Whispering Back (32 page)

So, for the first weeks, we did nothing but lead her out, taking her to find the best views and tastiest patches of clover, and groom and massage her. She was remarkably unspooky for a young horse, calming down very quickly if a pheasant came up nearby, flushed out by the dogs, and she was fine in moderate traffic. Pennie came back and Amber was noticeably less resistant to the excruciating treatment. Maybe our training methods were making her more manageable. Or maybe she was starting to realise we weren’t trying to torture her.

Eventually Pennie gave us the go-ahead to begin working towards riding her. I took her up to the pen and tried another join-up. But, despite the considerable improvement in her physical condition, she was hardly any better mentally. As soon as she realised where we were headed, she began her goldfish impersonation, and you could almost see the adrenaline rise up in her. Immediately, she was back in survival mode, her attention everywhere but with me, her feet unable to cope with staying in a walk. It would have been unbearably frustrating for me, if I hadn’t been aware that it was at least as frustrating for her. In spite of the fact that first join-up work had not made an impression, I was still hoping to see some good results. But she still seemed to panic altogether at being sent away, however gently, and then not to want to be with me, only going through the motions of following, without seeming to have any trust or confidence in me. For the first few sessions, it was a battle to keep her attention for more than a second or two. Even when I sent her away, she would just scoot around the pen or school, lips popping frantically, looking everywhere else but at me until I showed her the back of my shoulder. Then she would come directly in, still looking away, and stand next to me, but avoid being given a stroke on the head, pushing through my space as if I wasn’t there. Every time she did it, I would go off in the other direction, and she would come round to me, like a barely-tamed barracuda.

In the next session, I tried long-lining her without tack, just using a headcollar, and found that having a line resting on her hocks was far too much for her. Her back end dropped nearly to the ground, like some great cat on springs, and then she bounded off before kicking out so ferociously that the line nearly left my hand, and flew forwards over her back as she pounded around me. No matter how carefully I did it, she could not tolerate the line going behind her. For a split-second she would catch her breath and freeze, and then she was in an unreachable state until well after I stopped. I could get her to stand still, stock still, but moving sent her into a frenzy as she fled the line on the back of her legs. She just couldn’t cope with the idea, in spite of having a rug with straps that go around each back leg in much the same fashion as the long-line. And I knew that her body wasn’t up to much more frantic running around. It just seemed so likely to end in disaster.

We were soon both in a sorry state, dripping with sweat and even more exhausted by the mental strain of it. Horses naturally react strongly to something they fear, but once they realise that no pain is involved, they’ll usually overcome their anxiety, even if it takes a while. But the memory of the huge, ugly pink scar on her back leg seemed to live on in Amber’s mind like a nightmare. She pounded that foot on the sand, her eyes rolling wildly above her mane as she glanced down at it in terror. This was not making it better, I told myself. Her mouth was almost in a spasm, and she stamped the ground and set off again, all by herself. Enough was enough. I reached out desperately, and grasped the end of her nose, as if I could somehow hold back her fear. She stood prone, holding her breath. For a moment, it was like we were the only two beings on the face of the earth. I slowly relaxed my hand, and somehow got her back down. We walked for a long time, drying off the sweat.

Everything we asked her to do that she didn’t like, she blamed us for with venom. After that day with the long-lines, she hated me for weeks. I could understand why she felt like that, but it made the prospect of making significant improvements seem remote. It even took some time to re-establish the small improvements we had started in the school. We went back to walking out around the farm, grooming and rubs.

At first it seemed as if, in her world, everything was in one of two categories: taken for granted, or utterly terrifying. Nothing much was in between. I was beginning to wonder whether there was any chance of anything in her ‘terrifying’ category ever being turned into ‘accepted’. If there was any chance of her being ridden, by Emily instead of some rodeo cowboy, she would somehow have to get used to a saddle. Before that, she would have to accept the idea of working with a human.

So I had really high hopes that we might make progress if we worked with a tarpaulin. She was bound to find it quite worrying, but as she almost certainly would never have been asked to walk over one, she wouldn’t have formed any negative associations. After I had just about accustomed her simply to being in the school, which was easier to do in body than in spirit, I set the blue tarpaulin out.

Without pausing for a moment she walked calmly over it. I could have screamed.

Unless I approached her with it aggressively, she found it only slightly disconcerting that I should want to shake it at her, more because it seemed such an odd thing for me to be doing than for any other reason. As long as I didn’t do anything with the long rope, everything was fine. Back to square one.

It was around this time my ideas on driving horses with a single line began to change. I had never been a fan of lungeing, at least in the conventional sense. The idea seems to be that the person stands in the middle and asks the horse to go round in a circle. As anyone who has ever tried acting out the horse’s role in this ritual will very soon realise, this is an extremely dull, repetitive task. Although it may exercise a horse’s muscles, it certainly does not exercise his mind. It teaches him, in fact, that you want him to do 99 per cent of the work, while you twitter on and occasionally flick a whip. And even the muscular benefits of it are questionable, especially if devices like side reins are used inappropriately. I’d tried it with Sensi many years previously, in the fields in Milton Keynes when she was still fairly green. In spite of having lots of equipment, I was spectacularly unable to control her, at one point losing hold of the lunge line completely. It was easy enough to make her move, especially with the long whip, but making her move forwards was another matter. She had an expertly tuned ability to turn in towards me, and run back if I waved the stick. And when she finally did move forwards, it was all but impossible to get her to slow down, unless she decided to turn back in towards me again. All this meant I was quite ready to accept Monty’s assertion that lungeing could be detrimental to horses, and much less useful than long-lining. But we were beginning to see how, in many situations, there could be great value in combining Monty’s ‘body language’ techniques with a lunge line, when working in a bigger space than a round pen. There are clear similarities to how a horse behaves loose, and how he behaves on a single line if you do the right things.

