A Good Honest Horse

Sweet boy

Yesterday, I was watching old videos of my late horse, King of Harts, as he’s only been gone two weeks and I miss him. The earliest records a jump lesson we had together twenty-five years ago. My hair is long and in braids. I’m wearing my first pair of breeches, my first pair of riding boots and gloves. I’m so happy I look about twelve years old. I was thirty-nine.

Hart had just turned ten. I’d been given him to ride because he required a lot of leg and that was something I needed to learn to provide. I knew him already from cleaning his stall while he was in it. He had a habit of making me laugh by head-butting me all over the stall so he could catch a chance at knocking over the manure bucket and running out the half-cleared door. Other times, he’d rub his head up and down my trunk, pinning me against the wall. Everyone told me he scratching an itch. But I felt it was because he liked me.

The boy had quite a reputation in the lowcountry training circuit. He was a handsome lad, strong, very strong, and with a mind of his own. He was smart, talented, but willful. When he went to riding competitions, he was known to enter the jump ring and jump all the jumps with or without a rider and in the order he saw fit. He wasn’t dangerous. But he did have a sense of humor.

In that video of long ago, we’re first seen mounted up and under saddle. My husband, the videographer, asks: And who is this? Having already had my battles with that will of his, I reply: Mr. Heartache.  But that was in the early days. I had no idea what lay in store for us.

Over twenty-five years, that horse taught me joy and patience and loyalty and hard work. We had our disagreements at times and I lost quite a few. But he never held a grudge and oh, the times and sights we shared! The first snowfall in the Blue Hills, the Kiawah River levee at high tide, sunsets and mists and flocks of strange birds, coyote packs, deer, fox, the first sweet wildflowers of spring. We shared trail buddies and stable pals. The mounts of some of the best friends I’ve ever had or will have were his best friends, too.

We aged together. There was a time I figured out his human age in horse years and realized we were the same age that year and then he raced on ahead of me whether I liked it or not. I can’t count the times that happened literally while I was on his back. Once, we were galloping through a rocky wooded path all on our own and I went from two-point, with my head near his neck and my backside in the air, to sit back down on him to slow his pace, but he chose that moment to execute a flying buck, I assume out of spirit and fun. I popped right off,  landed on a pile of small rocks, and passed out. When I awoke, it was to the sight of his giant nostrils breathing air into me. It felt like he was giving me life.

Sometime over our friendship, we brokered a deal, I guess. He stopped being so willful, at least under saddle, and we became, blissfully, a team. He knew what I wanted from him and gave it. I knew what distressed him and made sure we steered clear. On the ground, he followed me, head down, wherever I walked. It could have been the carrots in my pocket.

He was himself til the end. Most of his life he spent in good flesh and with plenty of pep. It was only in the last few months that his topline caved and his ribs stood out. I wondered how he’d get through another winter and I suppose it’s a blessing he doesn’t have to try. But his spirit was still there. The last handwalk we took together, two days before he died, he headbutted me down the road for a bit. And when we turned and headed to the pasture, he clopped along with his tongue stuck out a little, which he always did, even with a bar in his mouth, when he was happy. He was thirty-five and I murmured to him that I loved my old man and thanked him for being a good honest horse.

They say a good, honest horse is one who does what he’s asked or tries hard to do it. A reliable horse. One who’s not going to get silly or hysterical and endanger himself or his rider. Hart might have been strong and willful and smart enough to think he knew best from time to time. He had a few rude habits, like the headbutting. He might try something sneaky once in a while, like drag a bale of hay by the string into his stall. He’d been known to think the person feeding him was taking too long bending over the bucket belonging to the guy beside him and pick up his own bucket in his teeth to bop the feeder over the head. But put the smallest child on him and he was a lamb. For my money, that’s as good and honest as a horse ever needs to be.