by Tory Bilski
“Circle him back and let him know he belongs in the herd,” Helga says.
This unnerves Sylvie. “If Britt can’t handle her horse, what chance do I have?” Not wanting to ride the pregnant Stulka, she’s back on Thoka, and keeps a steady stream of conversation with her: “Shh, shh, slow, don’t look at that bad horse Britt’s on.”
And I have to admit, Sylvie’s not wrong: Thoka is ornery and does whatever she likes. She’s the old alpha mare in the pack with that fuck-off attitude.
Once we finally get to the gates of the Hunastaddir farm, we breathe a sigh of relief. Gunnar, Helga’s husband, with perfect timing, pulls up in his truck and unloads coolers of sandwiches and beer, two thermoses, and bags of donuts and cookies. The sandwiches are smoked lamb or sliced egg. The beer is Gull. One thermos has coffee, one has hot chocolate. It’s a trail-ride feast.
Gunnar has the dog Gauper with him, so he can run back with us. I marvel at these dogs’ stamina. My dog would faint. Icelanders treat their dogs the way they treat their horses—only the good ones, the tough ones, the smart ones, get to survive. It’s natural selection, with a good dose of human intervention.
I’m on my third sandwich because I simply cannot resist smoked lamb and butter sandwiches. But I need to save room for Icelandic donuts, so I sneak Gauper parts of my sandwich and he stays by my side for the rest of the lunch. I lay back on the grass and look at the sky. It’s overcast where we are, but there’s sun over the lake.
I notice Viv buzzing around, checking out this horse and that, asking Gunnar lots of questions. He is very reserved, handsome and rangy like a classic cowboy, and he holds us all at a bemused distance. Viv receives only one-word answers and shrugs from him, but the curious mind of Viv cannot be stifled by taciturn men. The questions fire away until she goes back to tending her horse and looking pensive.
As our lunch hour wiles away, I feel apprehensive about getting back in the saddle. My horse is a handful and we started off our relationship on the wrong note with him throwing a fit about a little puddle of water. I almost wish I was on bossy little Thoka. But everyone is saddling up and so do I. Disa passes the ceremonial flask of Remy Martin before heading out. Sylvie says, “I really need this today.”
When we all get to the gate and we’re ready to pass through, Viv says, “Okay, stop!” which is really hard at this point. The horses are raring to go home the minute we turn in that direction. And to slow the momentum is not easy. Viv’s “Stop” makes Sylvie groan. “What? Make it quick.”
We have to turn our horses in circles, as we listen to Viv tell us: “I don’t have a good feeling about this trip, I had a great ride so far, and I don’t want it ruined. I’ll go back in the truck with Gunnar.”
Viv says aloud what we have all been subconsciously thinking—that there’s a bad moon rising. But how could she do that, give language to what we all fear? It’s like she’s taken off her skis and walked down the hill, surely damning one of us to a broken leg.
Helga takes it in stride and tells her to take off the saddle and bridle so her horse will run home with us. That’s the other thing about heading home: often one or two of the pack horses go freely home on their own, which makes the horses being ridden get extra frisky, seeing their herd members loose and galloping unencumbered alongside them.
The minute we go through the gate, the horses are straining at the bit—you have to ride a horse to get the meaning of this cliché. They keep jerking their heads forward, pulling the rein hard so that it slips out of your hand. If they have longer rein, you have less control, they go faster. Once on the path, they cluster together, outracing each other in a very fast tölt. When Viv’s loose horse gallops beside us, it’s all we can do to keep ours from galloping, too.
Eve giggles. “Whoa, they are feisty today; look at my guy go.” Her horse is a sweet-faced five-year-old gelding. “Sylvie, how are you doing?”
“I’m in no mood to talk.”
I can’t talk, either. My horse is pushy, strong. The one who didn’t like a puddle of water earlier now splashes through streams with aplomb. The ride basically feels like a semi-restrained bolt with Disa and Helga riding alongside everyone, saying, “Don’t let your horse do that; shorten your reins; keep your leg off him or he thinks you want to go faster. You are the boss, remember that.”
