Change of Pace: My Master’s Horse

And it’s high time.

My accomplice and I have been working on these posts for a long time. I don’t even remember how long. And you, my loyal readers, known and unknown, have read and responded. But now I don’t have anything more to say about my books, published and about to be published; I don’t have anything more to say about the condition of this world or the condition of this country.

Instead I’m going to treat you—and it will be a treat—to bits and pieces of what I really want to write. If you’ve been in the game of publishing as long as I have, you’ve learned what “they” don’t want, and they don’t want a lot of what most of us are interested in writing and reading.

And so to hell with what they want (at least for now.) Here’s the first bit and piece, and there will be more, I promise.

Photo by Rodolfo Quirós from Pexels

MY MASTER’S HORSE

I am my master’s horse but he does not make me lie down in green pastures.

Instead, hardened caliche and at least six pointed stones. There he knocked me down so the white man could pry my jaws apart with his bare hands to look at my teeth.

Because he is going to sell me.

But he is not going to sell me.

How could he be my master if he sold me?

Another horse, you say?

But would another horse, mare or gelding, not raised to his hand and by his hand be mastered?

They have their wills, you know.

Sometimes their unbroken wills.

But how, you ask, can he knock me down, not in green pastures but on hardened caliche and at least six pointed stones?

I weigh 1600 pounds.

My master weighs 140 pounds with his boots on.

But he knows the place just above my left knee where an old injury (I jumped, once) has left a weakness.

My master places his left knee in that weak place and gives a shove.

And down I go, every time.

He sat on my high side to hold me down while that white man, that vet, pried my jaws apart with his bare hands.

The vet lay down to get a look, shining his little light down my throat, all the time boasting how he’s the only vet who will come out here, bouncing forty miles on a dirt road, to tend the horses on the reservation.

My master doesn’t give him the time of day. He’s paying him a lot to look at me.

“About twelve,” he said, “give or take maybe a year,” getting up and dusting off his side where he laid on the caliche and stones. “You figuring on letting him go?”

My master stood up off me and I got my front hooves under me and reared up and shook myself.

“No good to me anymore,” my master said.

A lie. If he’d been standing close enough I’d have given him a good kick. But he knows me. He was standing way off.

“Since he bowed that tendon? That was when, maybe eight months ago?

“Something like that.”

The vet ran his hand down my left leg.

“Seemed about cured. I told you it might.”

“Lame half the time when I go to saddle.”

Second lie. I gave a snort. My master grabbed my lead and started to haul me to the barn.

“Come on, God damn it.”

I set my hooves. No intention of moving till he gave up that tone.

But I am my master’s horse. He twisted two fingers in my nostrils and I had to go.

Later an extra ounce of oats. “Put some meat on your old bones.”

I’m not old. I’m experienced. Riding the range those first years, a good roper, he had to admit.

Never good enough, though.

Then three years on the Indian relay circuit. That spavined me for good. Those boys jumping on my back, load of rocks in the middle of my spine. One half mile full speed, dust up my nostrils, breathing raw in my throat, then dropping off on one side, the next load of rocks thrown on from the other.

So sore at the end I could hardly move.

But I am my master’s horse.

He didn’t sell me. I knew he couldn’t. Told anybody who would listen I’m his old pal.

In Writing Short Stories