White Horse Pilgrim

Signpost

Finally and suddenly I saw the parallel.

In my former job as a guide I found my way around badly mapped wild countryside using a general knowledge of the lie of the land, some remembered specifics, and a certain wisdom concerning how to stay safe. For instance one follows a rodge rather than a valley bottom because the latter is more likely to lead over a cliff or into a chasm. (Carpathian topography worked hat way anyhow.)

Now I find my way about the rather mysterious corridors of a very large organisation persuading very senior people that such and such a thing is a good idea and worth spending a lot of money doing. There are a lot of zeros on those sums: but at least it's real money paying people to build things.

One difference is that the landscape was unchanging, more or less. The weather could not stay still for long but the mountains were constant. Not so with organisations. Those fabrications are veritable shape-shifters. Like a good fairy tale they contain ogres and dragons who guard the gates and passes and ways to enchanted lands. But I am brave, know how to wield facts, and even know the odd password. There are strange ways that unnerve the ill prepared. So again I find myself as a guide.

That long late Transylvanian 'gap year' did me good.

The horn regrown

Working from home today (and indeed still working thirteen hours after I started) I did manage to slip out at lunchtime to see Brena and Doru. The low mid-day sun cast long shadows as the affectionate mare followed me around the field. I'd fed her and hung around for a while.

She has a way of hanging over the fence when I am leaving that makes me really regret going away. This is one mare that I would like to spend a lot more time with.

An affectionate horse makes ownership a whole lot more pleasurable for me. I'm not interested in going out and winning things with her. the enjoyment comes through relationship: with a horse and with the land that we travel.

Even when eating she likes me to be close and give her attention - unlike Doru who will threaten to bite anyone who gets too close when he is eating hard feed.

It was whilst looking at her mass of muddy mane looking forward to the spring - when I might just manage to get her clean again - that I saw how Brena's ear horn has regrown. This is an odd and apparently benign growth in her left ear. Last May the horn separated leaving a tiny root. Now a replica has grown.

I've never before seen such a thing on a horse. It is Brena's individual personal peculiarity.

Meanwhile I stood to let her rub her nose and forehead on my shoulder, for which reason I always wear an old fleece when I visit her. In Brena's company clothes will become ingrained with shed hair and dirt. She does enjoy a good rub on her human. Then I stood with a shoulder under her throat, reached up, and gently pulled both her ears. Brena likes this, and so does Doru. (Siegfried Sassoon also wrote of how his horse enjoyed having his ears pulled, especially when tired.)

Finally I picked smooth hard clods of mud from Brena's mane. I'll have done that plenty more times before this winter is through.

Autumn's mare redux

This is what I face when it is time to ride.

However clean I leave her, this is what I find just hours later. It's not as if the ground really is all that wet and sticky.

Brena is warm and happy so the mud doesn't really matter. In fact, being almost theatrically dirty, she has a faintly comical air.

Autumn trail

It was a soft late autumn day, the sun watery through a faint haze yet just strong enough to warm the wandering traveller. Trees barely clothed in their final few leaves sheltered a carpet in turns bright and earthy. Away from the highways silence reigned, broken only by occasional calling birds and the footsteps of a single horse. Her feet crunched or splashed according to the surface.

It was as if nature is putting on a final show before slumping into the cold and grey of winter. See, she says, I am still alive: indeed parts of me are growing anew. I am bright and optimistic, for I know that another spring will come and then summer. I welcome you who loves my ways and wiles, who visits me whenever time permits and weather is kind. Do not be downhearted at the enveloping nights for their length will soon shorten again: instead take the time to rest and think and plan. (Does she know that work takes up most evenings these days!) But I was happy riding out, thrilled at the beauty of the day: a lightness and joy and especially a tranquility poignant on this day of Remembrance.

Through the light mist successive lines of hills drifted away to a mysterious invisible horizon. The light green of sprouting winter crops provided a fine optimistic backdrop for the rusty skeletons of trees.

Down in the valley a familiar track led through low spindly trees whose desire is to join hands above to form a tunnel. Inward they lean in friendship: to link with their fellows and shade the traveller. Sometimes the traveller has to duck his head too! His mare is happy to trim branches in service of her insatiable appetite.

There at the end of the avenue stands a solitary sign telling unfamiliar visitors that they may turn left or right. I know the way without need for map or sign, and I suspect that the few who pass this way nowadays tend to be familiar visitors returning. The sign, I suppose, means that people have got lost around here. Mine must be the first generation to require such waymarking.

To me this is a friendly intimate place where landscape retreats to a more human scale. The trees enclose the track at little more than the height of a human frame - I am glad not to be riding a tall horse. Leaves and trunks, earth and grass are all close. So much is within touching distance, as if nature invites exploration. If only the ancient land could tell a tale of the farmers and shepherds, travellers and wanderers who had passed this way.

Soon enough I shall pass this way again. Perhaps next time the trees will be quite bare and the ground firm with frost? Or will the mist be thick and the puddles overflowing? This is ever a land of changing moods. This place is an old friend with long memory, a complex character and many costumes.

