The house smells like a sugar shack.
The onions and parsley have sprouted.
The wind is blowing and the thaw is on.
The cows cavort.
It must be spring.
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My Uncle is a cattle rancher in Montana. He wears button
down collared shirts, cowboy boots and a handle- bar mustache. Always. For us,
growing up in suburbia, he became a kind of mythic figure. Any time Dad thought we city-bred softies
needed a little inspiration he would regale us with stories about working on his
brother’s ranch, being treated for the first time to the delicacy that is
“Rocky Mountain Oysters” and the rip-roaring calf wrangling fun of branding
time.
Looking back, I now realize that there were a lot of lessons
that my brothers and sister and I distilled from those dinner table tales. For
instance: If you clock a guy in a bar room brawl, buy him a drink afterwards. And:
A gentleman always takes his hat off in the presence of a lady, and holds the
door for her.
To some these proverbs may seem archaic, but we had a real
sense that they were necessary for survival in the “wild west”. Now I’m more sensitive
to the fact that they might be necessary to knit together the fabric of any community
anywhere.
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| New Bit |
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| Old Bit |
As we swallowed down our last few lumps of tuna fish hotdish,
we would find ourselves resolving not to be such pantywaists anymore. Every
family ought to have an Uncle from out west. Puts hair on yer chest. Balances the
current universe awash in skinny jeans and pastel merino sweaters.
I told my Uncle about our fourteen year old Tennessee Walker-
about how she was a gift horse, where she came from, how she was trained, how
she wasn’t, her old bit, her new bit, lounging, ground manners, questions,
comments, concerns.
“Do you think it’ll be too crazy, trying to introduce her to ground driving and a new bit at the same time?”
His response was simply:
“Try it. See what she does.”
I felt like Almanzo Wilder in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “These
Happy Golden Years”, when Cap Garland turned and tossed the words “God hates a
coward!”over his shoulder at him as he stood in fog of indecision.
Like most things in
farming, working with horses is mostly a matter of putting in the time. Time
spent gives the familiarity that greases the wheels, so to speak. Of the 3 Jersey Cows that we
have purchased over the years, two of them came from herds well over 500 and
were not used to much one on one attention. Asking # 279 to go from a
conventional dairy setup with loafing sheds in winter and twice a day machine
milking to “Honey” or “Buttercup”, Queen of the farm, with hand milking, being
halter trained and led in and out of a stall each evening and morn is a big
ask. The adjustment period averages 2 months. Right when you think “this isn’t
working. I’m selling her,” she settles in as if she’s always been there.
With them, the change came on gradually, largely due to us showing
up at the barn and pasture at the same time each day. Our habits were
deliberate and regular. It was easy for her to grasp what we expected of her.
Simply put: we just put the daily time in. That’s what we were finding with our
horse too. That’s how it became not just training sessions for her, but for us
as well.
The first two months were spent working on ground manners: leading well, voice commands, and working on the lunge line. At first she seemed to think lunging was supposed to be an exercise in running. My goal was to make her content with boring. I was after a predictable and well stretched out walk. A long whip to accentuate my movements helped in the beginning. It was an early aid to getting her to walk out from me in the wide circle, verses avoid work by coming in to my body. Increasingly I was only using the whip as an extension of my arm, and soon not at all. My goal was to get the maximum response from the most minute request. Eventually it became a delicate dance. It seemed all I had to do was think about asking her to change direction and she would. She was always willing to join up. Many days I came away from the barn certain that she knew more than I did, and this process was going to be about training me. I had the feeling that the more I worked with her, the more consistent and clear my body language became, and so in a sense were lunging each-other. Soon she seemed to grow bored quickly and lose focus and attention. It was obvious she was up for a new challenge.
Bob Hart Jr.
(from an March 1998 EQUUS Magazine Article “From Hot
to Brilliant”)
After two months
of building trust and establishing good communication via daily grooming, foot
care, and lunging her, we put her saddle on her, fastened the new bit to the
bridle, and found to our surprise that she seemed to accept it eagerly. The bit
has some copper in it, and she seemed to find this more comfortable than the
twisted steel of her curb bit, because, just as advertised, it caused her to
salivate more and lubricate the bit.
“Adopted as a
healing charm in ancient Egypt, the Figure of Eight Knot was found in Middle
Kingdom burial sites. Probably because of its symmetric, interwoven shape, the
loosely shaped Figure of Eight Knot has been a symbol of love for a long time,
especially during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.”
