The Rural Life (15 page)

T
here’s no such thing as a horse whisperer. There never has been and never will be. The idea is an affront to the horse. You
can talk and listen to horses all you want, and what you’ll learn is that they live on open ground way beyond language and
that language, no matter how you characterize it, is a poor trope for what horses understand about themselves and about humans.
When it comes to horses, only three things matter, patience, observation, and humility, all of which were summed up in the
life of an old man who died not long ago in Northern California, a man named Bill Dorrance.

Dorrance was ninety-three, and until only a few months before his death he still rode and he still roped. He was one of a
handful of men, including his brother Tom, Ray Hunt, and Buck Brannaman, who in separate ways have helped redefine relations
between the horse and the human. Bill Dorrance saw that subtlety was nearly always a more effective tool than force, but he
realized that subtlety was a hard tool to exercise if you believe you’re superior to the horse. There was no dominance in
the way Dorrance rode or in what he taught, only partnership. To the exalted horsemanship of the vaquero—the Spanish cowboy
of eighteenth-century California—he brought an exalted humanity, whose highest expression is faith in the willingness of the
horse.

There’s no codifying what Bill Dorrance knew. Some of it, like how to braid a rawhide lariat, is relatively easy to teach,
and some of it, thanks to the individuality of horses and humans, can’t be taught at all, only learned. His legacy is exceedingly
complex and self-annulling. It’s an internal legacy. The more a horseman claims to have learned from Dorrance, the less likely
he is to have learned anything at all. That sounds oblique, but it reflects the fact that what you could learn from Dorrance
was a manner of learning whose subject was nominally the horse but which extended itself in surprising directions to include
dogs, cattle, and people. If you really learned it, you would know it was nothing to boast about.

There’s no mysticism, no magic, in this, only the recognition of kinship. Plenty of people have come across Bill Dorrance
and borrowed an insight or two, and some have made a lot of money by systematizing or popularizing what they seemed to think
he knew. But what he knew will never be popular, nor did he ever make much money from it. You can’t sell modesty or undying
curiosity. It’s hard to put a price on accepting that everything you think you know about horses may change with the very
next horse.

T
his has been a rare grass year in parts of north-central Wyoming, in the drainages east of the Bighorn Mountains. As one rancher
put it, “You couldn’t have dialed the rains in better.” The rain fell, the grass grew, the sun came out, the grass cured,
and in the early weeks of July there was a kind of tonsorial fever on the hayground watered by Piney Creek, Clear Creek, and
Prairie Dog Creek—men and women neatly scissoring the grass with machine-driven sickle blades. The windrows, long lines of
cut grass drying in the sun, stood almost laughably high. If the profits of ranching lay in good grass instead of the vagaries
of the cattle market, these ranchers would have been rich, their prosperity numbered in round bales, square bales, and enormous
loaves of grass.

Everyone seemed to feel the abundance. At the Sheridan Fairgrounds a ranch roping took place one Sunday morning, a leisurely
horseback competition based on the work cowboys do when branding or doctoring cattle. Once a steer was roped, head and heels,
it became another rider’s job to step off his horse and lay the steer down and release the ropes. But this summer the yearling
steers were so fat they had no flanks to lie down upon. They lolled and bellowed and showed their great grass-fed bellies
to the small crowd in the grandstand, then trotted nimbly away to rejoin the herd. Outside Sheridan, a band of riders on newly
broken colts rode through an uncut field of grass, the seedheads brushing against chaps and saddles and raising the sound
of the wind. Riders began to sneeze and the colts to fidget, not yet broken to the sound of sneezing.

Along every road, every path, a fringe of opulent grasses grew, ligules shading into lacquered purple, blades into the blue
of dusk, awns into an almost roanlike coloration. In the waste clearings grew foxtail barley—supple, iridescent. Sagebrush
rose along the fence lines in sharp-scented thunderheads. South of Sheridan, near Ucross, the hayfields are edged with sloughs,
and in uncut pastures, yellow-headed blackbirds hovered momentarily before settling onto grass heads that dipped slowly beneath
their weight. A buckskin horse at liberty in one of the unmowed fields showed only his back and ears, an island of contentment.

