Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  “Look, he’s upset she’s hurt.”

  He keeps nudging her, and the mare doesn’t move. She is lifeless and we slowly realize the mare may have died during mating, which happens more often with natural mating than we like to think about. There is something called horse rape, when the mare isn’t ready and her hormones haven’t peaked, and the stallion forces himself on her.

  “What’s he doing now?” The stallion butts his head against her as if trying to bring her back to life.

  “He’s grieving,” Eve says. “He’s heartsick.”

  “We need to tell Helga,” Viv says again, more forcefully this time.

  The stallion stands over the mare, nudging her every so often—and then, sure she’s dead, he struts up to another mare.

  “Oh,” Eve says, and then, “Oh, my.”

  We watch incredulously as he mindlessly, instinctively mounts the next closest mare while the dead white one is only a few feet away.

  “Sheesh, how do you like that!” Allie says.

  “Yep. It’s a line up, girls—next!” Sylvie says.

  “I’m telling Helga that there’s something wrong with the mare.” Eve runs over to Helga’s house. She quickly returns and says, “Gunnar will take care of it.”

  In about ten minutes, we watch through the window as Gunnar drives his tractor out to the pasture and gets out to confirm that the mare is indeed dead. He then climbs back up and unceremoniously scoops her up into the front loader.

  Except for Brittany and Pippa—who remains almost wordless throughout dinner, dessert, and window-watching stallion sex—all of us are in long-term marriages. And this scene gives us pause.

  “I mean, that stallion didn’t slow down for a second.”

  “Within the fifteen minutes it took Gunnar to take away that poor mare, he mounted three other mares.”

  “I often wonder how long it would take my husband to find someone new if I died.”

  We’ve all seen it before—the devoted husband who barely makes it out of his dear wife’s memorial service before hitching up to someone new. Even in assisted living places, if a guy comes in still somewhat intact, he has a selection of women to choose from.

  “I think Jack wouldn’t wait long at all. He would be dating within a month.”

  “My husband can’t stand to be alone,” Allie admits.

  We shake our heads in disappointed agreement, equinizing our husbands.

  I am reminded how often my husband says, “I would die without you. My life would be over.” I believe it every time he says it, but the odds are he would get on with his life rather quickly. Testosterone kicks up after divorce and, depending on age, after a wife’s death. He would search for another mare, intentionally or not, or more likely one solo mare would sniff him out.

  But on the other side, how many women unequivocally state that if they lost their husband, through divorce or death, they would never marry again? They might date, but they wouldn’t marry. All of us who are married in this group have been married for a long time and, intentionally or not, we’ve played an acquiescing female role. Maybe for us equality in marriage happens later in life when you’ve seen enough versions of yourself, through enough decades, that you circle back to your original selfhood. Maybe our break away, our heading to Iceland as a group every year, is our reclamation of self outside of marriage, an optional test drive of what we would do if we were no longer married. This is how we would live without men.

  Starting Horses

  The three-year-old horse walks into the barn for the first time in his life. He is encouraged to go in from Frieda, who walks behind the horse and sweeps her arms upward in a large V as if funneling the air in a narrow path. He enters alone, unforced, though there is an older horse in front of him to put him at ease. He is neither calm nor anxious, but alert to the newness. He is hearing and feeling his shoeless hooves on the floor of the barn for the first time. His vision is narrowed from the wide expanse of open land, the only view he has ever known, to the long hallway of stalls in the stable.

  Until recently, most Icelandic stables didn’t have separate individual stalls. A few of the old farms still around have only a large space in the barn, a cave-like pit with dirt floors that horses get herded into if the weather is really bad. Otherwise, horses are left outside. Helga’s barn is new and state-of-the-art because she is a trainer and breeder: the aisles are wide with two dozen stalls, larger than American standard size stalls and always a foot and a half deep, also an Icelandic standard, so that horses step down into them and up out of them. Often the horses aren’t alone in these stalls, either; sometimes two or three horses are together in a stall. The idea is that they should always live like a herd.

