Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  I was eighteen when I rode in my last horse show. In the photograph, I smile next to Nate in his tight braids, holding his reins in one hand. My cheeks are gaunt, my collar gaps. My belt’s tail vanishes behind me. The boots are beneath the frame, but I can feel their tight grip on my calves, and I know they shine.

  I had achieved it, finally: a blue ribbon, womanhood. A year after that picture was taken, I was presented as a debutante at a Carnival ball, wearing a plume like a carriage pony’s feather in my hair. My father squeezed my hand in its kid glove, laughing, Isn’t this just like a yearling sale?

  Competitive, and good at learning lessons, I got into the college I wanted, where I yelled to be heard and drank plastic cups of wine. I never hit anyone with a punch bowl, though. Nasty little studs didn’t bother me—I was tough. Do you want to see my hoof-shaped scar?

  Then, at the beginning of winter break my sophomore year, my mother flew up to Connecticut and picked me up in a rental car, headed farther north. We were on a rescue mission to find Toby, whom my parents had sold a few years before, that tax write-off business having finally come due. My mother had heard through the grapevine that he was in bad shape. Though the original buyer had agreed to give her the opportunity to buy him back when the time came, they had not. He had gone from a good barn to someplace not so good, and, now, lamed, he had been cast off. A Good Samaritan had taken him in and was giving him back to my mother, if she wanted him. Of course, she wanted him. She loved him—still loved him—had loved him this whole time.

  We drove up the freezer-burned highways, along the coast of Connecticut, up through Massachusetts, and into New Hampshire, my mother erupting, every so often, in brief outbursts of rage: Some people shouldn’t be allowed to have animals! You just don’t do that to a horse! They should be shot! Finally, late at night, Toby’s caretaker led us into a dimly lit barn. I don’t remember how we found him—shod or barefoot, blanketed or unclipped, cross-tied or in a tidy stall—only that when he saw my mother he lowered his head, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, and she cried. We were all crying, I’m sure of it, though a horse’s tears are invisible, their sorrow a thing you need to be willing to see to know.

  Still, it wasn’t until after college, when I took a summer job as a wrangler at a dude ranch in Colorado, that I finally realized all I’d gotten wrong. It took a little doing, even then.

  When I arrived at the ranch, the other wranglers were just as suspicious of me—citified in my home-starched shirts—as I was of them. I fought with my boss about wearing stiff, high-waisted Wranglers in the heat. I fought with the other wranglers about how they left the string’s ears unclipped and their fetlocks long—as God intended!—to chase away the flies. Not trusting that I could really ride, they pulled the dullest colts for me my first week on the job—sleepy six-year-old roans that had to be spurred to a trot—and sent me to lead children’s rides in the low pastures, where there was no chance I might get lost.

  After that, to prove myself, I rode nothing but three-year-olds and troublesome mounts from the wranglers’ herd. High-headed Okie, who had some Saddlebred in him. Pecos, who liked to buck without warning, and who, at the end of the summer, I took home. Eventually even Jeremy, a cowboy who spent his Sundays riding bulls, would watch me settle a spooked colt with an approving nod.

  None of the horses at the ranch were that difficult to ride—they were working horses, after all, bred for steadiness, expertly trained. On Thursdays, in the big covered arena at the bottom of the mountain—a place the ranch’s guests were not allowed—a cowboy from a nearby ranch started two-year-olds. This process, as I’d known it, was always rough and dangerous: colts rearing under whip-wielding riders, fillies overheating in the round pen. But the way this cowboy did it was so calm, it was almost silent.

  One Thursday, my own work done, I snuck in through the side door and watched, hardly breathing, from the bleachers, as the cowboy circled a gray colt, slowly, touching him here and there, speaking in low whispers. Eventually, he asked me if I’d like to learn.

  As I held a colt close at his head, the cowboy dusted him with blankets. If the colt skittered, the cowboy held the blanket firm against his body, but if the colt held still, the blanket went away.

  It’s about telling him how to act when he’s afraid, the cowboy said. You apply, and then release the pressure. Apply—

  He stood up in one stirrup, talking softly, until the colt went still.

