I have always had a special way with animals, and communing with them is part of it. My mother told a story from the summer of 1943, when I was half way to 4 years old. A neighbor across the street phoned to ask whether she knew that I was sitting on the sill of an open, second-floor window and dangling my legs over the side. My mother came to the master bedroom door, found it closed, and paused, worried that opening it might startle me into falling. She assumed casualness when she opened the door and calm when she asked me what I was doing. My answer: “I’m talking with the birds.” I quote her accurately and believe that she quoted me accurately because I claimed to be talking “with,” not “to,” the birds. A nice story from my childhood.
You can easily accept that I talk to my pets—anyone can, and most do—but you can also easily doubt any suggestion that they know what I am saying, much less “talk” with me. You would be so wrong. Fast forward 65 years to a stunning exchange with Edgar, at the time, my favorite cat. In his early years, he and my other cat slept in the garage. Before bedtime, I would cuddle him on his back, rock him in my arms as if he were a baby, and tell him what a good cat he was and how much I loved him. One night, carrying him to the garage in this way and without altering my voice, I asked whether he had any idea of what I was saying about loving him. On hearing my question, he, who had been looking toward the garage door, snapped his head to stare directly, intently, into my eyes, with a look which answered, “Are you crazy; do you think for one minute that I do not know?” To say that I was stunned understates the effect of his uncanny response. I put him in the garage, fixed myself my one evening drink, and collapsed into my reading chair to recover.
I had not known that there was a name for someone like me until about 10 years earlier. While Marianne and I were watching Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998), she labeled me. In a particularly poignant scene, the protagonist Tom Booker waits patiently in a field until runaway Pilgrim, physically damaged, psychologically wounded, returns to him. She elbowed me and whispered, “That’s you.” I am pretty sure that she referred to the man, not the horse, because she knew about me from watching me with some partly trained horses on her parents’ place in Tennessee.
Now is the time to tell my one and only horse story. In the summer of 1960, I was a 20-year-old counselor at a camp which I had attended for three summers in my mid-teens. (Allow me to put in a plug for The Prairie Trek Expedition of the Cottonwood Gulch Foundation, which my son also attended.) In those years, the camp had paid a wrangler and rented horses from the nearby Elkins ranch, near Grants, NM. About that time, Mike Todd, Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband, died in a plane crash on the ranch; as a result, the discovery of a large uranium deposit led to a change in its business. The camp hired another ranch to provide a wrangler and horses. When its horses, variably tamed and trained, arrived, I sat on the corral fence and watched them bite, bump, and kick their way to a social structure. I wanted to ride the top horse (I do not like lines).
That evening, a sliced apple in hand, I walked to the corral to meet my horse, whom I named “Sport.” As I entered the corral, all the horses ran to its opposite side and, with their heads together over the railing, showed me their backsides. “Sport,” I commanded, “come here”; no movement. Again: “Sport, come here”; again, no movement. And again: “Sport, come here”; third-time charm. Sport had no idea that he had a name, much less that one, but he either responded as the top horse or knew (“vibes”) that I was calling him. He raised and turned his head, his eyes pop-eyed, to look at me. Then he ducked it again among the heads at the rail. When I called his name and gave the command a fourth time, he backed out, walked over to me, and took the first half of the apple from my hand. When he started to turn back, I commanded him to stay for the second half. He took it, whirled, and returned to the herd. Day one.
Days two and three were quite different, though their pattern was the same. After breakfast and after lunch, I went to the corral. I called Sport, he came over to me, and the wrangler and I saddled him. I mounted him, the wrangler opened the gate, and off we went. For what seemed like the entire morning or afternoon, but was probably about half an hour, Sport did everything he could think of doing (and probably a few things which he did not have to think of doing) to get me off his back. I had ridden Eastern as a child and Western as a camper, but breaking a semi-wild horse was, as they say in the military, above my pay grade. Still, I managed. Suddenly, in our fourth session, Sport stopped; he did not surrender but accepted me as a worthy rider. We were inseparable thereafter. We enjoyed each other’s company on morning and afternoon rides with the campers—the wrangler allowed me to lead on the top horse, and he brought up the rear—and by ourselves on twilight rides under moon and stars.
When the corral gate broke open one night, all of the horses but two departed for the ridge above the camp; Sport and the wrangler’s horse stayed. When the wrangler and I discovered the breakout, we saddled up for the round up. Sport knew what needed to be done with or without any suggestion from me. When he leapt over logs or cut around trees, he took care—I know that I took make-sure care—that I did not hit my head against an overhanging branch or smash my knee against a tree.
The bond between Sport and me was strong, and, as it turned out, his feelings for me were exclusive. When I left Sport to take a group of campers on a three-week hiking and camping trip in the Four Corners area, the arts-and-crafts counselor told the wrangler that she wanted to ride him. The wrangler advised against it; she insisted. He explained that he thought that Sport would not let anyone but me ride him, that he himself would not try; she persisted. So he saddled Sport, helped her up, and opened the gate. It took him only a few seconds and a few steps to throw her into a tree, break her arm, and give her a concussion. No one rode Sport until I returned. I pondered how I could keep him, but, as a rising junior in college and the son in a family with no horse experience after the automobile came into use, there was no possibility. For more than 60 years, I have often thought fondly of Sport, wondered what kind of life he had after that summer, and hoped that he found another rider whose company he could enjoy.
This story relates an example of the kind of bonding which can develop between man and beast. It began with my setting up what I call leadership of a domestic animal, an approach mixing firmness of purpose with gentleness of manner, but it settled into a reciprocal relationship of trust, respect, and affection. I knew what I wanted in a horse, found it in Sport, and liked him; he found what he wanted in a rider and liked me.
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