The Horse Chronicles

The setting: My kitchen, about eleven o'clock in the morning on a Saturday. A chilling, gray, icy Pennsylvania winter day. I am alone, depressed by the weather, and only a cup of coffee and my thoughts for company. We won't have any relief from the cold and snow for some very long weeks yet. The sun rises late, sometimes fails to show up for work at all, and always leaves early. My winter-killed spirit is made more disconsolate by a terrible accident that killed one of our horses, the old Big Red One. It is February, in 1997.

What I thought I knew about the mare...

My introduction to Babe came in the fall of 1994, before Tezzeray came to the farm. I have always loved horses, and I thought I knew them, knew about them. But this mare was indifferent to my attentions. In fact, she seemed to resent me, to shy away from touching unless I offered food.

One afternoon, Joseph and I took a bag of carrots and apples out to the pasture to feed Babe and Big Red. When I held a hand full of treats out to the mare, she struck out at me with her left front hoof. There was no mistake or misstep about it. I had approached her at the point of her near side shoulder, an apple in my left hand, my right hand out to pat her. Without warning, and apparently without provocation, her left front hoof shot forward - a lightning fast, stiff-armed blow.

The steel-hard edge of her hoof connected with my right shin and she bore her weight forward so that the hoof grazed down my shin and ankle across the top of my foot. The pain was shocking, excruciating, and the apparent calculation behind the act left me feeling angry and humiliated. I turned my back on the mare and her companion, hopefully for good. We would not soon be friends. My leg was swollen and painful for a week. It took a full four months for the bruising and soreness to go away.

Babe is an old-style, King Ranch stock quarter horse: bow-headed, feet like soup plates, bulky, blocky body. I have always thought she looked fat, but in truth this horse is wall-to-wall bunchy muscle driven by a hair-trigger nervous system.

Her owner is an affluent business man who breeds fancy Swiss beef cattle, sort of an extended 4-H project cum agricultural tax exemption. He is of the opinion that since wild horses have existed for eons without preventive medical attention, his horses do not need to have their hooves trimmed, their teeth floated, regular preventive worming, or annual shots for disease prevention. My regular horse vet informs me that this is actually a case for reportable neglect, but this man's family owns the home which I lease, so my complaints are limited to muted suggestions that he might want to do this or that for his horses, suggestions which have fallen on deaf ears for over two years. I pick up Babe's basic maintenance expenses and just don't tell her owner. I know that this is not smart, but I do these things regularly for my own horse, and I simply will not deny her basic care. She is, after all, a horse - even if I don't like her personality.

Babe's long time pasture buddy Big Red died this winter at the age of 37. He was a former championship steeple chaser, a rangy sorrel Saddlebred with a wonderful personality. Red was our pasture boss and barn supervisor. He taught my coddled, inexperienced Arabian show horse everything necessary about life on our pastures. With Red gone, I wondered what would become of Babe. Their physical and emotional attachment had been uninterrupted for eight years. The night he died she beat up her front legs, possibly on a wooden fence post; not wire wounds, but deep abrasions which had removed hair and flesh. She let me doctor her wounds and tend her feet. This horse knows about rage.

I have a rule around this mare. If you are on the same side of a barrier as the mare - a fence, stall wall, whatever - and if you are within ten feet of the mare, and if you can't see her: YOU HAVE A PROBLEM. In addition to the earlier pasture incident, this horse has run over me in the stall a couple of times, and even knocked me flat on one occasion, results of unprovoked panic attacks. We just don't know what sets her off. Once bitterly cold winter evening, Joseph was lowering the bay door to the stall run, and she just ran into it. Stripped eight inches of hide and hair off of her nose in the process. That was when we formulated this rule about the mare.

Babe has scars on her body. There is an old wire cut on her right haunch. It is twelve inches long, a hard, knotty scar covered by the only white hair on her coffee brown body, excepting her blaze face and one white stocking. The farrier who visits every other month thinks that the long crack in the top of one of her front hooves may also have been from a wire wound. This horse knows about pain.

Once - and what I mean is one time only - I made the mistake of separating Babe and Red. I wanted to medicate her hooves for thrush, so I brought her into the inside work area in my barn. I closed the connecting door, leaving Big Red in the stall run. Babe was haltered and on a lead rope. Big Red was standing less than four feet away from her. She panicked and became enraged. She rushed the four-foot high solid oak, reinforced connecting door, striking it with her chest and shoulders, and let me know that she fully intended to either go through it, or over it. I found myself trapped in the three-foot wide nook between a concrete wall and my tack bench with no place to hide. After striking the door, she went for me with the same frontal body block. I grabbed some object and struck at her. She backed off for perhaps two or three seconds and came at me again. I screamed at her and struck repeatedly to try to get her to back off. Somehow I managed to release the bolt on the connector door and open it. Babe bolted through the door. Once back in Big Red's immediate presence, literally in a matter of seconds, she reverted to her normal, aloof, indifferent self. The incident might never have happened. It left me completely stupefied. This horse knows about fear.

My beautiful purebred registered Arabian horse EA Tezzeray came to live at the farm about eighteen months after we moved here. Tez was raised in a padded cell in a show barn, the product of calculated inactivity, selective breeding, and selective training. He rapidly moved from junior horse to pasture boss, first being dominated by Babe and Red to being their chief tormentor. His daily care, feeding, riding, training and social requirements gave me the opportunity to get to know Babe and Big Red really well. At one point, I decided that it would be a good idea to rehab the mare from an educational standpoint - to get her back under saddle again, and hopefully to some day wean her from her emotional dependency on Big Red.

I cannot describe riding the mare in words. You would have to do it to understand it. I can compare the experience to other horses, but no words of mine will paint the true picture.

Riding my horse Tezzeray is like driving a high performance sports car: fluid, rapid acceleration, requires precise, careful steering, a vehicle with a mind of its own, powered by high octane jet fuel. Tez loves to move out and I have difficulty keeping him from breaking into a canter on days when his is really wired. He routinely bucks for fun.

Riding the mare is like commanding a Sherman tank: sheer power. The muscles in her legs are nearly twice the circumference of Tez's, although she is a hand shorter than he is. Her stride is a short, choppy walk-trot on tightly coiled titanium steel springs combined with hair trigger reactions. The mare is so agile. She could spin around in a phone booth. Her body hums with anticipatory nervous energy. I have never seen the mare offer to buck under saddle, but my impression from riding her is that she would explode out from under her rider if she needed to. She is so powerful.

I have ridden the mare only three or four times over the course of a year. It was enough for me. I just decided it was easier to concentrate my efforts on schooling my own youngster, and, after all, she is not really my horse.

Enter Katie...