Jaci Dawn

I can tell you my favorite animal, but I cannot tell you why. They are beauty in motion, but so is a cat, a deer, an elk, or an eagle. They have intelligent eyes, but so do dogs. They can learn tricks, but so can dogs, monkeys, cats, and birds. They can kill you, but so can a dog.

What is it about horses that draw my eyes to them? That smell of horsehair under the fingers? The whiskers tickling a hand, looking for a treat? Those swiveling ears, that tell you what mood the horse is in? The one-sided look (because a horse can’t look you dead on, but only with one eye at a time when you are close). Flowing manes and thundering hooves?

I was drawn to horses before I knew any of those attributes. They peppered my black-and-white television dreams in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I was forbidden to go in the corrals (after a USFS employee looked down from the barn loft and saw me toddling about under the legs of the half-wild remuda while he was feeding them. I got a whopping, I’m sure, but I don’t remember that. I just remember horse legs and the startled shout of the man in the loft window). I could stand on the rails and coax a horse over with a handful of hay, but someone must have taught me early on how to release the hay to the inquisitive lips of the horse on the other fence. I petted many a velvety muzzle and felt warm breath on my hands – and for a particularly friendly over-the-fence horse, I sometimes could scratch its poll and feel how strong it was.

Horses. Bays, sorrels, palominos, whites, dapples, roans, grullas, duns, blacks, and pintos. My father’s favorite horse was a big blue roan grulla. My best friend’s Shetland pony was a grulla. My first horse (I owned him for 10 seconds) was a brown and white pinto. My second horse (I owned her for several years) was a snow-flake red roan Appaloosa. My third horse (owned in conjunction with the second) was a registered bay Quarterhorse that nobody wanted.

Wait. Why did I only own a horse for ten seconds? He was a very popular horse around the high school, and his owner often rode him to school. Horse. That was his name. Her name was Penny. Penny cleaned dog kennels to earn enough money to buy Horse, and once she owned him, shoe often rode him from her home along the McGill Highway into town to go to school. She tied him in the park across the street.

Penny & I had PE together for two years. She was a year ahead of me. We weren’t really friends, just classmates. Girls with only one thing in common: horses. I’d never even met Horse because Penny ran with a different crowd than I did. But she came to me one day and asked me if I wanted Horse. She was getting married (a lot of girls in my high school did that long before graduation) and she could no longer keep Horse. He needed someone who would love him, and she had chosen ME to be his new owner. For free. A gorgeous brown and white Pinto. FREE.

I held onto that dream for about ten seconds before I admitted I was going to go to college and I, too, would abandon Horse. I couldn’t take him. It would be unfair to him. But I miss him as if I had taken him and ridden him to school like Penny did. He was mine, even if for only a few seconds.

My other two horses were free, too. Whisper, the Arab/Appy, was a divorce rescue – just two years old when I got her. My dream horse. I held onto her for as long as I could, learning to trust horses, learning how to read them, learning how to avoid being hurt by them (oh, yeah, I got kicked once – right in the gluteus maximus!), and learning how to train a trail horse. She was a good trail horse, willing and not shy about breaking trail. She was also an Appaloosa, and more stubborn than a mule when she wanted to be.

The bay fell into my hands because I was already taking care of him, and his owner became disinterested in him. His owner was never really interested in him: he just bought the horse because his best friend was a horseman, and they needed horses to go hunting, and his friend said the horse was well-papered and had good conformation. (The horse didn’t have good conformation, not by a Quarterhorse standard: he was too skinny through the hindquarters, and someone had trimmed his hooves wrong early in his life. Took us years to get that corrected, and he still had to have shoes on in order to walk comfortably). His name was Sunny or Sonny, but that sounded too much like my father-in-law, Sonny. We changed it to Major Payne.

Major was a great kid’s horse. Barn sour as all get out, but he could give a kid a fun ride, he never considered bucking (Whisper crow-hopped and bucked if she got mad at you), and he never argued when he was on a lead. I let the neighborhood kids ride Major. My kids were allowed on Whisper. Truth is, they were both good with kids, but Major was always docile, whereas Whisper had a question mark over her ears at all times: “You in control? Just checking.”

Major’s mouth was hard. His former owner once bridled him up and rode him for seven miles (hold your breath) with the curb bit in backward. Yeah.

I used a snaffle on Whisper. I trained her to rein, because that’s the only way I know how to ride. She responded to knee pressure.

I never rode Major. He wasn’t a favorite, but more of a horse that got dumped on me by default.

They were both smart. Major could open any gate or latch (so long as it wasn’t “hot” ). We nicknamed him “Velociraptor” because of his habit of walking along the hot-wire fence with his whiskers just skimming the electric charge. As soon as the charge quit pulsing, Major breached the fence. Lots of hours were spent coaxing horse back into the pasture so we could fix the hot wire, because Major walked through it as soon as it was “down”. When we passed him on to new owners, he let himself out of their barn the first night.

We warned them.

Whisper was just a gentle little mare, 15 hands high. She had a lot of expressions. I miss her. She came from regal Arabian lines, but there was no registration: she was born of an Arab mare that had been turned out with an Appy stud. The stud’s owners claimed the mare “didn’t take” and disavowed any offspring. The mare was sold to the man I got Whisper from, and by spring, she foaled. She obviously “took”, but he Appy’s owner refused to acknowledge the foal. There was no way to register, but the owne r kept meticulous records (as did I).

I’m sorry my little mare got lost in the horse passes on to another owner mess. My husband promised me that wouldn’t happen, but he was wrong. I don’t know where she ended up before she died. She’d be 29 this year, so I am pretty certain she is long gone. Major was older,

I hope they were in good hands. I also hope to see them over the Rainbow Bridge.