  —and then release. You teach him—

  He set his weight down in the saddle, waited until the colt stopped tossing his head, dismounted.

  —that no harm will come to him. That he’s free and strong and powerful, but that you are not a wolf. There’s no reason, he said, stroking the colt’s soft muzzle, just no reason at all to be afraid.

  And maybe this was my trouble, too. I was afraid all the time and called it toughness. I needed to learn to trust myself instead.

  Three weeks into that summer at the ranch, I saddled the big mustang and took an experienced group for a daylong ride up the mountain and into the national forest. It was a trip I’d heard described but never taken, and so I asked around for a map to the valley that was our destination. There was no such thing. Riding out, I was sure we’d wind up stranded on some logging road as night fell, that we’d never find our way home. But, as I marked each turn we took—counting false trails and memorizing aspens—the forest became legible. I could almost feel my brain developing, as I engaged, for the first time, my innate human ability to navigate a wilderness. Maps were not required; all that was necessary was to rely on our instincts, trust the horses. We gave them their heads as they leapt over streams, rose from their backs as they worked their way carefully up rock faces littered with scree. Around noon, we found ourselves in a meadow ringed by mountains, dismounted, pulled our picnic lunches from our saddlebags, and lay down in the high grass. I ate that day like I’d never eaten in my life.

  After that summer, I wore my high boots one last time, at a fox hunt in Tennessee. I still don’t know how I got them on, but one of the whippers-in complimented my turnout while I waited on my borrowed horse for the hounds to be cast.

  Riding with the second flight up the scrubby fields and through the forests of ash and oak, I was careful to follow the hunt’s strict etiquette—always staying behind the field master and the hunt members, turning my horse’s head toward the hounds as they passed, so that he wouldn’t kick. (His name was Bucky, and it suited him.) Ware hole! we shouted, one after another, as the flight sidestepped a deep pool of water in the path then took off at a slow gallop. At the bottom of the forest path, I followed my mother and her borrowed gray over a coop into a little clearing. Ahead of us, the field master held his red arm high. We halted hard.

  Then, off in the brush, we heard the hounds open.

  Trailing the baying of the hounds through the thicket, I rode wildly. Branches swatted at my jacket’s arms, clattered against the felted plastic of my hunt cap. The flight dispersed among the trees, and for a moment, I was lost—the forest seemed to close around me, and my heart beat against my ribs. Nearby, the hounds were at some creature’s throat.

  I urged my horse on to the edge of the trees, where the land dropped steeply to a rocky creek. Down below, the water ran red. Upstream I saw the field master’s scarlet coat, a thatch of gray fur, the roiling bodies of the hounds. Then, up the bank, a rider jolted toward me at a lope, his free hand held away from his snow-white saddle pad. Halting beside me, nose to tail, he ran that hand, wet, across my cheek.

  Coyote, he said. You’re blooded now, girl.

  I could taste the iron, a sickening smear, at the corner of my mouth.

  Later that day, before we’d made it back to our starting point—to the hunt tea, the stirrup cups, the trays of dainty canapés—my legs began to swell in the tight boots, their circulation cut. They throbbed, a strobe of numbness and pain. At the top of a hill, I halted, took a drink from another rider’s flask, and borrowed h
is knife. Crossing one leg over the pommel, I cut the lovely, hand-sewn stitches, set my body free.

  I tell my friends with children that it’s good for a girl to grow up around horses; I think it’s true. It teaches you about power—how to wield it responsibly, when you must let go. It teaches you self-possession and the ability to stay calm when you’re afraid. It makes you strong, I say, by which I mean: Chin up. Shoulders back. I don’t encourage them to let their children hunt or show.

  The fluffy mini pony my daughter rides gallops away each time we go to catch her. Rescued by an old friend of my mother’s who runs a sort of foundling farm, Licorice was clearly hurt by her old owners, who kept her tethered in their yard.

  At four feet and ten hands tall, respectively, my daughter and the pony see eye to eye. Alone with her, the pony knows she won’t be overpowered. Her ears stay up, her eyes dark, her head low, as my daughter moves around her with the currycomb and the brush. Her coat hardly gets any cleaner, but I don’t interfere. I stand outside the stall and listen to them talking. My daughter, soothing, murmurs, Oh, sweetie sweetie. Oh, poor you. What happened? The pony, apparently, gives her answers. Oh, no, they couldn’t! They did? Why would a person want to hurt a little pony like you?

  Still, even a year into this gentling, catching Licorice in her pasture is a process. We go out whooping, swishing sweet feed in buckets. Then, as the herd comes running, we leave the buckets on the ground inside a smaller paddock, leave its gate open, go and hide: a trick. While the pony’s head is down, engaged in eating, I skulk along the paddock fence like a wolf, shut the gate. Inevitably, she startles as I approach, softly saying whoa. The slightest screwup—rope over my shoulder, a step too fast—and she’ll go running, clever in the way she slips my grasp, fast as all get-out. Before I can even stand up from my crouch, she’ll be halfway across the long green meadow, her little legs churning swiftly beneath her, her body doing just exactly what she needs it to do.

  What Will Leave You

  Adrienne Celt

  When I turned thirty, I decided to take horseback-riding lessons, in part to research a novel I was writing, but also to appeal to the child inside me, who’d always longed to be a cowboy. The time was finally right. Every week, I drove to a dude ranch near my home in Tucson, winding twenty-five minutes through Saguaro National Park and watching the desert cycle through its seasons of dryness, greenness, and glorious bloom.

  Sometimes in the winter I’d arrive after a rain to find the horses drenched and the conditions less than ideal for a lesson. This was its own sort of education: I didn’t know that horses could turn their ankles in deep mud and go lame. I didn’t know how fragile those large, elegant bodies were.

  In fact I didn’t know anything: how to pick a horse’s feet; how to cinch a saddle in just the right place, with the right degree of tightness; how to slip a halter over a horse’s long face. Often they would elude me when I tried to do this out in the pasture, flicking their ears and then trotting casually just out of reach. I learned to whistle at the ranch dog, a sweet and enthusiastic Australian heeler, and then point her at whichever horse I wanted to ride. Sometimes, we had to do this four or five times before I could get the halter and lead rope in place, and I’d get frustrated and embarrassed as I walked behind the dog, ropes dangling from my impotent fingers. But all this was useful—my ignorance was the point. The novel I wanted to write was, in part, about learning horsemanship from the ground up, in a sudden blaze, so it made sense for me to start from nothing.

  There was a scene in my book, very much informed by those lessons, in which a young man exercised an energetic young horse in a round pen, urging it into faster and faster circles with the crack of a whip, and then turning it around to run the other way. It was a moment of casual expertise. As he stood in the center of the pen, dust rose up around the rim in uneven intervals under the horse’s gait, lifting into the sky like the points on a crown. The moment still comes to me sometimes, even though it’s been years since I first wrote it. Like the scent of hay being forked out to hungry mouths in the stables, and the feeling of moving into a canter for the first time—sudden smooth undulations, following a choppy trot—it is embedded in my brain.

  A few months into my lessons, the owner of the ranch fostered a mustang that had been badly burned when (according to local rumor) a cartel had torched the barn of an informant on the US side of the border. The horse was too spooked to ride at first, so the owner tossed him into a pen to let him run. Eventually, he reacquainted the horse—who he’d lovingly, if dickishly, named Bernie—with being saddled, then ridden. I watched him, week after week, stoically maintain his seat as Bernie tried to throw him off, bucking and snorting. And I saw the moment when Bernie changed his mind. It was as simple as that: he looked at the man, who was slipping a bit gently into his mouth, and decided he was no longer a threat. After that, Bernie grew to love humans, and would literally eat from the palm of your hand.

  I also think about my own horse, Lady, and all the hours I spent exercising her in a round pen before riding, watching her lag petulantly in the beginning, and then find her spirit and kick into a higher gear. The physical memory of the lunge line in my hands, a bright blue rope that clipped to her halter. The way she snorted when she really got going and pumped her legs like pistons.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  I wanted to write a Western, but more than that, I wanted to be in a Western: to disappear into the desert with my trusty steed and learn the sweat and pain of a new lifestyle; to be incompetent for a while, so the mastery would be all the sweeter when it came. I wanted to escape the world I’d built for myself, which focused so much around my computer, around being inside and reading small words on a screen or page, scanning them for some kind of cathartic energy. There must, I thought, be other methods of catharsis.

  Even though learning to ride a horse had been a dream of mine since childhood, I had to trick myself into it, wedding the lessons to something productive: research for my book. I tried to use everything I experienced. My heart, pumping with unfamiliar joy as I raced down a dirt road in the desert, became my protagonist’s heart. The smell of creosote thick in the air around me, and the small Quarter Horse moving into a canter with the merest squeeze of my legs—these were given to her as well. She was not me, but we had things in common. We both lived with deep nervousness about the future, our families, the possibilities the world might offer us, and we both found solace on horseback. The difference was, I chose my new equestrian way of life, while she was thrust into it. This—the protagonist’s lack of agency—would become a recurrent problem with the manuscript, something I would struggle with for years. But I didn’t know that then, in the early drafts. Her hostage energy made sense to me. Her sense of escape, once she grew to embrace her new life under the desert sky, reflected my own.

  But it wasn’t only escape I sought: it was connection. Epiphany, even. As I learned, week after dusty week, horsemanship is a conversation, a language you and your horse co-create. You can teach an animal voice commands, or you can make your requests silent and soft: tilting forward or back, movements imperceptible to the eye. You, the rider, must learn to listen to them, too. What it means for your horse’s ears to flatten in fear and anger, or perk upward in sudden alert. The texture of a snort, the licking and chewing of comprehension. Riding well is a flow state not unlike writing, a place where you exist outside time.

  Whenever I pulled into the dirt parking lot and waved hello to the ranch’s owner, this new creativity blossomed in me, along with the equally important knowledge that I had chosen to find it. Riding, like writing novels, filled me with the conviction that I was lucky, that I was strong, that I could do most anything I wanted to, if I was simply willing to try.

  I met Lady—a paint mare with a lot of attitude and a stocky build—at the dude ranch where I took lessons. But she didn’t officially become my horse until a couple of years later, when I made the impulsive decision to buy her. It all happe
ned quickly: one Friday morning I showed up for my lesson, and there was a stranger picking out horses to bring to a different, more fiscally stable ranch in New Mexico. A barn hand told me that our place was closing. Bernie was already gone, as was Jackpot, a filly I’d been watching fatten up ever since she was born. The rest, including Lady, would go at auction, which, given the inherent randomness and lack of regulation at horse auctions, could easily mean going to her death.

  Standing in the dirt pasture, my hand on Lady’s neck, I called a horse-owning friend of mine in tears and explained the situation to her. If I bought Lady, I could save her. “Are you sure you’re ready to own a horse?” my friend asked, gently.

  I was not sure. But what else could I do? Abandoning Lady to her fate did not seem like a feasible option. I didn’t know what owning a horse might entail, but I knew her: Lady, with her broad forehead and flicking tail. The absolute line between the white in her mane and the black. How she would roll around in the dirt after I gave her a bath, falling over one way and then the other with all her immense weight, and then jumping up to shake off like a dog. At that point, I’d been riding Lady exclusively for months, and she and I had formed a bond. No longer did she race away from me when I went out to pasture to bring her in for a lesson.

  With my friend’s help, over a frantic few days and innumerable phone calls, I found a nearby stable that had space where I could board Lady, and brought her there with all her tack, which I heaved into a plywood locker. As my friend and the barn owner stood chatting, I felt dizzy with responsibility. They, the lifelong horse owners, knew so much that I did not. I was committed now—my relationship with riding had suddenly bloomed into something much bigger than research for a novel. A horse can live over thirty years, and Lady was only nine. Somehow, the conversation turned to burying dead horses with backhoes, and this was the thing that broke me. Can I afford to rent a backhoe? I wondered desperately. Do I want to rearrange my whole life around a creature I’d need to rent a backhoe for?