A Slowing, of Sorts

There’s a feverish southerly wind here in central Texas, the kind that wraps around you like a woolen scarf when you step outside and lets you know that spring has put its hat on and caught the last air-conditioned cab out of town. The heavy, red velvet curtain has dropped and everything is creeping, languid, dallying. While other places are in the throes of a vernal apogee, we already have the edge of an overbearing southern summer pressing up against us, forcing us to walk more casually, think more thoroughly, and live a lot more slowly.

It is equal parts oppressive and inspiring. I want to rush outside in the morning and complete my checklist, life’s order of the day, all the things I believe to be important and consequential. But then that wind circles my neck and flings my hair all around and bends the grasses to the ground like a colossal car exhaust sent by the sun, and I’m shriveled and slow and realize as I cover my eyes that I have to prioritize my ambitions. After all, it’s summer in Texas.

So today I walk, leisurely, with two Pomeranians and a barn cat, through the searing wind up to the barn. I’m wearing boots and shorts, and it’s prickling hot and dark inside, but I lure my friend’s blond mare through the barn aisle and into a stall with sweet feed. I’ve just started halter breaking her three week old colt. He’s a fuzzy, reddish bay fellow with natural curls and a lot of bone for a suckling. He still sticks close to his mother at this age, making him a good candidate for persuasion. I want him to think that following me around was his idea.

It's been over a decade since I worked with a newborn foal. My first foal, a filly, was born to my best polo mare at my ranchette in California. I spent hours doting over her, filled with a maddening mix of pride, frustration, and uncertainty. Having never raised a baby horse before, I had little idea of what I was doing. I was able to fall back on what I knew about training horses in general, but I’d never had a horse whose opinion I could shape from the start. This sparked that universal caregiver doubt that I had what it took to raise right a creature who was completely dependent on me not just for food but for learning what it takes to survive among people.

There is a saying, among horsemen, that if you care about a horse you will educate him well, so that if you ever have to part ways with him someday he will have friends wherever he goes. I always admire how perfectly this applies to humans, too. Educating horses and humans at a very early age is not a complex science, but it does require keen observation, comprehension of unspoken language, and above all, bottomless amounts of patience. I’m not normally blessed with boundless patience, but in this Texas summer, I don’t have much choice.

I’ve worked with this little colt for a few days now, and he still runs to his mother for comfort when I close the stall door behind me with my unsettling tangle of ropes and nylon. He is soft all over, with great, fanned eyelashes that would make any girl envious. He presses the front of his face up against his mother’s flank so as to both hide from me and keep me from putting anything over his nose. She simply munches away at her grain, seemingly oblivious, but very much paying attention as she flicks her right ear back at him. He’s small enough still that I can push him around a bit, but I try not to corner him too much. Horses only cooperate with us in the long run because we’ve convinced them that it’s a fun, clever idea. Like humans, no horse reaches the top echelons of sport unless they truly want to. A horse can be forced to do some things, but they can never be forced to do anything well.

I slip the halter over his nose after some small protests from him and then loop a rope over his rear end. This “butt rope,” as we call it, is to encourage forward motion. Foals have a strange counterintuitive reaction to pulling, which is to pull in the opposite direction and go backwards. All foals do this. If you put a halter on a foal the minute it is born and pull on it, the foal will resist and go backwards. I suspect this has something to do with horse communication in general. Horses don’t pull on other horses, but they do push them, and they do use body language and facial expressions to send others in the direction they wish them to go. Pulling is completely foreign to them as a language. Unfortunately, pulling is a very common form of human communication, as in tugging on someone’s hand or arm or shirt to convince them to follow you. What I need to teach him is that pulling is the same as pushing.

When I pull on the lead rope to put pressure on the halter on his head, I “push” him at the same time by pulling on the butt rope. This impetus from behind teaches him that the pull means go forward. Of course, it always starts off with some confusion. The first day we tried this he sat back until he leapt forward, crashed into his mother’s butt, tried to spin in a circle, and then ran into the corner behind his mom and sulked. By the second day he walked forward immediately with very little butt rope pressure. By the third day I was able to lead him out of the stall, make a little turn in the barn aisle, and then go back in the stall. This was not without his mother’s intervention, however, who interrupted her feast to walk to the open stall door and stare at him disapprovingly for leaving.

Foals are incredibly malleable with tremendous memories. To see him advance so quickly in his understanding each day is rewarding and alarming all at once. Part of me shouts, “you did it, you taught him, he understands you!” and the other, more anxiety-ridden half of me says, “don’t let him down, don’t teach him the wrong thing.” I continue to think this even after they grow up. Young horses, like people, need firm, sensitive leadership and confidence building exercises. As they get older, horses eventually need to learn to “take a joke,” which is a horseman’s expression for those equines who tolerate with forgiveness the mistakes of their flawed and error prone humans.

If you’ve ever met a saintly, elderly horse who appears to suffer with dignity the assaults of children, the incompetence of people learning to ride, and the occasional blunder by even an experienced handler, you will understand the importance of humor and horses. Young horses are often offended by missteps that an older horse ignores, sometimes with a glint of amusement, if that’s even possible. I don’t like to anthropomorphize animals, but when you are around them long enough you do start to wonder if they know more than they’re letting on.

I haven’t worked with the horses as much as I should. In the wintertime here we sprint around frantically, trying to squeeze all of our lives into six months of temperate weather before the great roasting arrives that curbs our enthusiasm and forces us all to choose our day wisely. This is a blessing, disguised as a toaster oven, that plucks me from racecars and ranch projects and reminds me to slow down, to return to my roots, to listen to what the horses have to say. You can’t rush around, either in a Texas summer or with foals, and definitely not with foals in a Texas summer. You have to take each fervid day like a tiny colt’s step forward.