---Philippe Petit---
This knot seemed
appropriate for two reasons: first, because trying to teach “Lady” to ground
drive would be coming full circle for us. We used to farm with a team of Fjord
Horses, and began to really love our work from the moment they first came into
our life and our farming, re-shuffling our garden plans from 50 and 100 foot
rows, to 400 foot long rows. They became a game changer for ground preparation
(manure spreading, plowing, discing), cultivating, and harvesting. Anyone who
has ever experienced the difference a horse drawn potato plow makes in
harvesting tubers previously lifted by hand will know the unmitigated wooping-
with- joy- to- the- heavens elation we felt when horses entered the picture on
our market gardening farm.
Secondly, because
“Lady Nugget” is currently more of a GO horse than a WHOA horse.
The first day
went far better than we dreamed it would. She had no problems with the bit. Her
main concern seemed to be the fact that Shane was walking behind her. And she
needed some getting used to the feeling of the ropes occasionally touching her
legs and rump. This was good practice for the traces on a work harness, and was
part of the “sacking out” that we were going for. She seemed willing. Though,
at first, she was so nervous it took a lot to check her pace. Shane applied a
seesawing motion to the lines. This is something Doc Hammill recommends. It
certainly seemed to jog her out of panicking and keep her mind engaged. The
figure of eight knots proved handy as Lady leaped forward over a log and seemed
bent on trotting. Shane’s lines slid through his hands and he closed around the
knots, as he worked for the muscle memory, recalling the art of talking to a
beast through rope.
The day was so
filled with so many new things for her that we had the impression she had no
time to think how else to react other than to do what we were asking. The only
trouble we had on Day 1 was getting her to walk up.
Many books will tell you to have someone walk
alongside her with the lead rope, but we were finding that these multiple
layers of communication were confusing to her. I think a lot of people
underestimate how sensitive a horse is to something as mundane as a lead rope.
Any time you have a rope clipped to a horse they can feel a lot more than you
are even aware you are telegraphing. I have noticed many times that when I give
generous slack on a lead line, and simply move my body with intention and
confidence, I get more cooperation and better ground manners, than when I
closes my hand completely around a rope and try to manhandle a result.
Our main goals
for day one were simply for her to move out when asked, and stick a stop. Both
took some doing, and a bit of patience while she learned to accept
communication from behind. Each time we saw her offering to acquiesce in the
slightest we’d ease up on the pressure. In his book about passive leadership, Mark
Rashid calls this “finding the try.”
“Any time
you’re willing to fight with horses,” he said in a low, unwavering tone,
“they’ll always be willing to fight back. The thig is though, even during those
fights the horse is still trying to figure out what you want. The sad part is,
because you’re so busy fighting with them, you’ll never feel those tries.”
-Mark Rashid quoting his mentor “The Old Man” in Horses Never Lie
As I walked her back to the barn after our first day ground driving, I said to her: “Well, Lady, looks like you just won a spot on this farm.”
DAY 2
Wasn’t it Mary Poppins who said, “well begun is half done”? Or was she quoting Aristotle? That promising little tidbit was flickering about in my mind as we strode out to the paddock for round two. Unfortunately, our second attempt at ground driving was to be anything BUT practically perfect in every way.
It began well. No issues saddling or bridling. But it soon became evident that she was waiting to throw a fit. It was as if that horse had spent the night thinking the whole thing over and was anticipating how to get around having to obey those long lines.
First, she demonstrated no intention of stopping on command. She pranced every stop, she sidestepped in pretty little dressage motions instead of walking up. She give dainty little half bucks and rears. Eventually she turned and faced Shane. When I watched her I had a vague memory of Lynn Miller writing in his “Training Horses Training Teamsters book, that when a horse turned around on you like that it was either your fault for hooking something up wrong or time to get a different horse. I was beginning to think the latter- but then I noticed our rigging the lines through her stirrups was pulling her head lower than it looked like she was
DAY 3
The next
afternoon when we got to the paddock Lady Nugget Muffin was all lathered up
snorting and restless. There was a big dent in the fence, a T-post bent. It
looked like she had been racing laps around her paddock and had slipped into
the fence and then shot off for some more, locked in a nervous frenzy of fear. “Easy
girl, easy. What is it? What happened to you?” We rubbed her down, brushed her.
