Horse Sense

Fifteen years ago, I was living alone in the Southern Sierra on 20-odd acres of fenced riverfront property when my friend Natalie called and offered to sell me Whitey, a 12-year-old half-Arab, half-quarterhorse mare she’d rescued from a neighboring cattle ranch.

Real cowboys, at least real cowboys at that ranch, did not ride white horses. Whitey had been kept for children and women to ride, and there weren’t many, especially after the rancher’s wife took the kids and left. After their departure, the rancher told Natalie that Whitey was nothing but a hay burner, and he was going to “chicken her out.” Thank God Natalie, a horse breeder, not only understood the local idiom for butchering, but she also couldn’t bear the thought of it. She bought Whitey and reconditioned her--wormed her, fattened her up, called the farrier, sharpened Whitey’s skills as a mount. When I came for a visit, Natalie had me take Whitey for a spin. Whitey, it turns out, had only benefited from the cowboys’ neglect: She was a fine riding horse, willing to please, polite, well-gaited, careful about where she put her feet. A few days later, after the quality of that ride had sunk in, Natalie phoned and offered Whitey for a very fair price.

Except for the times I galloped Christina Hernandez all over the playground, pretending her long braids were reins, I missed that stage when a girl compulsively reads “Black Beauty” and “Misty of Chincoteague” and thinks mucking stables the apex of privilege. I didn’t start riding until I was 19, and while I liked and admired horses, I had no particular skill or rapport with them, and never acquired the expertise that comes with devout interest.

By the time Natalie offered me Whitey, I owned one horse, a cow pony named Ramon, who, shortly after I bought him, kicked up a strand of barbed wire, panicked, and threw me in such a way that I compressed and fractured several vertebrae and, once I was allowed out of bed, had to wear a metal back brace for three months.

I didn’t hold Ramon’s bad moments against horses in general, however, and continued to ride. I still liked horses and Whitey seemed sweet. Also, living alone and having fenced acreage made me extremely vulnerable to renewed horse ownership. But mostly, a resurgent interest in horses had been piqued by a curious book I found at a rummage sale--a collection by Nobel Prize-winning Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck in which there was a long essay on the Elberfeld horses, known for intellectual phenomena.

Many people have heard of Clever Hans, the horse in Germany who was said to perform feats of mathematical wizardry and to communicate with humans in spelled-out words. A stern, unkind old eccentric named Wilhelm von Osten had taught Hans first to count, then to read, then to listen discerningly to music. It was said that Hans could distinguish between harmonious and discordant chords and had the intellectual capabilities of a 14-year-old schoolboy.

Hans and his owner were quickly discredited. In fact, Clever Hans became known as one of the great frauds of the 20th century. The scientist who discredited him said the horse was not actually doing the mental calculations, but was responding to imperceptible, infinitesimal and unconscious signals from its master.

The discreditor’s reasoning stopped me short in my reading: So what if Hans couldn’t calculate the square root of 9,632--I couldn’t either. The fact that Hans could respond to such subtle signals seemed extraordinary enough. What, I wondered, would an unconscious signal be? And how could you train a horse to decipher it?

According to Maeterlinck, Von Osten died humiliated and embittered--yet he did have a disciple to carry on his work, one Herr Krall, a wealthy manufacturer who inherited Clever Hans and also acquired other horses of his own, Muhamed and Zarif, whom he trained in his spare time. In two short weeks of training, Muhamed was supposedly doing simple addition and subtraction, and four days after that, he began multiplication and division.

Maeterlinck himself visited Elberfeld, where he saw old Hans, now out to pasture after having severely injured himself trying to leap out of his stall to get to a mare. Maeterlinck repoertedly was also able to observe Muhamed and Zarif perform their remarkable calculations. He was left alone with the horses, and asked them mathematical questions whose answers he himself didn’t know; the horses responded with convincing accuracy. Ultimately, Maeterlinck credited neither the horses’ intellectual capabilities nor human trickery, but a grander universal and mystical intelligence that horses are able to access. A problem and its solution exist simultaneously, Maeterlinck believed, and horses, or these horses, hearing one, immediately knew the other.

