The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [43]
Snowman was a perfect children’s horse. Still, Harry could not forget the sight of the horse standing in front of him with a piece of fence board, barbed wire, and the tire attached to his rope. There were half a dozen five-foot paddock fences between home and the doctor’s farm.
Maybe the horse was trying to tell him something.
Between riding with the Knox girls and running his own small stable, Harry de Leyer spent so much time on horseback during his first year on Long Island that he wore right through the flaps of his old saddle. He often felt the rhythm of a trot or canter even when he was off a horse. He rode so much that he estimated distances not in feet or yards, but in horse strides, intuitively knowing how many it would take to reach a far-off pasture fence.
At night, he lay in bed thinking about horses. To Harry, every new horse that came into the barn was a puzzle to be solved. Snowman was a puzzle. If the horse could jump big sturdy paddock fences, why had he not shown any particular skill with a rider on his back?
There are different schools of thought about riding. Some people believe that you should educate the horse in the art of collection, akin to the training in classical dance, where the required movements are carefully honed until they become perfectly balanced and controlled. Others propound the forward method, believing that a horse knows how to move naturally and it is often the rider’s interference that causes problems. Though Harry had received lessons from his father growing up, and had participated in his local riding club, most of what he had learned about horses had come through trial and error. He tried to think like a horse. Why tug on the horse’s mouth all the time? He reasoned that if he had a bit in his own mouth, he’d want its use to be as gentle as possible.
So he always chose the softest bit a horse would respond to, such as a D-ring rubber snaffle. Its joint in the center keeps pressure off the horse’s tongue, and the rubber is much softer than the hard metal of most bits. Most trainers’ first instinct would have been to put a heavier bit in Snowman’s mouth, a pelham, whose action is aided by a chain under the chin, or perhaps a kimberwicke, whose U-shaped mouthpiece puts a torque on the horse’s tongue. But Harry believed that if you went easy on a horse’s mouth, he would return the favor by being responsive. Some horses can be described as having a “soft mouth.” These horses are acutely sensitive to any kind of pressure on the reins. Other horses are “hard-mouthed,” having grown so used to having the reins jerked that only a severe bit will work. Harry thought there were many ways to talk to his horses; pulling on the reins and activating the bit was only one—and certainly not the most subtle.
Like other mammals, horses have five senses. Their acute vision, keen sense of smell and hearing, and exquisite sensitivity to touch are all designed to protect them from predators. Men have used the horse’s sense of touch as an elaborate and detailed system of communication. A horse can “read” subtle changes, such as a slight movement of a rider’s lower legs, a tightening of the reins, or an almost imperceptible shift in balance. A horse and rider who are working well together communicate in a subtle and fine-tuned nonverbal language—a sort of equestrian Braille. Messages are telegraphed from rider to horse in a way that, at its highest level, is almost invisible to a spectator.
All horses have some ability to jump, but most horses are not born to be jumpers. Three physical qualities factor into a horse’s ability to clear high obstacles: speed, spring, and balance. Speed and spring are inborn, but balance must be taught.
Until 1878, the subject of a horse’s exact series of motions at a gallop remained a subject of debate. Former California governor and racehorse owner Leland Stanford believed that there was a moment in the stride when a horse became airborne, but it was too fast to be seen by the naked eye. Stanford commissioned the British photographer