All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

Wonderful strange stories from around the world

The Horse Yeller

The dawn brings rain. Mud everywhere. Rats and stench in the stables. It is my first visit to the Cumberland Riding School in Northern England and it will be my last. I am 17, and I just hate horses.

And yet I know it makes no sense, because I come from a part of the country where wiry, weather-beaten vets can look into a horse’s mouth and tell you its life history, while I couldn’t even tell you what it had for breakfast.

A horse is led out from the stable and everything goes dark. Its massive chestnut frame eclipses the sun. It snorts it shivers, and it has and erection the size of Italy. I show visible fear. Well, wouldn’t you?

My head is hot and full of mistakes and questions like, Where’s the ignition? How do you stop the thing? And, Why is it looking at me like that?

I am saddled up and reigned in. The instructor says, “You must show confidence, because riding a horse is just like life. Either you do it, or it does you.” And with that, he slaps the beast’s rump. It responds by accelerating to warp gallop in 4.3 seconds. Show confidence indeed. Where’s the damn handbrake? Where is this thing taking me anyway?

I only spoke to one other person that morning while maintaining a manic and anxious conversation with myself the entire time. Another rider, a professional of course, waved in greeting from across a field as we flew past. “Out for a ride are we?” he shouted cheerfully.

“No! Being taken for one! Aaaaggghhh…,” I yelled back, as the horse plunged into some impenetrable woodland at a wicked rate.

In 1927, General Sir Raleigh Egerton wrote: “I consider that the horse has a humanising effect on men, and the longer we can keep horses for artillery and cavalry the better it will be for the British army, because thereby you keep up the high standard of intelligence in the man from his association with the horse”.

An excellent point, but it wasn’t helping me and it didn’t do much for King Richard III either, come to think of it. Only and English king would scream, “A horse, my kingdom for a horse!”

You wouldn’t find any respectable Mongolian warlord swapping his kingdom for a lousy nag. No sir, he’d just take your horse, and quite probably your kingdom, your best women, and your finest Scotch as well. Then he’d kill you. To warlords, the horse was cheap, dispensable, and disposable yet still rated higher than people for its usefulness.

The cavalry in Genghis Khan’s army had five spare horses each. These animals were short, muscular, and very, very fast. They weren’t just horses, they were Mongolia’s answer to the Exocet missile; whip, gallop, and Zap!

Khan’s horsemen were particularly adept at shooting targets to the rear as they flashed past—and each rider carried an arsenal of different arrowheads. Some were solely for killing, while others were designed to give a terrifying whistle which could also take half your face off. A whistle-while-you-maim arrowhead. They could unleash six arrows a minute, and Khan’s armies were huge—usually numbering around 80,000 at any one time. So, wait a second; that’s 6 x 80,000 a minute, whistling, and deadly.

Each man carried: a bow made of wood, sinew, and horn; up to three quivers of arrows; a lance with a vicious hook and snare; a sabre; and a dagger strapped to his left arm. Small squares of iron were sewn into the lining of his boots to protect his calves, and to give maximum force when he ran out of weapons and had to resort to, well, putting the boot in.

This gruesome cavalry decimated the once elegant city of Heart in Western Afghanistan, over a thousand years ago. In the years that followed, old men could still be found in lonely, dusty alleys shaking their heads slowly and muttering to no one in particular, “He left nine….just nine of us.”

The annual gorugen, or great hunt, became the basic training for Khan’s recruits. Encircling animals in a given area, the horsemen would close in. Each rider was allotted one arrow. Failure to kill met with ridicule. There was none of this, “Now, Gorzak Bulba, let’s see you give the appropriate hand-signals, while maintaining proper control of the animal.” No. T. pass the test, you had to kill something. Cool. Mongolian cool.

Assuming we have all lived past lives—and I do—no matter how hard I try, every time I bring up the file named “Horse,” there is nothing. No memory, no association. Zilch.

Anyhow, I’m not sure I even want to know what I did in my previous lives. For a start, I’m still here. Which means I keep getting sent back. Which means they can’t have been all that useful or redeeming.

But I do have a distinct feeling of deja vu whenever I dream of Khan’s great armies. I reckon I was in his artillery battery. Nothing flash, mind you. In current parlance, the position would be the equivalent of a trash can attendant on a US aircraft carrier. I don’t think we cared much, and I have a strong suspicion that men who were in artillery were an unruly mob, and were left pretty much to their own devices—of just vices. We did the dirty work—like catapulting disease-ridden corpses over the walls of besieged cities in countries whose names were always preceded by the word “Outer.”

I seem to recall the job was actually a promotion. The wages were bad, the hours were long, and the smell was indescribable. But we got to meet plenty of women—some of whom were actually catapulted back over the city walls. Divorce, medieval style.

The horse at war. The horse at play. In 1930, a captain in the British army quipped, “The tank would never replace the horse until a sporting use could be made for it. “good point, because people have being having a ball on horseback for centuries.

Remember the quintain? Perhaps not. But surely you’ve heard of the gibbet? No? Ah…OK. A quintain is a wooden construction that looks exactly like a gibbet, which was a simple wooden frame that was used to hang people from. It could once be found on nearly every village common in England’s green and pleasant land.

Later, the gibbet was refined into the quintain, which, instead of having a noose at one end, now dangled a heavy sack full of wet horse dung. It’s purpose was fun and challenge.

The idea was that the horse rider, armed with a long stave, would come at the thing at full gallop and try and hit the sack, making sure he ducked of accelerated away fast enough before the bag of dung spun viciously around and knocked him senseless to the ground.

Good fun to play and great fun to watch—especially after 12 pints of 14thcentury English Dogbolter home-brewed beer inside you.

What’s more, nobody whispered to horses in the middle ages

By Roger Beaumont

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