Read Online The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater - Free Book Online
Authors: Lauren Slater
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does; it always does. Amy takes each pinkie and pulls back the corners of her mouth so a keen whistle sluices through the air and makes its way over the land, a whistle so strong you can almost see it, dipping down and around the curves, sliding over the modest mounds, racing between rocks, and eventually reaching the horses, whose sensitive ears fork forward as they rise up from grazing, turn their majestic necks towards the call, their bodies, all at once, breaking into a trot, and then a canter, the whole herd of them, thirty, no forty, galloping towards the sound so we always hear the horses first before we see them, or rather we
feel
them first, through our feet, the ground vibrating, the thunder building, building to its breaking point just as they round the bend and burst into view, silvers and bays, chestnuts and golds, their bodies surging as though they are one mass moving, as though they will not, cannot, stop; they pound towards us with no sign of ceasing, and each time Clara and I start to step back—an instinct, a preservationist impulse—and each time Amy says
no.
“Stay still,” she commands and so we do, putting our faith in her and the herd, who are now no more than thirty, then twenty, then ten feet away, their necks extended as their hooves lift and hit the ground, closer and closer, our hearts in our throats as the whole hustling lot of them screech to a bunched, sudden stop right at that electric line, their huge chests heaving, their long faces hanging over the wire. Laughing, we open our hands and offer them carrots and apples, loving the ways their dry, rippled lips search our skin for more. We love the huge pools of their eyes. We love the veins visible in their faces. We love their wild gallop just as we love how the chosen one demurely, politely, lowers his head for the halter Amy slips on him, Clara now holding the rope as the horse walks behind her. I stand back and watch. All three—Amy, Clara, and horse—enter the darkness of the barn, the horse flecked with dirt and streaming sweat from his run. Five minutes later the three reappear on the concrete path, the horse totally transformed in his tack, gone domestic, it seems, in a matter of moments. A clip and a clop and my daughter’s chosen mount now stands obediently in the center of the ring as Amy tightens the girth, pulling up the saddle straps so they cinch the horse hard; he doesn’t protest, never protests, and then the stirrup proffered, Clara’s booted foot slipped in, and, with a boost from her teacher she’s up and over, sitting straight—remade, my daughter is—taking on height that isn’t hers.
And as I watch the lesson progress I wonder what sense we might make of this sport and the undeniable draw it has for millions of girls growing into adolescence. Does it have something to do with the paradox at the heart of being female in our time and place, girls told to stay strong and yet to be soft, this contradictory message reflected in the body of a horse, with his mixture of power and delicacy, size and fragility, animals who inspire fear even as—pure prey—they are full of it themselves?
How powerful your daughter must feel up there
, some feminist might proffer, an unfulfilling explanation, too easy, too pat, the flip side of the horse-as-phallus theory that, from what I can see, most people buy into without much reflection.
Like Clara, my own love of horses was paired with a desire to ride, and when there were no horses available, I spent my time locked away in my room with equine novels and plastic ponies, my fascination eclipsing every other childhood interest: the Schwinn bike I’d so loved and on which I’d pedaled my way out of the Golden Ghetto, now hung on a hook in our garage, its sparkling seat furred with dust. I don’t know what became of that bike, or the box I used to warm the egg I found in the forest. I have not carried those things with me into my adulthood, hanging on hard to my ribbons only, in
feel
them first, through our feet, the ground vibrating, the thunder building, building to its breaking point just as they round the bend and burst into view, silvers and bays, chestnuts and golds, their bodies surging as though they are one mass moving, as though they will not, cannot, stop; they pound towards us with no sign of ceasing, and each time Clara and I start to step back—an instinct, a preservationist impulse—and each time Amy says
no.
“Stay still,” she commands and so we do, putting our faith in her and the herd, who are now no more than thirty, then twenty, then ten feet away, their necks extended as their hooves lift and hit the ground, closer and closer, our hearts in our throats as the whole hustling lot of them screech to a bunched, sudden stop right at that electric line, their huge chests heaving, their long faces hanging over the wire. Laughing, we open our hands and offer them carrots and apples, loving the ways their dry, rippled lips search our skin for more. We love the huge pools of their eyes. We love the veins visible in their faces. We love their wild gallop just as we love how the chosen one demurely, politely, lowers his head for the halter Amy slips on him, Clara now holding the rope as the horse walks behind her. I stand back and watch. All three—Amy, Clara, and horse—enter the darkness of the barn, the horse flecked with dirt and streaming sweat from his run. Five minutes later the three reappear on the concrete path, the horse totally transformed in his tack, gone domestic, it seems, in a matter of moments. A clip and a clop and my daughter’s chosen mount now stands obediently in the center of the ring as Amy tightens the girth, pulling up the saddle straps so they cinch the horse hard; he doesn’t protest, never protests, and then the stirrup proffered, Clara’s booted foot slipped in, and, with a boost from her teacher she’s up and over, sitting straight—remade, my daughter is—taking on height that isn’t hers.
And as I watch the lesson progress I wonder what sense we might make of this sport and the undeniable draw it has for millions of girls growing into adolescence. Does it have something to do with the paradox at the heart of being female in our time and place, girls told to stay strong and yet to be soft, this contradictory message reflected in the body of a horse, with his mixture of power and delicacy, size and fragility, animals who inspire fear even as—pure prey—they are full of it themselves?
How powerful your daughter must feel up there
, some feminist might proffer, an unfulfilling explanation, too easy, too pat, the flip side of the horse-as-phallus theory that, from what I can see, most people buy into without much reflection.
Like Clara, my own love of horses was paired with a desire to ride, and when there were no horses available, I spent my time locked away in my room with equine novels and plastic ponies, my fascination eclipsing every other childhood interest: the Schwinn bike I’d so loved and on which I’d pedaled my way out of the Golden Ghetto, now hung on a hook in our garage, its sparkling seat furred with dust. I don’t know what became of that bike, or the box I used to warm the egg I found in the forest. I have not carried those things with me into my adulthood, hanging on hard to my ribbons only, in
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