is the calcaneus. In the human, this
is the heel bone. In the horse, it’s the bone at the point of the hock. Run your hand up the back of a horse’s hind leg. About halfway up you’ll come to a joint between the lower leg bone and the upper leg bone. When I was a child, I thought of this as a kind of backward-facing knee, but I was wrong. It’s not the equivalent of our knee, but of a bone that for us is in the foot.

  As early as 56 million years ago, these differences had begun to take shape. The primate had a heel bone that pretty much looked like our modern heel bone and that most of us today would easily recognize as such. The dawn horses had hocks that had already become somewhat similar to the hocks of modern horses. If you knew where the hock of a modern horse was located, you would easily be able to pick out the calcaneus in a dawn horse.

  This is very cool stuff. Horses and humans share tarsals and metatarsals, fibulas and tibias, and indeed, almost all the same bones—evidence of our biological kinship. Sometimes I imagine setting a skeleton of the first true primate and a skeleton of the early dawn horse side by side—and then running the clock backward, figuratively speaking. As we moved backward in time, we would see both skeletons become more and more primitive. The differences in the two skeletons would slowly disappear until, ultimately, meeting at the bottom of an upside-down triangle, they would be the same. We would be the same animal. Scientists call this the “stem” animal from which both horses and humans evolved. In other words, evolution—the great unfolding of life on our planet—is the foundation of the horse-human partnership, the reason why we can learn to understand each other so well.

  It’s not clear when this stem animal, our common ancestor, lived. Some researchers suggest that horses and humans parted ways and started down separate evolutionary pathways only shortly before they turned up at Polecat Bench, probably just after most dinosaurs became extinct. Others suggest that the parting of ways may have taken place earlier, about 100 million years ago, during a period romantically dubbed the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution. I first read about this revolution when I was just a child, in an essay entitled “How Flowers Changed the World,” in The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley.