34. “You can’t make me”

A cold spell descends, so I take Gus into the indoor arena.  He hasn’t been there for three weeks or so, and he’s enthralled by the new data:  leaves that have blown in, various horses’ spoor (both prints and scat), new bits of pigeon down, etc., etc., etc.  But we manage to focus on some walking in hand, and Gus is delighted to return to tricks such as pirouetting around the pedestal and tilt-a-chair.  We end with some standing on mats, which seems to interest him a lot, and as we exit I tell him what a stupendous donkey he is.

He instantly proves me wrong by digging in his heels when I try to lead him toward his paddock.  He sees Barbara grazing Henry nearby, and he wants some grazing too.  The swaths of emerald-green spring grass look succulent even to me, so to him they must be irresistible.  To get at them, he hauls me forcibly to the edge of the big pasture and thrusts his head to the ground.  Well, I rationalize, he needs some grazing, and afterward I’ll get him into his paddock.

I give him 15 minutes of nonstop noshing and then suggest that we move on.  He begs to differ, pulling away and trotting onto the lawn of the barn owner’s house, a forbidden area.  I notice that, in heading there, he shows me a swish of his tail. As the “horse-speak" author Sharon Wilsie points out, a tail-swish is a common goodbye signal among horses.  Per Wilsie’s recommendation, I routinely give Gus this signal, by swishing my arm behind my back, to let him know I’m leaving for the day.  But it can also signify a blow-off, a dismissive back of the hand.  Which is pretty clearly what Gus is sassing me with right now.
 

I scrape up my dignity and quietly retrieve him, but my request to come along is again rejected: he pulls, I pull back, and he pulls harder until I’m running (read: being dragged) alongside him, impotently shouting “No!”  I angrily punch his neck, but that leaves my lead-line grip one-handed.  He freakin’ wins.  I toss the line over his back and call him bad names.  As he canters off — flipping me the bird with a tiny back-kick? — he draws three big geldings into his powerful magnetic field of naughtiness.  Gus runs the outside of their fence and they follow along the inside, fairly chortling in their glee.  He really is a pain in the ass, of the ass, and by the ass . . .

I blame myself for not switching from his light lead-line snapped on the underside of the halter to his heavy rope snapped on the over-the-nose side ring, and for using up all my carrots and apples in the arena.  I should know better than to go up against Gus with no physical leverage and no gustatory enticement.  So I turn my back on him and return to the barn to fetch his other rope and some horse cookies.

On this third approach, once he feels the weight of the bigger line and gets a whiff of the oat-and-peppermint treats, he’s all mine.  He forsakes the grass, abandons his ego trip, and follows me like a puppy.  I match his paces as we walk, which helps get him into the zone; I ask him to stop and walk on and back up once or twice; and I bung him into his paddock without further ado.  There we play some I-step-you-step, which earns him the rest of the horse cookies, and we part on the friendliest of terms.

33. Spring steps

Today I bring Gus’s surcingle and driving reins to the outdoor arena.  It’s warm and he’s half-suffocating under his long, thick winter coat, but he’s a trouper.  He marches off along the arena fence — that is, until he’s unable to resist dropping his head to inhale the information trove of a fresh pile of manure.  I give him a few seconds and then jiggle the reins and tell him to walk on.

On our second circuit around the arena, I aim him (still zigzaggedly, but my steering skills are improving under his tutelage) at the wooden bridge, and he steps onto it, walks its length, and trots off it.  Click! and a big treat-fest.  Only problem is, because he’s short, his first step onto the bridge puts his hoof at an angle that can make it skid forward, and he hates that. The next couple of times I try to send him over the bridge, he veers around it instead.  So I gather up the long reins to lead him in hand, and luckily his hoof doesn’t slide this time.  I let him stand on the bridge while I blitz-click and treat six or eight times, trying to impress upon him what a grand and glorious place this bridge is. Next try, I succeed in driving him over it again.

I also send him through the arch of tarp strips, and he barely hesitates — except one time when the breeze goes calm and the strips hang vertical and together.  Good to know:  he prefers erratic flapping that puts daylight between the strips, rather than stillness that presents them as more solid.

Some friends stop by, and we unclip the reins to showcase our cone-fetching trick. Once Gus picks up the cone, I run backward and in circles to make him follow me all over, his teeth staying firmly clamped for as long as it takes to catch up to me and flop the cone into my hand.  When we stop for a minute while the humans chat, Gus nudges the cone and looks for a treat.  So my friends take turns tossing it for him, and he promptly fetches it and delivers it to whichever of us holds out a hand.  They’re enchanted to take the deliveries and to dispense the treats.  Gus gets high marks for “plays well with others.”

                             ____________________________________ 

For a reward, I take him outside the ring to graze on the fast-sprouting spring grass.  Standing next to him, I fall into almost as deep a zone of relaxation as he’s in.  He occasionally takes one or two steps forward — never lifting his muzzle from the ground, lest he miss a morsel on the way — to reach another patch of lawn.

When Gus finds some very lush, wide-bladed grasses, I remember that too much rich grass can be harmful to horses if they aren’t used to it after the winter.  I give him only a minute or two of chomping the big blades before I take up the lead line and ask him to come along.  He does briefly, but then YANK! goes his head, I have to let go of the rope and fling it over his back so he won’t step on it, and he canters away, looking for more good eats behind a barn.  Sigh . . .  

I walk around and meet him, gather the rope again, and cross my fingers.  I swivel and lift the rope near his halter to raise his head, and I use my maitre d’ arm gestures to invite him forward with me.  And along he comes like such a good boy!  I click and treat a couple of times as we make our way back to his paddock, and he walks right in.

32. Steeds and palfreys

Toying with the fantasy of riding Gus, I’ve been thinking how lucky I was to ride horses over the years.

A Nutmeg lookalike

I still fondly remember Nutmeg, the pudgy roan mare assigned to me during a weeklong New Forest horse camp (only affordable thanks to my dad’s American salary in the somewhat penurious England of the late 1960s).  And I still remember when we all switched horses for one lesson, and the lot I drew was General, a crotchety old bay who bucked me off so hard that my eventual return to Earth knocked (a) the wind out of me, (b) my glasses entirely off my face, and (c) my riding crop deep into the woods where it was never found again.  Being 10 years old, I bounced right back unhurt.  But I was grateful to reunite with sweet little Nutmeg for the rest of the week.  

In my late twenties, I took a liking to Junior, a quarterhorse that I rode for a busy friend.  Junior was nice but prone to youthful indiscretions.  Once, on a suddenly frosty morning in the autumn, he got, as they say, the wind under his tail, and he bolted with me.  The plan was a moderate canter, but he tore off at a dead gallop.  It was easy enough to ride, but the footing was rutted and tussocky, so I feared for our lives and limbs.  All my rein-pulling (and involuntary bellowing of “whoa!” into the roaring wind) was in vain; he never set a foot wrong, and he stopped only after some 100 yards, where a big hedge blocked his way.  


One summer day, as we were schooling in a sandy arena, I felt Junior’s knees wobble and bend under me, and before I knew it he was lying down, preparatory to a nice roll.  I guess the saddle was hot and itchy, so a back-scratch seemed in order.  Somehow I jumped off and hauled him to his feet.

A few weeks later, riding along a rural road, we passed a cow pasture.  Now, the very job and vocation of quarterhorses is to work cows, but Junior, we hereby learned, suffered from a phobia of cows, even behind fences.  When several cows lumbered toward the fence, his reaction was panicky whirling, which skidded his hind feet into a steep, slippery roadside ditch, which made him stand upright so suddenly that he was falling over backward.  With me on him.  Wearing, for impact protection, a cloth baseball cap. 

