"I am fond of the sound of horses in the night. The lifting of feet. Stamping. The clicking of their iron shoes against rock. They mouth one another's withers and rear and squeal and whirl and shuffle and cough and stand and snort. There is the combined rumblings of each individual gut. They sound larger than they are. The air tastes of horses, ripples as though come alive with their good-hearted strength and stamina." ~ Mark Spragg Where Rivers Change Direction
My first experience with horses was in England when I was very small. A neighbour of my Grandad's had two or three little retired pit ponies. They were blind and rather moth-eaten and very ill-tempered. My Grandad would plonk me down on the back of one and away it would go! I was sort of like those poor kids that hang on for dear life to the backs of sheep at rodeos. It was only a matter of time until the pony tossed me over a fence or into a ditch or simply stopped, its little legs rigid and back humped, while I sailed over its head and into the inevitable puddle or cowplop. I loved it! I would beg my Grandad over and over again to put me back on the pony so I could "ride". My love for horses, even with such an inauspicious beginning and with such a puny and crotchety 'horse', was imbedded deep in my fibre. I had my own horse eventually. My father won him in a poker game. That's a whole other story but suffice it to say that that horse had a great deal in common with the acerbity of the pit ponies.
My Grandad had a draft horse - a Percheron I think it was. One summer he was using the horse to attempt to pull out a large stump. It was a huge, stubborn stump that had tangled its searching roots deep into the earth and stone in just the place that my Grandad wanted to extend his garden. The horse hauled all summer at that stump. The stump was steadfast and tenacious. So was the horse. My job was to wipe the sweating, heaving flank with a wisp of hay (though I barely reached his belly) or to hold the bucket while he took gasping gulps of water. He would nibble at the hair on the top of my head.
The stump won, ultimately, and stayed where it was while my Grandad sought a different place for his garden. But that horse never said no; never balked at yet another day of fruitless and exhausting labour; accepted both the hearty 'good boy' slaps on his neck and the switch at the back of his legs when Grandad was frustrated. And its eyes were gentle and forgiving.
Here at Fat Hummingbird Farm, horses are plentiful on the surrounding fields and pastures. But unlike the hot-blooded jumpers and Thoroughbreds that are used for pleasure riding in the Western Coast area where we are from, or the quarter horses and scrawny cayuses on the Prairies on which I was brought up, almost all the horses here are draft horses. I've never seen such a variety of draft breeds in one place!
There are three Percheron yearlings, like my Grandad's, still some time away from their eventual bulk and size. They have been in the same huge field all summer. Each time I see them they are that much taller with a bit more muscle.Then there are the Norwegian Fjord and Icelandic horses - looking even in the heat of summer like they are bracing their wide butts against cold and icy winter winds, the Clydesdales (with a foal with the too big ears and feet of a hound puppy), and the Halflingers that seem to be at several places. Another neighbour has a sizeable herd of American Creams - mares and foals, turning from creamy white to dirty and yellow brown over the course of the summer. Even the neighbour who does Dressage does it on a Canadian - his bulk not belying his ability to dance. Some use the drafts for horse-logging up the sides of our mountain. Some use them for pulling competitions or wagon hauling. Some use them for that same inexorable stump pulling. Some - well just because horses make the landscape beautiful.
There have been times in my life when an experience with draft horses has been magical. On a cold, wintry day back on the Prairies, a friend took my boys and myself to visit an old farmer he knew. A few miles north of Fort McLeod in Alberta, near the Standoff reservation. Stitching back and forth across the land from one backcountry road to another. Finally dipping down into the coulees and into a dilapidated farmyard. The man and his wife invited us into the warmth. Floors that creaked, shelves that groaned. We were served tea and stale cake.
The farmer took us to see his horses. Seven. White, very large, very old horses. Bony, thin, huge feet. Draft horses of some ilk. Our friend, Jim, said this man was the last of the horse farmers in that whole area and that he and those horses had grown old together. When both the farmer and the horses were young they would plough fields and haul hay. Sometimes they would drag stones out of a field with a sledge.
They panicked at the sight of us strangers. Flared nostrils. Rolling eyes. Enclosed in a pen sloped up a muddy, stone-studded hill, they milled up and down. Galloped in circles, snorting and whinnying. Their hooves created sparks as they struck the rime-slicked stones. Like the god, Thor, with his hammer and anvil. Their forms morphed and transmuted, each with the other.
"They are ghost horses," one of my sons sighed.
And yes, ghosts swirled in the snowflakes that were just beginning to fall and in the air that eddied around these ancient horses that flew sparks from their hooves.
It started to snow harder and the horses swarmed nearer us, the steam rising from their backs. One of my sons reached his hand up to the face of one of the horses and she blew her equine breath with pink-rimmed snorts into the winter cold - and she nibbled the pom-pom of the toque on the top of his head.
