A horse can hear your heartbeat from four feet away. If your pulse is elevated, the horse will interpret it as danger. The notion of staying calm around a horse because they can sense your fear comes not from the worry it might exploit you, but from the chance it will become a nervous wreck and a danger to itself and to you.
Fear is the dominant emotion in horses.
Horses experience the world in excruciating detail. This means, according to animal behaviorist Temple Grandin in her book Animals in Translation, they are “hyper-specific,” a term that comes from autism research. Hyper-specificity means seeing the differences between things a lot better than the similarities. So a horse “might not see the forest at all. Just trees, trees and more trees.”
Temple Grandin, herself autistic, believes that horses and autistic people have a lot in common. Horses can see things in the shadows that we can’t see. If they are scared, they will run.
*
“Do you want to have a ride too?”
It’s a bright June day in Burwood, on Christchurch’s edgelands, just 10 minutes from my suburban house. I’ve brought my 10-year-old son T to the local riding centre because he has suddenly shown an interest in horses. I’ve been waiting years for this moment. He’s sitting astride a ragged palomino pony called Fonzie. His face is unsure but I keep up an excited tune of reassuring noises for him. He is just happy to be around animals; whether on their backs or beside them, it doesn’t seem to make much difference. He prefers animals to humans, who insist on making eye contact with him and asking him questions.
I touch the pony’s soft muzzle and breathe in its warm, horsey smell, which pricks the inside of my nose in the same comforting way a room full of yellowed secondhand paperbacks does. Funny, the way a smell can reach back through time and connect your past to your now – a shot to the brain.
“Why not?” I say. “Yes.”
It’s probably 25 years or more since I sat on the back of horse. I choose a helmet, identical to the one I wore as a teenager and probably just as old, from the dark, muffled tack shed. The step is worn in a dip and shines with years of use. The helmets have numbers scrawled on them in black ink: head measurements. Nothing for show here; it’s all brisk and practical. A whiteboard above the shelf list names of horses, also in black ink: Penny, Charm, Mystic, Jubilee, Fonzie, Bo Peep… the list goes on. Beside them are girls’ names – Ruby, Sarah, Becky, Lily, Harper – and the date for the coming Sunday.
“This is Jubilee,” says the teenage girl who is holding her reins, slightly bored. Jubilee is a fine-boned chestnut with a flaxen mane. The hair on her neck is corrugated, as if she’s had a perm, or been sweating. I have doubts about whether she will be able to take my weight, but the girl, Becky, seems unconcerned. “I’ll give you a leg up.”
My hands move without me asking them to. They’ve done this before, a long time ago. I stretch out my hand and grasp the stirrup, pull it into my armpit until the strap is taut. It fits snugly, so I know it’s the right length for my legs – some weird mathematical or anatomical fact. I gather up the hardened reins in my left hand and grip the back of the saddle with my right. I bend my left leg at the knee, my foot behind me. Becky grasps my shin and pushes me up.
*
My earliest memory of riding a horse is not my own. It’s my father’s: me on a pony, cantering in the distance, hair flying. When I put it together with my vague recollection of that holiday place, Te Maika, I see a lone house in flat marshland, a sunset, myself in silhouette. I was four years old. The way he told it, I was absorbed by the large Māori family who lived on the next property over and my love of horses was born.
I remember the next rides better. At the horse trekking place near Makara on a school trip. I am five. Rain patters on leaves and my hands grasp wet reins. The horse begins to bounce.
“That’s called trotting,” says a red-cheeked woman. She radiates reassurance. Her smile says don’t be scared.
“I know,” I say.
“She’s a natural,” the woman tells my mother, who rides behind me, and I inhale with pride.
The next memory is soon after, in a ring at a riding school. I panic as Mum, walking, leads me towards a pole lying slightly raised off the ground.
“It’s gonna jump!” I cry.
The horse steps over, still walking. Its hoof knocks the wood on its way through. My brother mocks me for days after (“It’s gonna jump!”).
Another memory. I’m sitting on a couch, watching Follyfoot on a small black and white TV. On screen, somebody leads an Appaloosa away from the camera. Somehow, even so young, I know that it is called an Appaloosa, a cream horse with small brown splodges scattered over its hocks.
“Look, Rach,” says my dad. “That horse has a spotty bum. Just like your mum.” My mother makes a low grumbling sound and shifts in the seat next to me. I don’t take my eyes off the TV.
And another, this time on a trip with mum’s new boyfriend and his kids. There are bunk beds, new raincoats torn on barbed-wire fences, and hot pools, with instructions not to put our heads under or bugs will crawl into our ears and we’ll die. It’s somewhere in the central North Island. My memories are underscored by photographic evidence. I’m on a dirt road, wearing a skivvy, purple trousers and gumboots, holding the saddle of an enormous patchwork skewbald. The stirrups dangle far below my feet. My future step-sister Kate jogs along beside me, holding the reins. My blonde head is bare and my teeth grip my bottom lip – concentration, not fear – and I’m looking into the camera, my eyes delighted crescents.