As my consciousness glided into emergency slow-motion, I realized that his rearing up was tipping me backward, and I knew that my pulling on his head would only worsen his tipping.  So I made a distinct effort to drop the reins and grab onto his mane — all for nought, because he fell anyway.  I was deposited smack on the tarmac, where, waiting for him to follow, I improved the time by hoping that I would escape being crushed or kicked to death and also by accepting that I had no say in the matter.  In a half-second, Junior crashed onto the tarmac too, landing mere inches to the side of me.  Like all horses down, he found the destination more disconcerting than the trip, so he instantly jumped to his feet.  It was in his scramble to stand up that I sustained my only real injury:  one thrashing hoof struck me just under the collar-bone.

Junior and I were both providentially OK.  My back and butt were bruised but unbroken.  To check on my hoofbeat injury, I looked inside my T-shirt and noticed that its interior surface had a circle of whitish powder adhering to it.  What the . . . ?  I climbed back into the (scratched and scuffed, and borrowed) saddle, and we rode home to lie down with a few ice packs.  Unshirted and inspecting my shoulder-front more closely in a mirror, I could almost read the brand name of the horse-shoe impressed pinkly into my flesh.  And then I tumbled (ahem!) to the T-shirt mystery’s answer:  a crescent of my skin cells had been ground into the inside of the fabric by the clomp and twist of Junior’s hoof.

After that little brush with death, I never, ever, ever rode a horse again without a proper helmet.

Lacey

When I moved to Saratoga, I put an ad in a local dressage newsletter, offering exercise for a horse whose owner was too busy to provide enough.  That’s how I met Lacey, a red-chestnut mare with a sprinkling of white polka-dots evenly distributed over her body.  (These, it turns out, were not signs of Appaloosa heritage but the leftover follicle damage from a bad case of hives or other skin allergy years earlier.)  Sociable, vigilant, and savvy, Lacey was the alpha mare in any herd.  More than once, geldings broke or jumped fences to get to her when she was in heat.  And she welcomed them.

When feeling her oats and needing to blow off steam, Lacey would snort and trumpet like an elephant.  On those days, we knew not to ride until after longeing her, and she always took the opportunity to rocket around at top speed, bucking and farting like a bronco.  Lacey had a taste for donuts and danishes, and she was cushy enough to ride bareback.  She was game for anything, and games were what her owner and I loved to play with her, especially after she was retired from riding.  Using her strong cow-herding instincts, she especially enjoyed chasing us: she would pin her ears and snake out her neck toward our escaping derrieres — just as Gus chases the beachball with a predatory twinkle in his eye.

As a noble mount, Gus is plenty strong enough to carry me on his back, but he’s so short that, as Barbara suggests, I might need to strap roller-skates to my feet.  Which reminds me of another horse tale, again from England.  Among the lesson horses for hire at my muddy, neighborhood stables was a minuscule Shetland pony.  Marybell was no taller than a very tall dog, but she was very much fatter, probably because she loved to be hand-fed fruit-flavored ice lollies and we kids loved to indulge her.  After business hours, when the staff rode and ponied the horses in small groups out to their turnout field for the night, one particularly lanky stablehand would always straddle Marybell, fold his legs up in front of him, and ride her off to pasture.

My guess about Gus is that he’d freak the hell out if I sat on him, and before I could dismount he’d eject me with extreme prejudice.  I’m too old for that nonsense.

31. Riding high

It’s been crossing my mind lately how fun it would be to sit on Gus.  Just for a second or two.  And then slip off again before he knows what hit him.

Training horses and building a relationship with them is easier from the ground than from the saddle.  Leading and longeing, striding near their own legs, and meeting them eye-to-eye all contribute to a way better connection than sitting behind their heads and above their hooves.  Clicker training, with its reliance on quick delivery of food treats, is literally a hand-to-mouth proposition.  Not that it’s impossible when mounted (and in fact, the reach forward by the rider and the sideways neck-curl by the horse can be good stretching exercises), but it feels a lot more natural when both parties are on their own feet.

Most horsepeople aren’t clicker trainers, and most horsepeople do little or no groundwork.  They’d rather sink as much time and focus as possible into the sport of riding.  And no wonder:  it’s a freakin’ blast.  First up, you’re up.  And that high perspective is a high all on its own.  Then, just at a plod, the rocking of the horse synchronizes your whole body with a four-beat power-walking movement.  (Those big but slow and steady waves of motion have been proven therapeutic for children and adults with disabilities. As a volunteer for a therapeutic riding program, I saw it with my own eyes: kids who normally couldn't sit up on their own could sit up, tall and smiling, in the saddle of a walking horse.)
 
At the trot, you’re bounced up and down on the horse’s shoulders, but by posting — repeatedly rising and sitting at the right rhythm — you dance a jaunty bebop with him.  With each rise, you can feel yourself being carried forward in midair.  For me, it’s reminiscent of being a wee kidlet and having my burly, kindly big brother toss me around.  (A sitting trot is great too, as you stay glued to the horse’s back for all the aeronautical thrills of lift, weight, thrust, and drag.  But since following those big movements requires a lot of flexibility in the rider’s abdominal muscles and joints, and since my musculoskeletal core is an ugly train derailment, sitting the trot brings me more spinal agony than it’s worth.)

The canter is a driving, exhilarating waltz:  the horse’s feet go fa-da-DUMP, fa-da-DUMP, fa-da-DUMP while the human’s center of balance is lofted and rolled forward and back with each DUMP.  (And jumping a horse — which I haven’t done since I reached the age of reason, when my cerebral cortex passed its beta-testing and went fully online — adds even more surge and height and hang time to the experience.  I see its allure, even at the risk of, and again after, all manner of crashes and injuries.)

True horsepower can’t match a speedboat or a rollercoaster, but unlike them, it’s softly, warmly, heavily, blood-thrummingly animal, so it’s atavistic: it speaks the body language of our primitive souls.  No, I don't believe it's some displaced sexuality, but it's certainly sensual.  Moreover, that animal sensuality comes with a lively mind that’s independent and not of our species, so it engages horse and human in an ur-Esperanto, reconnecting branches of life that evolved so widely apart so long ago.  Communing and partnering across species can bring a rare delight to life, and doing it bodily with a body as awe-inspiring as a half-ton horse is a peak experience.

OK, yeah, clearly I still miss riding . . .

30. Change of venue

The day after the clinic, the weather is suddenly warm again, and the general vibe around the farm is lazy and noodling.  One or two people are hand-grazing their horses, and other horses are dozing in their paddocks.  

Now that the snow is gone, I can lead Gus around behind a big derelict barn where two horse-trailers are parked.  His experiences with trailering are limited to the two or three times that Sandy has switched barns, and, like his trip from his previous owners’ place, they were ugly ordeals requiring tranquilizers.  My hope is that we can walk by these trailers a jillion times, then look inside them a half-jillion times, then get his front feet into one of them another quadrillion times, and maybe even stand inside it a few elephantillion times, so that perhaps eventually he’d find it less horrible to ride in one.  Anyway, it’s a pleasant perusal of the premises and good lead-line practice for us both.

At one point we find a fallen pine branch and he veers over to chew on its long, dark-green needles.  ??!?  Donkeys don’t eat turpentine, I tell him, and we move along.


Later, after I give him a few minutes of nibbling teensy green sprigs under the dead turf, I ask him to walk again and he accedes.  Until.  Suddenly he cranks his head and pulls to run away from me.  I dig in my feet and shout “Nope!” in exactly the same tone that his neck tends to use when he resists me.  Exerting equal and opposite force, we’re statues at an impasse for a few seconds (which feel like minutes), before he relents and moves toward me, and we walk along as if nothing had happened.  These stationary tantrums are becoming rarer and these surrenders commoner, both of which I'm glad of.

Next I bring Gus to an outdoor ring that has at one end a short piece of wooden bridge (fetchingly, if inexplicably, painted lavender) and a tall PVC-pipe arch with strips of plastic tarp hanging from its cross-beam and blowing in the wind.  He hasn’t been in this area for months, and some horses have used it as an overnight paddock, so every inch is deeply fascinating.