From the time the dew dried in midmorning until full dark, the windrowers moved across the fields, following the curves of
the creek bottoms and the sidehills, laying the grass out in narrow rows like the isobars on a weather map. The balers followed
once the grass had dried, and for a few days birds gathered on the tops of the round bales lying in the fields, looking out
over a terrain that had lost much of its softness.

Then the machines came again—bale stackers for the small bales, farm trucks and tractors with hay forks for the round bales.
On nearly every ranch, the hay was laid in stacks and rows where it would serve as a windbreak, a levee, in more ways than
one, against winter, which suddenly seemed that much nearer once the fields were bare.

I
’m writing from a screened-in porch on the north side of a house in Big Horn, Wyoming. The screens—ten panels framed in dark
green—have decayed over the years. Some have ragged holes in them. Some have sagged, the result of weather and age. But each
retains its power to granulate the world outside, to heighten the contrast between deep shade and the full sun on the leaves.
When a finch lands on a near bough, it’s like watching a Chinese painting come to life, the interwoven texture of the paper
visible beneath the brush strokes. When late afternoon arrives and sunlight hits the screens, you can see only the glow of
the screens themselves.

A line of saplings grows near the porch, and beyond the saplings runs a creek, and beyond the creek there’s a horse pasture
shaded by mature cottonwoods. The other night at twilight, as the birds were giving way to the bats, the robins set up a distracted
whirring in the tallest of the cottonwoods. A great horned owl had settled on a bare bough and was calling, with a thin screech,
to two more owls farther down the pasture. The screens on the porch had already deepened the night, turning the owl into a
silhouette, slowly bobbing its head and shouldering its wings up around its ears.

It wasn’t enough, finally, to watch from the porch. I walked out into the open air, down the pasture road, recapturing the
full resolution of the darkening world, reveling in the fineness, the particularity, of sight. The owl in the tree, watching
back with a gaze as keen as a dog’s nose, was a soft, gray oval, barely discernible from the bark of the cottonwood in which
it sat. It cried all night long, as did its fellows, and in the morning they were gone.

I
n central Iowa the corn is head-high. It runs in perfect regimen right up to the ditches, where cattails and horsetail grass
grow. No need for fences here, for there are few dissenters in a field of corn. On some farms the upright corn leaves are
as dull as old paint. On others they seem to glisten, and a driver passing by at high speed in the seat of a pickup truck
catches a scattered reflection skimming over the acres of seed corn like a school of fish rushing across a saltwater flat.
The geometry of farming seems, if anything, a little purer in the soybean fields, where the black earth flickers between the
rows. The bean fields are very clean, not a weed in sight. They are miracles of suppression as much as miracles of yield.

The gene for orderliness is visible all along the Iowa stretch of the Lincoln Highway. Near Jefferson the beans carry the
trait of neatness to the edge of town, and then the headstones take over, and then the lawns and flower beds, which appear
to have been mowed with barber shears and weeded with tweezers.

At the corner of Chestnut Street, a trompe l’oeil mural was painted nearly thirty years ago on the side of a building that
now houses Mary Ann’s Dress Shop. The mural is a view of Jefferson from out of town to the east, and it confronts a driver
who has just come in from that direction with the illusion of being back where he was five minutes ago. In the painting the
thunderheads are piled high, as they were one evening this week, reproducing perfectly the sensation of being squashed bug-flat
by the heat.

It was so hot that night that the only thing to do was to sit in the air-conditioned pickup cab, listen to the radio, and
drink root beer while the sun went bust. Across the road a few intrepid fairgoers had gathered at the Greene County fairgrounds
to watch cars race on a dirt-track oval of fertile loam. The air filled with the chainsaw throttling of the cars. Songs came
and went, the root beer got stale, and the air-conditioning could barely keep time with the heat, which seemed to be thickening
as the darkness grew.