*
There’s a small bird in my stomach that lifts its wings as I straighten myself in the saddle and my feet find the stirrups on their own. I’m as tall as I am supposed to be, as though two legs were never enough to offer me the right view of the world. I remember this feeling. How the back of a horse always felt like my natural habitat. Even a day where I saw a horse in the distance was a good day. The best day.
Ahead of me, Becky takes Fonzie’s lead rope and leads T through a gate and I follow. Jubilee slumps from side to side, reluctant to leave the comfort of the pen. My stomach settles. I’ve got this. Becky leads us into an arena – if you can call it that. It’s more of a grassless paddock. In it, six horses of various size, shape and colour walk around in a circle with riders of all ages. Some of them are being led with small children on their backs. This is not a fancy riding stables. The tack on these animals is worn, and the horses are half asleep; they know the drill. Every now and then, a man in the middle calls out trotting now! to one of the riders, who will sit to attention and urge a reluctant mount into picking up the pace. A couple of the ponies have more zip in them, with eager-faced girls in jodhpurs on their backs, bursting into a sporadic canter.
Robert runs the riding school. He’s middle-aged and lean, with uncut brown hair and loose curls. His face holds the deep grooves of someone who has worked outside their whole life. He wears a plaid shirt and jeans – no jacket despite the chill – and dusty boots. A wad of bank notes sticks out from his breast pocket. He keeps up a constant chat, without ever making direct eye contact, about nothing in particular, tossing off kind words to the kids, or instructions – sit up straight, give him a bit more of a boot. He comes across as a self-contained man who has lived this routine with these horses all his life. Later, a friend in her 40s who grew up in Christchurch will tell me that she came to these same stables as a child, that Robert did exactly what he is doing now, except he was a teenager, and his parents ran the place. I picture a younger him, with a smooth face, his slight, tense body skipping into the wind. Now, his small son plays in the fine dirt of the arena with a toy digger.
We walk around the paddock with the rest of the horses, and when Robert calls out trotting now I squeeze my calves and then tap Jubilee’s narrow sides with my heels because squeezing didn’t quite do the job. My body knows what to do as she lurches into a rocky trot. I post. Up, down, up, down, each step propelling me up out of the saddle.
“You’ve done this before,” says Robert, and suddenly I’m that five-year-old girl again, feeling ridiculously proud for something as simple as trotting on a horse. I eye up the low jumps set up in the middle of the arena.
When it comes time to pay, I hand him a $20 note and he gestures to a giant bag of coins balanced on a fencepost. “Take eight dollars from there.” He has charged us six dollars each for a half hour ride. Later, when I get to know him better, I will tell him he should charge more and he will shake his head.
“Nah, families around here can’t afford much.”
The riding centre is to the north-east, close to the side of Christchurch most badly affected by the earthquakes. This was all wetlands once, and when the ground shook, first in September 2010, and again in February 2011, the ground became liquid once more, swallowing houses or, at the very least, cracking them beyond repair. Now is not the time to upgrade the riding school, though looking around at the worn tack, the threadbare saddle blankets and the ancient wooden fences, I can see it’s in desperate need of an overhaul. Perhaps this is why other riding schools look down on Robert and his band of ragged horses, walking around and around their paddock. But the horses are loved and cared for; this is confirmed by the gaggles of long-necked teenage girls who volunteer at the stables just so they can be near them.
The next time I come back to the riding centre, I’m alone. I’m on Mystic, the tallest horse in the place, though, at 15.2 hands, no giant. I feel more stable than on dainty Jubilee but my stirrups are too long. Once again my body starts working before I think about it: foot out of the stirrup, unbuckling and pulling the strap, shortening the leather and putting back into place. Muscle memory. It reminds me that my love of horse riding resides in my body; it always has.
Robert is satisfied that I have enough experience to leave the small arena/paddock and enter the unsupervised big paddock, the one lined with the winter skeletons of poplars and willows. It has a track around the outside, and a small forest at the end with logs and makeshift jumps. Enough room for a canter. I haven’t cantered in years. The last time, I lost my instinct for it, was thrown by my stepfather telling me to grip with your knees. This played havoc with my balance. Instead, this time I drive my weight into my heels, squeeze Mystic through a trot and them I’m doing it. I’m flying. The grin on my face comes from deep within, from that girl in Te Maika on the pony, cantering into the sunset. There you are, I think.
