Cwmfforest II
Well, I am still alive, have not broken anything, and did not even fall off, though I certainly thought I was going to at one point. The muscles in my legs feel like marshmallow. I may never be a good rider, but I’m beginning to have hopes of progressing from mediocre to fair, and I am certainly learning a great deal about the very complex communication that goes on, or needs to go on, between horse and rider.
I was given a lovely, compact, caramel coloured horse named Hank. I should add that all the horses here are Welsh cobs, and that they come in four sizes: A, B, C and D. I think Hank is probably a B: tall as a large pony, but built like a horse. He has a pretty flaxen mane and tail, and he’s twelve years old: not a fossil like Aramis, but a good steady age. We caught our horses, groomed them, tacked them, and set out shortly before eleven, riding for a couple of hours along forest paths and past farms, trotting quite a bit and having a few perfectly manageable canters in leafy lanes and then we stopped for lunch. I began to think this was going to be easy. After lunch we headed up high onto the slopes of the hills (the Black Mountains, rather), which are covered in bracken and sheep, and prepared for another canter. And this one was absolutely wild: we flew across a track almost totally obscured by the bracken, turning sharp corners. Before I knew it, Hank and I were going awfully fast and I was convinced of my imminent death. I felt myself slipping, and yelled, much to my own embarrassment, but I honestly don’t believe I’ve ever gone so fast on a horse before. It was my fault, of course, not his. Used to riding Aramis, whose very top speed is never enough to catch up with the horse in front of him, I had simply given Hank his head; long reins are a way of telling the horse to run faster. So he did, and in fact ran so fast that when little dips in the trail came up, he simply jumped them. Not having anticipated either the dips or the jumps, my life flashed before my eyes– although the woman behind me told me that actually I was never in any danger of actually falling off but kept my seat quite well.
I learned a couple of very important things. First of all, most of the time even when you feel as though you’re about to fall, you’re really not. Second, when you are riding a well-trained horse (and all these horses are beautifully trained) it is your responsibility to tell them what to do in some kind of comprehensible fashion. When it came time for the last canter of the afternoon, over similar terrain, I (advised by our guide, who was quite patient with my idiocy) hung back, shortened my reins, and checked him a bit when he seemed to be speeding up. And he cantered beautifully and did not jump a thing. I was terrified the whole time, of course, but by the end of it I had learned that if I told him something the right way, then he would do exactly what I said. (This is not always true when he spots a particularly delectable bit of greenery as we’re ambling along, but we’re working on that). There are times when I need to make the decisions (go slower) and there are other times when I need to let him make the decisions (when we’re going down a very steep and treacherous slope, it would be lunacy to try and override the way he wants to place his nimble feet). My decisions are macro, his are micro, but we’re both engaged together in the making of them and they benefit both of us. After all, no one except the Man from Snowy River or Gandalf the White wants to hurl himself headlong down a rocky scree, and neither does any sane horse.
This makes me reflect upon just how specialized a skill riding actually is. Not only must the horse be trained to understand the commands given by the rider, but the rider must be trained to give the right commands. In this particular exchange, my horse was completely competent and I was not– I was talking gibberish when he expected coherent language. Nowadays, of course, most people don’t ride horses much if at all, so it hardly matters. But think again of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, all mounted. Most of them are riding pretty ordinary horses, of whom very little will ever be asked except to advance a bit quicker or stop. A rider as incompetent as I could manage such a horse without much difficulty. The exceptions, of course, are the knight, with his “goode” horse, and the Squire, who has been “in chyvachie” and “wel koude… sitte on hors and faire ryde.” A warhorse would require a different set of competencies than a lady’s palfrey or a priest’s ambler, or even the Monk’s hunter: greater physical strength, for one thing, since warhorses were generally stallions, prized for their aggressiveness. The stallion here (one of the ones I can see from my window) often breaks down a fence to go cover a mare on the other side of the valley. Different commands, too, would be required, to make a horse charge in the noise and the confusion of battle; these would be backed up by mechanical aids, some of them cruel (spurs, vicious bits), but I doubt that all the brute force in the world would be, in and of itself, sufficient to make a horse really effective on the field. The rider too, would need to be able to keep his seat in extraordinary circumstances. A knight who was a really bad rider would be an embarrassment– like poor old Kay in La Mule Sans Frein who can’t even competently ride a mule.