Scratched her withers and looked back along the tracks. A man and his
exuberant dog out for a hike were making a deft retreat.
She would not stand still for saddling, swinging her 1000 pounds from side to side. I had my very hat knocked off my head as I attempted to tighten the girth. I looked across at Shane. It seemed like one of those days for giving her a friendly pat and retreating to the house to bake cookies and live to see another dawn.
But Shane looked
eager. “Maybe he knows something I don’t” I thought, as I retrieved my hat and
handed him the lines. “This, I gotta see.”
I could hear
Mario Lanza singing “Ah sweet mystery of life!” in my head as I watched what
happened next.
Lady seemed grateful for something to focus on, as if the work itself were calming her down, giving her an avenue out of the deadlock of nervous energy. Every time she showed signs of sidestepping or turning around, Shane would rein her out of it in the other direction coupling the change of direction with a kiss and a “walk up”. Time and again he showed her the appropriate response was giving her “a way out” of whatever was bothering her. The snaps higher up on the saddle were working for us better than the stirrups had, and man and horse were looking comfortable with each other. Soon she was lowering her head and relaxing into that calm partnership that makes for a day’s work well done and well won.
SINCE THAT DAY
Since day 3 we’ve
had moments like those of Day 2 and moments like those of the “breakthrough
day”. But it’s been like a plane slowly taking off, gaining altitude. Each day
we work with her seems to make her calmer in the stall, builds up more mutual
trust. I think the trust part has been at the heart of this entire exercise.
After all, we were total strangers to each other only a few months ago.
The unnerving thing about this gift horse of ours is how much she seems to pick up from us, whether we are aware of it or not. You can almost tell what kind of a mood her handler is in, from the way the horse is carrying herself, walking alongside whoever happens to be leading her out of the barn in the morning.
One day we came
out for a training session after I had spent the night at my grandma’s
deathbed. I was tired and grumbling; frustrated with the experience of several
hours of painfully acute impotence and seeming futility. I had watched the
features and body language of a woman I dearly loved for the better part of a
day and a half, searching desperately for signs of communication as she slipped
farther and farther from this world. When we reached the paddock Lady would not
come to us or allow herself to be caught- at least not by us, while we were
feuding.
“She’s nervous.
She’s dangerous.”
“She’s not
dangerous. You’re nervous.”
“Maybe this isn’t
going to work out. Do we really want to be putting all this time into this?
Should we just give it up?”
All the pent- up
feelings of waste and impotence at the nursing home welled up inside of me. I
felt a ferocious need to control something, to make something happen. I grabbed
her halter and drove her around the paddock alpha herd boss style. It wasn’t
pretty, but it worked. What began as a work of bullish pigheaded “I’ll show
you!” faith ended with a white flag of surrender. “I can’t do this today.” I
handed Shane the rope and headed for the house vowing to sell the horse first
chance I got.
That afternoon
Shane had the best training session with her yet.
“I don’t think we
should sell the horse.” Shane said later that night.
I broke down.
“I don’t want to
sell the horse,” I said. “I just don’t want my grandma to die.”
Since that day Shane
has taken Lady out of the trial confines of her paddock and worked her out in
the open field, going up and down the imagined rows of the future potato field
and pumpkin patch. Each time he does this it’s like he’s writing a love note to
the future, a pledge of good things to come, ground to be cultivated, crops to
be harvested. He’s showing her how to fit in on this farm. They are building
mutual trust.
We’ve learned
that the days we want to throw in the towel with the horse are days when
something else is going on- something which is bothering us and which we are
telegraphing to the horse or allowing ourselves to be distracted by. It strikes
me that these are the days when we most need the horse, and the work.
Ron said it well
the day we met him and Lady:
“Doesn’t
matter what’s going on with you-whatever troubles you’re having in your life.
Get on a horse and the troubles go straight out of you, through the horse down
into the ground.”
I suppose that
makes them lightning rods. In that, horses are a lot like farms in general. So
many moments working on a farm feel filled with futility and folly, for every
bit you learn, or every year you gain in experience, you are humiliatingly
aware of the dizzying mountains of knowledge that you lack and need. It’s easy
at times to forget that that very thing is often what makes farming so
rewarding.
Sometimes it seems
as if, like a horse, the farm also is a lightning rod for every lint scrap of
trouble and toil, every twine ball knot of worry and struggle…but then too,
working the farm, it all goes into the ground and mercifully you find you are
the better for it.