I use his explorations for more lead-line practice.  I have to stop frequently to let him sniff the ground and ogle the surroundings, but a “This way, sir, your table is waiting” gesture almost always gets him started walking again.  We give the flapping tarp strips a wide berth — too much sensory stimulation already without adding that weirdness.  But the first time we approach the bridge, he eagerly addresses it.  He pops his front feet onto it and then rocks back down; he gets a click and treat.  Next time around, we stop next to the car-wash-like strips and I hold the end of one out toward him; he touches it gamely and gets a click and treat.  He walks the length of the bridge with all four feet and gets another click and treat.  This jazzes his brain and legs enough that he wants to trot, so we do that along one side of the ring.

We piddle around like this for awhile longer, walking and stopping and turning, and he’s a champ.  It’s a welcome change for us to be doing nothing — which, after all, is sometimes the very best kind of teamwork.

29. VIDEO: Training clinic, part 2

After Alex practices with me being the horse and being the handler — she’s an excellent teacher, patient and kind, eloquent verbally as well as physically, and adept at pacing her comments and demos so the student can best digest them — she snaps the lead-line onto Gus's halter.  (She’s worked with donkeys before, and lately she’s adopted several goats whom she’s training to lead as well.)  For me, stepping back and observing her and him from a third-person perspective is really useful.  I get to see his frequent little hesitations and distractions as he walks.  And I’m glad to find that Alex’s answer is what I’ve been doing:  accepting, waiting until he’s ready again, and walking on.  But I notice an extra technique that I need to adopt:  she gestures with her hand like a maitre d’ to invite and guide his movement forward.  It works like a charm to help him step off promptly and without rubbernecking at every stray leaf or pigeon.  

She does a little "dancer's arms" with Gus and encounters the same issue I've had: a hand at his girth or shoulder sends him backward rather than forward.  I've been touching his hip instead, as that seems to send him forward more reliably, but Alex often advocates waiting and letting the animal figure it out.  With Gus, when he steps backward, she moves with him and doesn't change her cues, because he's clearly not upset by that but he needs time to figure out what she's asking for.  Eventually he offers a step forward, and he immediately gets a click.  The success lets him learn how to respond to that cue, without my having to dream up a different cue.  Smart lady, smart donkey.

Alex also notices my sloppy and unbalanced footwork, so when she hands me the lead rope, she suggests I make an effort to roll each foot, walking more deliberately heel-to-toe. Because Gus responds so well to matching paces, I know her point is important for us:  it could improve the focus and rhythm in his hooves if I could demonstrate more care and clarity in my feet.  I resolve to practice this whenever I’m moving with him.

Alex walks Gus around and between several mats, asking him to stay by her side rather than tacking over to one of them.  He knows that standing on mats will guarantee clicks and treats, so they’re hot items for him.  When he walks nicely around them, she leads him onto a mat as a reward.  

With some of today’s horse pupils, she introduces a mat-to-mat exercise that I also want to try with Gus.  One of its goals is to help the horse practice making turns in good balance.  She clicks the horse for staying on the mat, but she reaches under and past its chin to deliver the treat, so it turns its head away from her just a bit to take the food.  At the same time, she steps closer to its neck, filling the space left by its turning head.  A couple more of these small head-away moves serve to prime the horse’s posture for taking a step and turning its body — and the human comes along, leading it off the mat and toward another mat that’s over to the side.  This way, the horse decides when and how to adjust its balance front to back, as well as side to side, in order make the turn in comfortable self-carriage.  It’d be nice if Gus could teach this to me, but at least I can try teaching it to him.

28. VIDEO: Training clinic, part 1

Clinic day is here.  It’s bitingly cold and raw, but eight humans get lessons with nine equids, and everybody is a trouper — not least the instructor, Alexandra Kurland.  She’s a widely known pioneer of clicker-training for horses, garnering particular attention for her work with seeing-eye horses for the vision-impaired [check it out here].  Headquartered not far from Saratoga, she has provided many clinics for Sandy the barn manager.  I’ve heard so much about Alex for so long that I’m super-eager to meet her.  