*
Temple Grandin says that unlike dogs, horses don’t need our approval. We have to earn their affection, not the other way around. The novelist Jane Smiley wrote about buying a horse and feeling flattered when it nickered to her in greeting after only knowing her for two days. I have felt that desire for a horse’s approval.
Neary every woman I know devoured pony stories as a girl – Black Beauty, The Black Stallion, My Friend Flicka and seemingly endless Jills, Jackies and Jinnys – and I wonder if pony books are the precursor to romance novels for girls, with the horse standing in for the love interest. We prize horses for their beauty; we flush when they greet us in recognition. It does feel a bit like a crush. Developing a relationship with a horse can be almost as rewarding as a human-human friendship – certainly my autistic kid thinks so. And it’s almost impossible to develop a trusting relationship with a riding school horse that is regularly ridden by hundreds of different people.
Here’s another way being around horses is a lot like romance: they cause our brains to release neurotransmitters – oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine. They can also cause a drop in cortisol, the stress hormone. So while they might be able to sense our agitation, they are also actively reducing that agitation in the first place, calming us down, making us feel happy.
*
It’s 4pm and I’m sitting at my desk with my stomach in knots, wrestling a festival programme into a budget that just won’t fit. I decide I need a break and I start looking on Trade Me at horses for sale. Could I?
Don’t be ridiculous, I tell myself, and close my laptop.
I need a drink. Or something even better. I pack up my things and leave, swinging by home to change and to pick up T from the babysitter. I love this city sometimes because by 4.55pm he’s sitting on Fonzie and I’m sitting on Charm, a leggy and grouchy bay mare, while our shadows – eight legs, four heads – stretch long across the paddock. It’s never fun to have something that you are convinced is pure magic explained in purely scientific terms. My work stress is forgotten and I choose to believe it’s not simply brain chemistry but something less tangible, more a shifting, mystical energy.
We stay until the sun drops down behind the stable, taking its meagre warmth with it, and the sky begins to darken. I plot when I’ll be able to return.
*
I lease a horse for the summer from a horse trekking outfit up by the Waimakariri River. His name is Rocky. He’s a gorgeous black standardbred, 16.2 hands high, with a beautiful nature and a slow canter that feels like flying on a magic carpet. The week before the lease, Jubilee, the dainty chestnut, threw me, deliberately. I landed hard on my elbow, and it swelled up to the size of a golf ball. Now it’s settled to a deep bruise a handspan across. It was unsettling, but I figured it was a one-off and I hadn’t been seriously injured. Rocky and I get to know each other over a couple of lessons in the arena – a proper one this time – and on the second week I take him out for a ride by the river. It’s a beautiful day.
It takes 12 milliseconds for a horse to react to something it is frightened by, and that reaction is usually to run. In a field near the river, Rocky bolts. I feel the force of this thunder gathering beneath me and all I can think about is the day when I was 13 and a horse spooked at something in the shadows of an orchard and took off. I had to keep my head down, apple tree branches smashing into my helmet, and hold on. It swerved at the end of the row of trees and I sailed over its shoulder and into a stand of oil drums, where I was knocked unconscious for a moment before I started wailing.
All the dopamine, all the warm feelings, all the stress relief of the last few months evaporates and all I can do is haul on the reins, trying to keep my balance, which makes things worse. I’m not sure if Rocky can hear my hammering heart and is now panicking, or if he’s just responding to my poor horsemanship, but now he’s weaving as well as bolting. I am terrified. It’s a miracle I stay on.
The fall from Jubilee combined with Rocky’s unscheduled gallop add up to the absolute certainty in my head that the next time I get on a horse, it will bolt, and I will fall off and I will die. Nothing can change my mind. It is just a fact. To prove it to myself, I watch endless YouTube videos of terrible horse riding fails, from humorous mishaps to all-out tragedy. I can’t stop myself. It becomes an obsession, a compulsion, in the same way that those after-work rides were a compulsion.
I’ve visited that first riding centre a couple of times with the kids, but I don’t get on a horse myself. Since Covid, you can no longer just turn up and find a ride; you have to book ahead, which means the lustre of spontaneity is lost. But I don’t need to ride to appreciate horses. I can store away my past horse encounters, deep inside my muscles, my memory. I still get a familiar thrill when I come across a horse and it deigns to pay me attention. I can draw on that memory to write novels for young people that combine my love of horses and dark folklore.
My kid, now a teenager, still squeals in delight when we spot a horse. Even a day where we see one in the distance is still a good day. The best day.
Rachael King’s latest middle-grade novel The Grimmelings (Allen and Unwin, $25), a fantasy centred on a family who run a horse-trekking business on a remote lakeside farm, outsold every other New Zealand book in March. It will be published in the UK on May 9 by Guppy Books; Rachael leaves Ōtautahi next week to travel for its British launch, and for a research trip to the Outer Hebrides.