Reflections in mud

Now it's too muddy to drive out to the field. I must lead Brena a quarter mile down to the barn which is the nearest that the truck and trailer can now reach.

Jess mentioned how Brena could be "interesting" to take between barn and field. The mare hasn't changed. She seems to realise just how much less control I have when my footing is more precarious than hers. So I did get pulled around a certain amount in the direction of whatever food seemed nicest until Brena decided that perhaps a pressure halter is worth paying a little attention to.

At that moment I thought of the adage that "the more work, the better the pony behaves". Brena is getting very little work right now.

Brena loaded easily just as soon as she had verified that the trailer contained food.

We went out to Churn Down (pictured earlier in the year) an appropriate choice for this weekend falling nearest to Armistice Day. It was on these bare hills that the cavalry was trained from Victorian times until the Second World War. Allenby's cavary trained here before heading for Palestine. The tents and picket lines lay in the middle distance, around the thicker line of trees which marks a long-dismantled railway.

It was not only men but horses that
...lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now lie,
In Flanders fields

On this occasion I found the silent valley amidst soft slopes poignant. Here our forebears trained themselves and their horses for war. The First World War alone took the lives of two thirds of a million horses from this island and almost a million men. By 1918 soldiers were told openly and honestly that the life of a horse was worth more than the life of a man - probably because thei had become scarcer. But the horses were not worth enough to be spared carnage.

After what they endured, the mud here is little to complain about.

There was a flag raised at a checkpoint for an organised hike. Brena stared at the fluttering fabric, snorted then - when I showed no sign of concern - gave the equine equivalent of a shrug and walked past. I considered all the things that horses have been asked to do, and have done because they trusted their handlers. How many have been far more deadly than a simple innocent flag marking a lady with tea and cakes?

I worked horses professionally in a more primitive place than this, and lost three to mishaps. They lie buried in a Transylvanian meadow, and I feel keenly the pointlessness of each loss. Now I have but two horses I can keep each well and not ask anything unreasonable or unsafe: atoning for my deeds and - in a miniscule way - for those of my forebears.

 

Symmetries

Today is a day with a peculiar symmetry to its nomenclature. Here the eleventh day of the eleventh month always is different: Armistice Day. Usually at the eleventh hour we go out onto platform 1 at Paddington station for the traditional service where colleagues who served wear their medals. Today we were caught up elsewhere so kept the two minutes silence indoors. I sense that more people are conscious of this day now that we are embroiled in war again, albeit far from these shores.

Four years ago I stood in the snow. There is Doru standing with the gelding Puiu. Behind are the other horses. That all seems such a long time ago.

This evening out at the field a slight cold drizzle fell, and I was reminded that once upon a time such weather heralded snow. But not here on this temperate island.Even a bit of weather can trigger nostalgia these days.

The snow was picturesque, of course, however the real deep raw cold of mid-winter was a challenge to survive. It's a relief to live in a place where some basic insulation keeps water pipes secure.

There was a symmetry between winter cold and summer heat: more or less -30C to +30C.

Now we shuttle between a cool but pleasant summer with a few hot days and a wet muddy winter with the possibility of a few days of snow. It's safe and easy. A part of me misses the adventure of the extremes. But none of me really misses the well running dry in summer heat or - worse still - in the midst of a frozen winter when the stream was no longer flowing and there was simply no water to be had anywhere. The precariousness of such existence was thought provoking in an era where acquisition seems to be the principle mass fixation. I don't see symmetry: just contrast.

Finding the way

It's been a very heavy week at work turning out investment papers, briefings and the first draft of a highly confidential report. That's after just two days. This pace will continue until we get the bid in on 1 December.

Now I've a day coming up at a conference. There I need to give an address on coping with organisational change. What with all that happened during exile (I haven't written about half of it here) and a couple of complete career changes along the way, I've a certain amount to say about change. What brought it all together for me was a psychological understanding of how organisations behave (albeit at a basic level) which opened my eyes to much of what is going on.

Having been a wilderness guide I have some pertinent analogies to offer: to do with finding a way across rough and badly charted terrain; about making decisions based on limited information; about applying intuition and how to temper guess work with what facts are available; and generally how to remain confident and comfortable when one has only a certain measure of control.

The attributes necessary are like those of a fairy tale hero: the right skills; enough courage and a bit of special knowledge. That's what I will be explaining to my audience.

Late autumn.....and some horse play

With the ground muddy already and days of rain forecast today probably provided this year's last opportunity to drive to Brena's field. From now on we'll need to slither a quarter mile between the parking area and her pasture.

As you can see, the barn manager still hasn't had the water pipes buried. If she isn't quick, she'll have the chore of manually taking water to two dozen horses daily whenever there's a frost.

Along the Ridgeway beech trees stand resplendent in their final brightness of the year like the last act of a play or the ultimate movement of a symphony. Already leaves fall in a curtain, pulled away and carried by a brisk chill northerly breeze.