Together we discuss our training interests and concerns so that Alex can plan what to offer each of us, and we all observe each other’s lessons, gathering in the arena or around stall doors to watch and learn.  Witnessing this party from his paddock, Gus objects to his exclusion with a blare of syncopated tubas and bagpipes every hour on the hour.  But after our lunch break, it's his turn.

When he and I walk into the arena, he’s mildly flummoxed to see so many people gathered at one end.  He likes them all; still, he’s not used to an audience.  Nobody can decide what we should show Alex — tricks like tilt-a-chair and retrieves to the pedestal? or “dancer’s arms” and other groundwork? — so we’re a bit discombobulated.  Also, I forget to switch to my smaller lead line, so I’m using the very long, heavy rope that’s for walking between paddock and barn, and the first thing Alex notices is how careless I’m being with that rope.  She can tell I’ve never learned rope-handling in any systematic way, and that becomes our lesson.

We unleash Gus to go and roll, while Alex has me hold a halter in my two hands in front of me as she moves its lead-line around.  Even when the line is very loose, I can feel minor weight shifts and drags and releases; of course horses can feel those too in their jaws and heads.  We take turns being the horse and being the handler, walking each other around the arena, to refine my sensitivity to how every hand, arm, and body movement may translate to a feel in the halter.  All the while, Gus is mostly content to sniff around on his own, though occasionally he seems to mirror our activity [see video below], and finally he strolls over and pokes his head between us: “Whatcha doooo-in’?  Can I join in?”  

27. Stepping out

On first reading about matching paces, in the Wilsie “horse-speak” book, I admit I gave a snort — and not as a sentry, but as a skeptic.  Why would any animal care whether your left foot lands as his left foot lands and your right moves in synchrony with his right?  Gus is moderately willing to play I-step-you-step when we’re facing each other, and I figure we could develop that into a fun dancing-partners routine.  But marching along in unison? Pleeeze . . .

For the dressage exercise where I adopt “dancer’s arms” to frame his movement, with one hand on his halter and the other at his girth or hip, I do pay attention to our footfalls as Wilsie recommends.  To help us regulate our paces, I try to match mine to his — after all, the idea is to move very precisely, and we only go three or four steps in a row before I click and treat.  As I get better at mirroring his small and relatively quick steps, I’m noticing that he’s getting better at the exercise too: more rhythmic, less rushed and impatient.

After a two-day hiatus for dangerously high winds (if blustery is the new normal in our world of climate change, then we’re going to need a lot fewer metal barns and a lot more wooden ones), I show up with a headful of plans for basketball and other tricks.  But man plans; Gus laughs.  

First, before we reach the arena, he yaws violently and pulls the damn lead-line out of my hand.  He hasn’t resisted me so adamantly in several weeks, and it irks me.  But spring is in the air and he needs a little frisk; I get that.  He tries grazing the dead, dun-colored grass and the tiny hints of green sprouting below it.  It’s not yummy yet, so he visits the big pasture, drawing its gelding horses over to greet him through the fence boards.  He lets the young one nibble on his halter straps.  Sometimes Gus plays this game for minutes on end — usually until the big cheese of the group herds the young guy away — but today his rope-yankingly inexorable social imperative quickly fades, and he turns away from the prying lips of his playmate.  I gather him up and we proceed into the arena.

We dabble at basketball and other games, but Gus’s heart isn’t in them.  He stops to scratch his flank.  He wanders, nose to the ground.  He finds a brown leaf that has blown in; is it edible?  And lately there are a few downy pigeon feathers, and occasionally a fallen eggshell, which he minutely inspects one by one. To regain his attention, I get him walking alongside me, and, just to keep my own interest up, I decide to match my paces with his.  Almost immediately, he seems rapt.  He stumps along purposefully, ears busy, and when I consider switching to another activity, he’s clearly eager to resume walking.  So we do.  We make turns and loops, we walk over ground-poles, we halt, we walk on again.  He’s in the zone, perhaps even more so than with long-lining.  So much for tricks and games; today becomes all about marching along in unison — exactly what I’d scoffed at so recently.