  Inside the barn, Frieda is still directing the young horse with her arm movements, without touching him. She waves her hands in such a way that she cuts him off from going right or left and he has no choice but to go into the stall where they have thrown in a fleck of hay. This kind of movement she makes is the first groundwork exercise. By making the horse move without touching him, she has begun to establish a relationship.

  “This is Grettir,” Frieda tells us.

  Grettir’s face is splashed white. A splashed white horse has blue eyes with the outer ring of the blue being a lighter blue, almost white. This is a common genetic trait in some Skagafjörður horses, so it’s possible Grettir’s sire was from the valley southeast of here. Blue eyes are not a hindrance to a horse’s sight, and it doesn’t make them any more susceptible to disease, but blue-eyed horses used to be called ghost horses. It was not a desired trait. That is not the case anymore—there is a growing population of horse buyers who like the look of the blue-eyed Skagafjörður horses and seek them out.

  Frieda lets Grettir eat the hay for a few minutes, letting him acclimate to the stall; eating hay will relax him. Before he lifts his head up from the hay, Frieda slips into the stall and for another few minutes she lets him get used to having her in the stall with him, without making any demands on him.

  Frieda’s body movements mimic a horse in a herd. Her head is down, and she is not looking in Grettir’s eyes. She is studiously nonconfrontational, trying to be emotionally neutral, setting up her presence without asking anything from the young horse yet. Humans are the predators, horses are the prey. If we want to enter their herd, we need to be less predatory.

  Once Grettir looks up from his hay and notices Frieda, he is curious. He has an innate boldness that was evident from his first step into the barn, that “hello world” look. Frieda’s position remains nonthreatening. She keeps her eyes down and her shoulders lowered, doing everything possible so that all her movements are nonaggressive. Trainers no longer “break” a horse, that old horrible way where out of ignorance or sheer cruelty they would beat a horse into submission—the idea being to break its spirit so that it feared humans. Now trainers “start” horses gently by mimicking herd behavior. Before establishing leadership with a horse, they establish trust, so that the horse willingly wants to please.

  Finally, when Frieda feels the horse is comfortable, she reaches out to touch his flanks, where horse skin is the thickest. “There are two blind spots on a horse: between and above his eyes and his forehead and his tail. So, to put a horse at ease, you never want to start touching him in those places,” Frieda says.

  Once he accepts her touch on his flank, she moves her hand down his back. Then she pets him under his mane. She narrates what she is doing. “I’m getting him used to my hand. He’s been loose in the mountains with his mother. I want to make sure his first contact with humans is pleasant.” She slips him a treat.

  She moves slowly to introduce him to the human touch, but frankly he acts like a circus pony. He takes to the touch as if he was born to be petted. It makes me wonder if carloads of tourists haven’t been fawning over him in the fields, indulging him, establishing his first contact with humans without his trainer’s knowledge. He is extraordinarily friendly. He’s interested in us, too, thr
usting his head forward so we can pet him, bypassing Frieda and nudging us, nibbling our coat buttons. We’re not sure if it’s okay to pet him, but his head is in our faces. One of us mistakenly goes to pet the space between his eyes, even though Frieda told us that’s his blind spot. He’s such a bold and friendly horse that even that move doesn’t seem to faze him. We pet him and make cooing noises that I know, just know, we shouldn’t be making. We can’t help but remark on him with a chorus of “How cute, how friendly, how sweet is this guy!”

  We make all kinds of generalizations about the Icelandic horse based on Grettir. “Look how smart he is. How willing to make contact with humans. How unafraid he is. This is why Icelandics are so special.”

  But Frieda knows better. “Each horse is completely different, even Icelandic horses. They aren’t all this friendly at the start.” She watches as he nuzzles our coats, going from me to Eve to Sylvie to Allie. “And perhaps he’s a little too friendly. Sometimes they get pushy when they get too used to humans so quickly. Sometimes the quiet shy horse is easier to start than the friendly one. When they are this friendly, it can be hard to establish boundaries and gain respect.”