Looking back, the Horse Chestnut trees were bare and gaunt already, their erstwhile foliage long lost and blown away. Now here's a view of the bleak marches of winter.

The wind whistles through spindly dark trees. Below, dry brown grass whispers the cold of the damp earth. Melancholically a few birds flap about scratching their meagre existence. Nothing else moves but the marching grey clouds and the dusk that is never far away.

A couple of hours riding took us down into the shelter of a shallow valley, crossing a wide ploughed field. It was there that Brena decided to play. It seemed for a second that she had stepped into soft ground and was sinking. But no, she had decided to flop down onto the bar earth where she made a guilty imitation of the beginning of a roll before giving up and starting to nibble the beginning of a winter crop. By then I had stepped off and began to cajole the cheeky mare to her feet.

I've seen this happen a few times before: with tired horses. Brena had not done enough work to be tired. However I've seen horses flop down that were short of sleep from unable to lie down stalled in cramped conditions. Brena was out in the field all night, but may have been kept awake by the fireworks that have been let off all around these past few nights thanks to Guy Fawkes.

A little later heading back up to the ridge that was my view past muddy ears. It is a beautiful time of year to be out and about, though chilly. For the first time in months I was wearing four layers on top, despite the sun making a short but welcome appearance.

The view into the woods, beneath the colourful vestiges of canopy, inspires an active imagination. I can imagine following a secret path beneath boughs and between boles, further and deeper until I come to a lonely cottage known only to a few. There, hidden and tranquil, ancient and unchanging, is my refuge. And not mine alone. If only.....

Back to reality and the parking area where Brena had a good graze by the trailer denuding a wide semicircle of herbage. Now she is rugged: partly because of the cold and rain, and partly to save me from having to groom a wet mud-caked horse. Soon that rug will be truly filthy.

Autumn's mare

Autumn's mare is covered in mud, for she has been rolling in the gateway after rain.

It rained last night. I awoke to rain drumming on the roof. So this morning I found a wet muddy mare.

We had a forty-minute trip out to ride with L. At least Brena dried off a little in the trailer. She managed to eat over half a net of hay too, for standing still can be hungry work.

I managed to brush all the mud from Brena's saddle and girth areas, the amount of dust in the air from that labour making me consider inventing "the horse groomer's respirator".

This was a typical autumn day, cool and breezy, grey and yet redeemed by the brightness and variety of the leaves.

Also, and quite typically for this season, the hunt was out. Unusually I had elected to ride from the next field to where the hunt had parked several dozen varied vehicles which ranged from smart lorries down to weatherbeaten Land Rovers towing ancient trailers.

Brena just glanced at the passing horses and hounds, being more interested in eating. Having come from a place where foxes are not pursued on horseback, the activity meant nothing to her.

A horse that had been hunted would have taken a bit more interest, associating that sight with equine companionship and the thrill of massed gallops.

There are few foxes around here: those with an interest in game bird shooting see to that. So the hounds must have had little scent to follow. I watched them head away southwest at speed up a gentle hill leading the field. A little later the hounds ran north along the ridge, accompanied only by the huntsman, then turned back south slipping into the mist. Three hours later, at the conclusion of my ride, there they were a mile south milling around. It looked as if they'd had a lot of fun riding around - the main point of it all - but had made no impact upon the already negligible fox population.

Special mare

It's curious what Jess said about having a special mare. I've been a fan of geldings and stallions for most of the time that I have been riding.

I wrote in the soon-to-be-published riding holiday centre book that geldings are to be preferred for their general easiness and predictability. That much is true. Before Brena my favourite horses were geldings and one stallion, Doru. However all of them were working horses. We were friends, for sure, and got along well on the trail. I could predict each one's next move, which was good when I had to get on and lead a group through the wild mountains and forests. There was no time, however, for real deep relationship. There isn't when one has a herd of working horses to manage. One never has sufficient time. One is tired, in a hurry, and distracted by often needy people.

Now I have just about enough time for an equine relationship. When I am with Brena I can concentrate on her. I do not have to ride twenty miles with a group in tow. I have time to begin to understand this mare, and she has the opportunity to adapt to me. I am more patient and she more loyal. Beyond that I have grown and have a more developed capacity for relationship: a greater depth of character and a broader personality. That is evident in more rewarding human relationships too.

The idea of a special mare is exciting. I've had a special gelding who was strong and trustworthy. I have a now-retired special stallion whose strength and steadiness I admire. But now I have a more complex creature, one whose mood changes with her body cycle, who quite genuinely seems capable of forming a deeper bond than any gelding. She shows affection openly and willingly, is able to show displeasure too, and becomes especially assertive when food is involved. Brena is a paradox: which is, incidentally, a sign of a spiritual dimension. My ability to understand is being challenged. I am invited to find beauty and goodness in characteristics beyond the simple ability to carry me from one place to another. Riding has become about what is good for both horse and rider. It does feel as if a new era in my riding has begun.