We come to a gate and we have to stop. Disa gets off her horse to open it. This briefly gives us a break and time to collect ourselves, to check our girths, and adjust our stirrups. Back in the saddle, I look down a small hill we’re about to ride down and notice something up ahead of us on the trail.
“What’s that black thing down there? A rock?” I ask.
Eve and Sylvie don’t see it. The gate closes behind us and we’re on our way again. If at times in the guesthouse we act like medieval knights in a mead hall, out on the trail we’re sometimes more like Monty Python knights, clopping along clueless and chatty.
“What is that thing?
“It’s a rock, looks like a big black lava rock.”
“Like a boulder?”
“I don’t see what you’re talking about.”
“That rock up there.”
“There’s more than one.”
“And one of them just moved,” Sylvie says.
“No, they’re rocks.”
“I’m telling you one moved.”
“It looks kind of like a bull from here.”
“Bulls. There are several.”
“Bulls! That’s a good sign! The stock market will go up,” Eve says.
“I see a bunch of black rocks,” Lisa says, pulling up from behind us in line.
“They’re not rocks, they’re bulls!”
“The Dow Jones is going up, up, up!”
While we are laughing at Eve’s enthusiasm and optimism, I’m also wondering how much she and Jack have invested in the stock market, that it’s on her mind while we’re riding in Iceland. It’s not like I’ve given any thought to my stock-invested retirement fund while in Iceland.
Disa and Helga look appropriately worried, however, and are volleying back and forth rapidly in Icelandic. They tell us to stop and stay where we are. They ride down to scout out the scene. Gauper, who previously had been adding to the confusion, barking and getting under our horses’ hooves, follows them.
Six bulls are in the path, lowing, mooing, looking aggressive, and coming toward us. Disa gallops up to them, yelling at them, in an effort to scare them off. But they don’t scare. They become even angrier. They are moving in a herd toward Disa, and her horse shies out from underneath her and runs off, leaving her scrambling to get up, facing angry bulls. Gauper is barking like mad, joining in the general chaos, and the bulls are advancing on them both.
Disa’s horse runs up to Helga, who dismounts and holds both horses, and moves down toward Disa. She yells back at us to dismount and hold on to our horses, though we had already instinctively dismounted the minute we saw Disa thrown from her horse. If those two were off their horses, we certainly had no business still sitting in our saddles.
Eve says, “I’m going to see if I can go help.” She walks her horse down the hill, shouting, “Helga, Helga, is there something I can do?” as if she’s volunteering at a Berkshire fund-raiser, like perhaps she’ll get the job of hanging the party bunting. But as soon as she gets within shouting range her horse panics and breaks free from her.
It can be bad news when a horse in full bridle and saddle takes off, especially when they’re spooked like this and in flight mode. Unless Eve thought fast enough to unhook one of the reins, the reins are completely loose and could get tangled in her horse’s hooves. And if that were to happen, it’s wouldn’t be like in the United States, where they would do water therapy for a horse with a broken leg. It’s the end of horse in Iceland. Luckily, Eve’s horse runs to us and we grab the reins.
Disa and Gauper are facing off with the bulls. Helga is behind them twenty feet, and Eve behind her another twenty feet. Eve yells back to u
s that there’s a cow having a calf in the field and that’s what the bulls are protecting. “I wonder if we could help deliver the calf?” Eve asks, perhaps not correctly prioritizing the potential crises.
Sylvie asks, “What does she want to do?”
“Deliver the little baby calf.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Sylvie yells to her.
“I’ve seen it done with foals on my farm when they get stuck.”
Sylvie says to us, “She’s out of her mind.”
“Come back,” we tell her. “Just come back.”
In the standoff between Disa and the bulls, Disa holds her ground. She yells at the bulls, she even growls. She finally gets three to turn back and the others stop advancing. Disa backs up to Helga and they both begin backing up the hill toward us, and all looks peaceful. But the dog enters the fray again, that built-in herding instinct taking over. Gauper runs out in the field to the bulls, barking and nipping at their heels, trying to herd them. The bulls low and paw the ground, and then they charge Gauper. He suddenly realizes that he’s not going to win this one, and runs back toward Disa and Helga, bringing the entire pack of charging bulls with him.