  Frieda introduces a lead rope she has made into a big loop. “I’m just going to see if he’ll let me rub this rope on him.” She runs it lightly over his back and you can see his skin twitching that same little shudder that would shoo a fly off his back. A horse’s skin is one big hypersensitive epidermis canvas. He doesn’t resist Frieda’s touching his back or his underbelly or his tail, so she continues to rub the rope on him, letting it drop a little onto him to see if he shies from it when it comes at him unexpectedly. But he doesn’t shy, and within no time Frieda slips the rope over his head and around his neck, while simultaneously slipping him a treat from her pocket. The giving of treats is consistent and instantaneous.

  Within fifteen or twenty minutes she has taken a completely young, untrained horse and put a rope harness over his head. And he has been willing and curious the whole time. She stops, gives him more treats from her pocket, and takes off the rope halter. “That’s enough for the first day,” she says. “You give the horse fifteen minutes of attention a day. You want to keep him interested, keep him involved, so the next time you approach him, he wants to see you. And you have established the basis of trust.”

  I am falling in love with Grettir, and I do believe it’s mutual. He’s nibbling my buttons and jacket a lot more than he’s nibbling the others’ clothes. I think we’re establishing a relationship. This is how love is across and over the stall gate. I like his blue eyes, his friendliness, his boldness. I am plotting out the possibility of buying him. I wonder where I can keep him in my area. How I can afford him. How I can make time for him.

  Frieda opens the stall gate and Grettir walks out to join the others in the herd. “During the winter, the interns will start to really train him. This first summer is pretraining. We just get the horses used to us.”

  I ask Frieda when he will be up for sale.

  “In two or three years. He needs two more years of training at least; they need to be five years plus before they’re sold. It takes longer to train Icelandics because of the extra gaits. And I think the horse should really be six, if the rider is not very experienced. In the last year we try to make them bombproof. We try to desensitize them to external noises. We put them through a series of loud noises, popped balloons, people running at them screaming, loud sudden tractor engines, everything we can think of to make sure they remain calm in the face of the unknown.”

  In three years, he could be mine. I could have my very own horse that has been born and trained in this perfect horse world. I could bring home a little piece of Thingeyrar with me. But what kind of life could I give an imported Icelandic horse? A spot in a tight stall in an average American barn where I would pay almost the same monthly price as my mortgage, and where it would never be free to roam in the mountains? That is always the rub for me owning an Icelandic horse. It goes beyond the issues of cost and time commitment. It goes to the very heart and soul of an Icelandic horse, especially if I can’t find it a home on a proper horse farm that knows how to treat the breed. Do I really want to remove this beautiful creature from its beautiful natural home, to risk exposing it to all of the diseases horses are subject to in New England? The Lyme, the Coggins, the Strangles, the sweet itch and other allergies. If, by chance, they eat an acorn or two among the millions that scatter on the ground every fall, it can cause kidney failure. And then there are everyday plants that one never thinks of as being poisonous: Eve’s first Icelandic horse died in her field from eating red maple leaves. The environment is so hostile to them it hardly seems fair.

  Years ago, I met a woman at Eve’s farm who was temporarily boarding her newly imported Icelandic horse there. She was in her sixties and had been recently diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. She told me she had never owned a horse, but always wanted to. The horse she imported from Iceland was ten, which is old to be exported to the States. It was from a farm in the Skagafjörður region of Iceland. The horse’s name was Gaska, which means playful and willing. When the horse was still boarded at Eve’s, the barn manager let me ride her. The owner didn’t have to know. Out on the trail for the first time in a New England autumn, everything was new to Gaska—the feel and the sound of leaves under her hooves, the large deciduous trees above, the odd moving wild turkeys in her path. She took in these new surroundings with a calm curiosity. She was a perfect horse: smart and intuitive with four smooth gaits. When Gaska left Eve’s farm, the owner, who lived in Connecticut, kept her in a stable near me where she was the only Icelandic in the barn.