So I considered trying something similar with Amber. She had already been at our place for several weeks. In the usual run of things, horses came and went, usually reformed almost out of recognition in less than a month. But with her, although we had put so much effort into getting her body to unwind a bit, and she was responding to Pennie’s treatment, the improvement was painfully slow. It was not comforting to think that she had been here so long and we had hardly gained any ground.

So I got the rope out again. I decided to work mostly in the school, so she could move in a straight line more easily. When I gently asked her to move away on a 30-foot line the first time, it was just like the first join-up – she blasted off round me in a complete panic. I was expecting it, but it still shook me how manic she was, as she flew round, nearly falling over and kicking at the fence. It wasn’t long before I started to remember the fact that lungeing has a particular weakness. It’s a lot easier to get the horse to go forwards than it is to make it stop. In Amber’s case this meant that whether or not I slowed down, she was on a schedule of her own, constantly evading the central issue, my existence. I tried another way – blocking her path so she was confronted by the fence. She panicked even more. Either she leaped forwards into the closing gap, almost falling over, or halted and turned, threatening to get herself tangled in the line. Putting her on a tighter circle just made me dizzy and put even more strain on her limbs. She could turn so tight that I could reach out and touch her shoulder, and she’d still be cantering, her legs at a 45-degree angle to the ground. I even tried making her speed up, then allowing her to slow down, but that nearly sent her out over the gate. Everything was either too subtle or far too much. There just didn’t seem a way to reach her.

Finally, I tried something that I didn’t really expect to work. I shook the line between us vigorously. She raised her head sharply, which slowed her down, and she looked down the line towards me, about to panic. I stopped in my tracks and she seemed to check herself. In a second she was off again. But it was a start, and I managed to build on it, until I could really get her attention when I needed it. This turned out to be probably the most useful trick I found to use with Amber. Big waves coming up the line right towards her eye were too much for her to ignore. Her natural inclination was to pull her head back away from the movement, which slowed her down. By stopping the movement of the rope instantly, eventually I got her really sensitive. Within about two weeks, a tiny jiggle on the rope was all I needed to get her to come down to a walk. It was the first and most important thing I taught her to do, for as she slowed down, she stopped panicking and began to come back to earth mentally, from where I could get through to her in other ways. Eventually I could get her to steer around the school quite accurately. It was an obvious improvement, and a viable substitute for long-lining.

Around this time Emily came up and attended a riding clinic. Although she had never done much groundwork with a horse before, she managed to get Amber to listen to her and go away calmly wherever she directed. Using a different horse, we soon got Emily a lot more stable in the saddle, and began to unpick a few major weaknesses, which previous instructors had taught her. Knees off, feet too far forward and too much weight in the stirrup through trying to push her heels down, Emily was already halfway to falling backwards and popping upwards before a horse even moved forward, and had no idea about how to ‘bear down’ (engage her abdominal muscles, while breathing steadily). Of course, she couldn’t breathe deeply, or bear down, because she had been told to ‘sit up’, which had the effect of sticking her chest out and hollowing her back, as if she were doing ballet. Clearly, there was work to be done on Emily as well as Amber!

But Amber was a long way off being ridden. In the weeks we’d spent trying to loosen her muscles and connect with her mentally, we hadn’t even looked at putting a saddle on her. Pennie came up again and we discussed her condition. After that first terrifying experience when the saddle had slipped, the trainer had girthed her up so tightly he had almost – perhaps actually – broken her ribs. But the damage was starting to heal. When Amber welcomed Pennie’s massage and began to groom her back, showing where she wanted to be rubbed, we decided it was time to try to move on.

The first time I put a roller on her, she tried to climb out of her own skin. Her terror, her anger, was as bad as anything I have ever seen. I had taken advantage of the fact that she was blanking me out to just do it up as quickly as I could. When she realised what had happened, she threw herself around the pen, ten times worse than most horses with their first saddle. But she did not injure herself, and when she realised that the roller wasn’t slipping around her belly like her first saddle had done, calmed down eventually.

But the next day it began almost the same. Now she knew what I was up to and squirmed about, trying to bite the roller, or me if I happened to be in the way. For about two weeks, she made improvements so slowly that I couldn’t be sure they were real improvements. I was getting to the point where I dreaded training her, which was not something I had ever experienced before. Nicole took over for a while, and it was almost a relief to see that she had the same difficulties. Whether she got Amber to stand still, or put the roller on while she was cantering in that tight circle, it made no difference. Sometimes she would put the roller on and take it off twenty times in a session, other times she would put it on just once and reward Amber for her compliance by taking her out for a walk, but Amber’s attitude hardly seemed to change. After a week, Nicole handed the job over to Brian. A week later, Jo took on the task.

By now, Amber would just about tolerate the roller, albeit with much tail swishing and grinding of teeth. It was time to introduce the saddle – my old one, of course – with a breast girth. By putting it on and off, again and again, I hoped that eventually she would be calm enough to think about what I was doing, and realise that it didn’t actually hurt. We decided that it might help to limit her space.

One lovely afternoon, telling myself I really did have all the time in the world, I got her out of her field and took her up to her stable, where my tatty old synthetic saddle was waiting on the door. As I stroked her body all over, I told myself I was going to put on that saddle as many times as it took even if I set a new world record. Which I probably did. Every time she moved forward I made her move back, and if she started to trot on the spot, or paw the ground, kick, or bite, I made a sharp gesture with the rope. But the second she stopped, I instantly stopped my noisy movement, and after stroking her softly, I would go very gently back to work, lifting the girth up onto her belly and tightening and loosening it again and again.