Disa doesn’t run. She takes a stand. Makes herself big. Really big, the way you’re supposed to when you see a black bear. She stretches out her arms wide, she stomps the ground and growls at them; she yells at them and bellows like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Her bigness gets bigger. Her voice fills the valley. Her whole body, voice, and mind are telling the bulls, “Don’t even think about it.” And they stop. They stand still looking at her. She gets them to reconsider. They don’t want to deal with her—she looks crazy and scary. They turn and trot back to the calf being born.
Helga and Disa run up the hill. “Okay, let’s go, everyone get on. Quick, quick.” We swing out wide from the path so we don’t have to pass the bulls. We cross the streams farther up the tributary where they are much deeper. We let our horses go fast: tölt, trot, canter. We no longer have the luxury of worrying about the speed and gaits. And we don’t slow down until we are safely within sight of the black stone church of Thingeyrar.
In the Vinland sagas, Eric the Red’s daughter, Freydis, takes her own ships and sails to her brother Leif’s outpost in Vinland, what is now Newfoundland. She is a renegade badass in the Sagas, born from one of her father’s Irish slaves. Unlike Hallgerd, Freydis is capable of wielding her own axe when she can’t talk the men into killing for her. Over in Vinland, the Norse have had a few encounters with the local tribes, trading with them, curious and peaceful at first. But as so often happens in the history of cultures meeting each other, misunderstandings occur and it doesn’t go well. The natives realize they greatly outnumber the Norse and gather up their forces to attack. The Norsemen realize the odds are not in their favor and retreat. Freydis admonishes her fellow Norsemen to stand and fight, but they ignore her and run for their long boats. The Saga points out that Freydis can’t keep up with them in retreat because she is pregnant and “moved somewhat slowly,” and the natives catch up to her. She stumbles upon a slain crewman, takes the sword off him, and turns to face the native tribe by herself. Freeing one of her breasts from her cloak, she smacks the sword on her naked chest and bellows. They stop in their tracks. They reconsider attacking her. They don’t want to deal with her. She looks crazy and scary. They get in their skin boats and row away.
Next Year, Iceland
Honey I bought two horses, I’m so excited,” Eve tells Jack on her Blackberry. “We need to wire the money to Helga.”
“He’s not going to say ‘no’ to her these days,” Sylvie whispers to me. “She could buy Helga’s entire herd and he’d go along with it.”
Sylvie has made her own purchase, Stulka’s baby when it’s born. She’s planning on paying Helga to train it for four or five years, and then ship it to the Berkshires. “One summer when the horse is ready, I’ll come here alone and train with Helga,” she says. I do the math. Sylvie will be seventy-four when the horse is ready. “My horse, Hátið, will be old by then and ready to retire,” she says. But Sylvie won’t be. When most people that age would be moving or thinking about entering a senior living community, Sylvie will be starting on a brand-new horse.
It’s relatively cheap to buy horses in Iceland, especially for first-rate recreational horses, as opposed to competition horses. Eve is paying $7,000 for Arngrimur (she calls him Arnie), who is a large farm horse that is used for annual round-ups of sheep, and $10,000 for Yrdlingur (she calls him Earl), a higher level five-year-old trained by Helga and the Holar interns over the winter.
Shipping a horse to the States is not terribly expensive, either, about $2,000, and another thousand for vet bills and quarantine.
“When are you going to buy one?” Eve asks me.
“Someday.”
Buying or owning a horse is not financially feasible for me. I might be able to squeeze out the initial payment, but boarding a horse, vet bills, and training, can average $20,000 a year in my area. At this stage of my life, any extras go to the kids, to their summer camps, piano and ballet lessons, but mostly to the ever-looming college tuition that will put us deep in debt. These are the costs of bringing up children in the Northeast.
These are not the concerns of the women I travel with. Some have plenty of money or, like Sylvie, they no longer have to support their kids, or, like Viv, they can keep their horses on their own property.