  The woman’s illness worsened, and she hardly rode Gaska. I reached out to her several times to ask, but she would not let me ride Gaska. Nor would she let me lease her from her. I asked many times. She waited all those years to own a horse and even though she couldn’t ride her, she wasn’t going to share her. Years later, I drove by the farm and stopped to see if Gaska was still there. She was. I was told the woman still owned her, though the horse hadn’t been ridden in years. I found Gaska turned out in the paddock in the hot July sun. Her head was down, her back sagged; she looked bedraggled and dull. No energy, no spirit. The term for a horse like that is turnip. Lifeless, head stuck in the ground. No interest in other horses or people. It was a sad fate for an Icelandic horse that had been taken from the Skagafjörður valley for the fleeting pleasure of an American woman who wanted a horse.

  2010

  Annus Horribilis

  Iceland is a mess in 2010. The financial meltdown in Iceland is all over the news, even in the States, where the media loves to point out that Iceland jailed the three bankers responsible for the crash, while in our country the bankers got raises. Then in May the volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull halts European air traffic for weeks, curtailing tourism and causing more financial loss. T-shirts that shout: “Don’t fuck with Iceland: we may not have cash but we have ash,” run a brisk business. Oddly, bad news brings Iceland into global focus, and journalists and the travel industry take notice: What is this place, Iceland?

  But the worst news of all, from my equine-centric view—an item that doesn’t make international news—is that a horse flu has been brought into the country by a German trainer. Yes, they can track it down to the very person who caused it—though she doesn’t go to jail.

  And the unthinkable has happened. Horses never exposed to any equine viruses have now been exposed and it has left most of the horse population incapacitated. We don’t know what we’ll find when we get to Helga’s.

  By the time we land in Iceland, Eve and Sylvie are falling apart, too.

  Eve’s farm is officially for sale. “We put it up last week,” she says.

  For the first time, Allie is driving instead of Eve. Allie is also talking on her cell phone, calling up each of her kids, asking them what they’re doing today, and steering with two fingers on her left hand, while the other three fingers hold a licor
ice wand. We take a wrong turn out of Reykjavík, and we wind up near Mosfellbær. Allie keeps talking on the phone with one of her kids, “A game? Today? I thought that wasn’t until Sunday?” as she manages to back up on an exit ramp, do a U-turn, keep the licorice balanced with her three fingers, and continue the conversation going at home. She is a can-do girl.

  Finally, she hangs up, and I can breathe again and stop watching the road.

  “Maybe it won’t sell,” Sylvie says to Eve about her farm.

  “Or maybe someone will buy it and keep it as a horse farm and we can keep the therapy program afloat. I’m worried about the kids.” Eve worked hard over the last year to get her farm certified for equine-assisted therapy. They have half a dozen kids, mostly with autism, enrolled already.

  “Maybe we could all chip in and buy it and keep it as a horse farm. If we got four or five people. We could do that,” I suggest.

  As the idea quickly takes shape in my head, I plot it out. I can cut back to three days a week at work, leaving me with four days a week up at the farm. Like Sylvie when she first moved up there, I’d make the transition slowly from Connecticut to the Berkshires. My son graduated college in May and lives in Brooklyn; my daughter is in college. It is time for me to move on and be where I want to be—in the Berkshires. We could sell our house, find a cheap apartment to live in for the days of the week when my husband and I are working in New Haven. He could come up Friday night, leave early Monday morning. We could make it some kind of collective, cooperative horsey commune. It could be done; it could be fun. We could all own Eve’s Icelandic horse farm together. We could keep the therapy program. We could make it work.

  Sylvie jumps on board. “We could! We could all chip in and buy it.” She’s squeaking with delight at the idea. And it gets me going even more.

  “We could set it up like one of those intentional group living places. There are a lot of communities where people do that. They share living expenses; but they have their own area to live in. There is plenty of room in that house. “