Whatever the explanation, horses and their intelligence seemed one of the world’s most alluring mysteries. And owning Whitey became a way to investigate it for myself. Having no idea how to begin to tap such intelligence, I asked Natalie how she trained her Morgans to do such generic horse activities as dressage. “Each step of the way,” she said, “I have to reach deep into a horse’s psyche.” Here she made a gesture as if reaching into a high, deep cookie jar “. . . find just the right connection, and make an adjustment.” Her hand turned an invisible faucet.

The day after Whitey came to live at my place, I saddled her and climbed on board. Looking down at her big, sweet head, I thought, how does one reach inside there, gain access to that wiring, locate a level of response? Whitey’s roached mane and long, white bangs offered no clue.

We sauntered down the dirt drive. I patted Whitey’s flank, murmured encouragement. Sleek, well-fed, she walked calmly, avoiding ruts and rocks with a pleasing precision. As we went through the gate and out onto the road, she was alert and responsive and altogether tractable. She was, I thought, as pleased to be with me as I was to be with her.

But when we came to the Tule River bridge, she would not cross. Even where the asphalt road was just turning into a bridge, with guardrails on the sides and solid ground below, Whitey would step no farther. I gave her a little kick with my heels. She went sideways. I turned her around, walked her a few paces off, brought her around again to the bridge. No go. I dismounted, walked on the bridge myself, spoke soothingly, tried leading her across. Nix. I tried pulling her and she actually reared, albeit timidly and not very high. This was ridiculous. Surely she’d crossed countless bridges in her decade as a kid’s saddle horse. I gazed into her bottomless, long-lashed Arabian eyes. Was she genuinely frightened, or testing me? Or was it sheer stubbornness and she simply preferred not to cross? What could I do or say to reach deep down into that equine psyche and change Whitey’s mind about bridges?

Three days later, we still had not crossed the river.

I called Natalie. “Whitey won’t cross the Tule River bridge,” I said, and told her everything I’d tried.

“I have only one thing to say to you,” said Natalie. “Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Whitey hates pain.”

“But I haven’t hurt her,” I cried. “Not even a little!”

“And therein lies your problem,” said Natalie.

I cut a nice, springy willow switch. One with a good little sting to it. I showed this switch to Whitey before I got on her back, and again when I was mounted, so the mere sight of it wouldn’t give her a jolt. I then kept the switch out of sight until we got to the bridge. She started in with her won’t-brook-the-bridge routine with absolute confidence. She shied, executed some fancy side-stepping. Stood stock-still.

I signaled with a tap of my heels, landed one sharp, stinging snap on her snowy rump and clucked. A tremor ran the length of Whitey’s back, and with no more ado we were on the bridge. Walking. I would have to say our pace was stately.

Below us, the saddle-brown water was fringed with greening willows: Surely there were enough switches on those banks to make Whitey learn spelling and counterpoint in music, not to mention algebra, geometry and calculus.

After that initial impasse, however, I never used a switch on her again. And she never did become a Clever Hans. Over time, however, as we galloped on old fire roads and followed deer paths deep into the woods, Whitey revealed her own intelligence to me. She was, it turned out, willing and careful and unusually friendly. Every time I came out of the house with her bridle, she sauntered up to meet me. Most of the time I rode her with only a halter. Such compliance alone seemed miraculous, and it never failed to give me pleasure. In one lingering image, I see us going down a steep slope densely littered with loose, oblong rocks. But Whitey proceeded slowly, meticulously. I gave her lots of rein and leaned back, observing how, with startling precision, she located and placed each foot on solid ground.

I left her behind with a friend when I moved back to the city, and she died not long afterward, an agonizing death I was told, from gorging herself on acorns. As I remember Whitey, though, she is healthy, sound and, in her own fashion, both clever and curious. She learned to lift the hasp on my gate with her whiskery muzzle and, if I’d left the door ajar for the dogs, she’d nudge it open and slip inside. More than once I’d be in my house reading or working at my desk when I’d hear a noise that sounded as if the heavy furniture had come to life and was stumbling through the house. And there she’d be, a suddenly-huge, dappled white horse standing between the sofa and the wood stove, hooves planted in the carpet, ears pricked, big dark eyes calmly taking in where and how I lived.