But this part of the trip pains me, when they buy horses to ship home. When we stop at the tack shop in Reykjavík, Astund, which is like Prada to us (even the sales rack can bring on sticker shock), they spend hundreds (Eve, thousands) of dollars on riding gear and clothes. They chat about the Icelandic trainers who are coming to the States to judge the sanctioned shows, about the Turkey Tölt weekend, the Easter Hop, the Memorial Day Parade, and all the other reindeer games they play in. This is a world I cannot be a part of without my own horse.
But when they talk about next year, going back to Iceland, I jump in. Eve begins with, “Helga says next year, we can ride to Kornsá, the inland valley. We can also do the trail all the way to Blönduós.”
“Next year” is all I have to hear—my favorite two words. It is my only desire, that we keep this going. They can buy horses and ship them home and ride every day in forested New England, but the riding there is nothing like the riding in Iceland, where the landscape is vast and cleared and you can see and ride for miles upon miles. And riding Icelandics at home really doesn’t compare to swimming across Lake Hóp on the back of your horse. I may briefly envy the horse buying I can’t partake in, but what’s most important to me is riding in Iceland, staying in Thingeyrar, and being part of this group.
“Let’s do that. Kornsá. Blönduós. Count me in.”
2008
Horsewomen of the World
Another year missed. Three days before I am meant to leave, I need a root canal. “But I’ll be able to get on the flight to Iceland?” Of course, I’m reassured. But something goes awry after the initial surgery. I have pain the next day—two days before my flight—that can only be relieved with Vicodin and gin and tonics, which are not doctor recommended, but they sooth my fear of potentially having to miss my trip. The next day, it gets worse and in a slurry mood of pain and sedatives, I do what I had feared. I cancel. What follows is a week of surgery, abscesses, and aerobic and anaerobic infections that almost get the better of me. The endodontist tells me he’s only seen it once before, the infection spreading up my jaw and through my face. But I’m lucky, I’m told, because the infection could have spread to my brain.
In what was day seven in Iceland, Eve emails me a picture of the group at their dinner party the night before they leave—Allie, Viv, Eve, Sylvie, her neighbor Margot, and two other people I don’t know. In the picture, they have dressed up Oli as a king in a paper crown, a red robe, and a lupine scepter. He is smiling, patiently, in the company of what I am sure is a group of loud, laughing women. The photo is from
a Nokia phone, but it must have been taken by Helga—she’s not in it—and they are all mid-laugh, heads back, yukking it up without me. The email reads: “Thinking of you. Hope you’re feeling better.”
I’ve gotten over my root canal, but I’m miserable from the ordeal. My daughter is on her way to Spain for language immersion; my son is up at his college for the summer, making up credits for classes he blew off during the year. My husband suggests we take a trip, maybe to an island. As long as I can find a place to ride horses, I don’t care where, I tell him. We settle on Saint Martin, the French side. I have this idea that I am going to make this the Caribbean version of my Iceland trip. All I need is a horse and some trails and a beach. I pack my helmet and boots. I’m planning on riding every day, setting up a relationship with the stables so they know me for the next five days.
I find a stable in the hills not far from our hotel, and my husband drives me there and drops me off. “This will be fun for you.” He has his kind of fun that I don’t care for: scuba diving and snorkeling. And I have mine.
The woman who runs the place explains it is her family’s farm and they have owned it for generations. She tells me that she is twenty-four and has never lived in France and doesn’t have any interest in visiting there. She is darkly tanned as if she’s testing her melanin absorption. She wears riding pants with flat sneakers, no helmet. She goes braless in a tiny halter top that exposes a lot of her chest, which is oddly and badly scarred with the wavy striations of burns. I wear my boots and riding pants, helmet, a light SPF sun shirt, a sturdy athletic bra, and cover my face in white zinc oxide.
I am the only one who signed up to ride at this hour, so it’s a private tour. Once we head out I ask, “What kind of horses are these?” She tells me they are typical island horses. A little this, a little that.