Ron was a man I never saw without his hickory striped over-alls. They were as a part of him as his raspy cough and kind eyes. They had a pocket with a zipper in the front. That was the very pocket "Nugget" played with as a foal 14 years ago when he first saw the little Tennessee Walker in a field.
"She's a wild one! No one can come near her!"
But Ron soon lost interest in the mare he had come to see, and fixed his attention and his gentle ways on the youngster. Pretty soon she was eating out of his hand and following him around the field.
I remember looking at the man when he said it. He seemed entirely unaware that the little chestnut mare picked him because he first had faith in her- he had picked her. He had the humility that comes with decades of dealing with large animals, the rootedness that kills common ego issues in their cradle, and that comes from looking out over the same fields he had done as a kid, when at the ripe old age of 5 he sat astride a mammoth black Percheron, his baby fingers with that reassuring gentle grasp on the reins...he had enough to give, and he gave it....so...she kind-a picked him.
"Don't worry about that cough" his wife explained, lest we fear contamination in this age of the virus, "he's always had that..."
It was easy to forget what was going on in the outside world, here on their farm. The handshake was still there. The sun was shining. There was no trace of fear- of- the- other.
The week before Thanksgiving, after nearly 9 months of disinfecting, hand-washing like Mabeth's wife, and sneezing over sanitizer squirts, we found that a serious contagious disease had been hiding in plain sight on our own farm, and had infected our dairy goat herd. CL can stay dormant a long while before manifesting itself. We suspect we contracted it when our goats were staying with friends during our brief wild goose chase back down to FL for grad studies...
2 days after we put down each and every one of our goats, and buried them in a compost pile that will not be used for at least a year, the telephone rang. It was Ron's bride.
"Ron died....and I want to ask you something. We wanted you to have Nugget. It's what he wanted. Just a couple days before he died he said he thought your family and Nugget belonged to each-other, and asked me if we couldn't work something out."
"I'm sorry, did you just say Ron died?"
His quiet ways, his firm, but gentle hand of reassurance, the way all the animals seemed to calm in his presence. His manner which said "I am no fool, but I'll suffer them gladly for their sake!" His voice with the raspy cough. All these came back to me in a flood.
There was soft weeping on the other end. "Yes. I did."
Ron had died doing chores. Just dropped right down behind his truck, with his hand clutching at the breast pocket with the zipper. Turned out the raspy cough was a symptom of congestive heart failure. Due to the panic this pandemic had put everyone in, no one was going in for appointments. Their hospital was laying off staff right and left, and had kept pushing his heart appointment off later and later....he died the morning of his 8:00 appointment.
The amount of hay in our barn after culling our dairy herd, was just right to overwinter a horse.
Suddenly it seemed like what had been just a senseless waste served some purpose.
A week before his funeral, I drove Ron's truck and trailer to our farm. It was surreal, sitting in his seat, adjusting the mirrors, pushing aside his old hat, his glasses, gloves. She was nervous with the cow in the stall beside her, cat's dropping onto her manger at night from the hay loft above, the sounds of toddlers skimming snow in sleds....
But when the "littles" came to say goodnight to the "Pony" in the barn under the light of one bulb, I watched with awe as she bent her head down to the level of our resident one- year old for a nice chubby-fingered scratch on the forehead. It gave the impression of a deep curtsey and a deep courtesy.
I know at first blush it doesn't make much sense, trying to teach a fancy- stepping Tennesee Walker with the attitude of a "fine lady" to work under harness, and drag farm equipment around, but we're going to try it, because at the end of the day, these days, everybody just wants a job to do, and she's no different. I don't know why Ron picked us...but I do know that the first day I met "Lady Nugget Muffin" I had the feeling that she kind-a picked us. I guess he knew that.
When you are training horses the trick is to remain calm, though all hell breaks loose around you. A lot can seem like hell to a prey animal like the horse. Even stuff that isn't- like a man on a bicycle, or a chicken stretching her wings. Don't judge her reaction harshly. Don't react yourself. The one fixed point of stability and quiet must be.....you.
Seems like a worthwhile exercise in these times.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation
Front
By Wendell Berry
One of the articles
in Reclaiming
Politics (IC#30)
Originally published in Fall/Winter 1991 on
page 62
Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context
Institute
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, copyright © 1973 by Wendell Berry, reprinted by permission of
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
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