Terror and awe. I was on my white mare.
I had had a romantic ideal of a beautiful white horse, maybe a Lipizzana or stallion was in my mind when I formed this visual in my teens. My white mare had crusty sunburnt skin on her piggy pink snout, around her watery bulging eyes, and on the tips of her bacon rasher ears. No matter how much factor 50 I slathered on her in the mornings, she was a disgrace. Her thin coat revealed blotchy Dalmatian marks when I bathed her. No sooner was she let loose she’d be dyed pink again by the red Devon clay.
I remember exactly where we were. There had always been something unhinged about her, some switch flicked in her head and she was gone beyond reason or reaching. The shutters would come down behind her eyes and she’d bolt. She was known for it. She came cheap because of it. She was a smooth ride, ideal for jumps and dressage (not my idea of fun). I’d take her miles, hacking through private woodlands and trespassing any field with an open gate.
This day we were in the bluebell wood, where the recent loggers had left devastation, and wide cleared tracks; ideal for riding. As we ascended the hill adjoining the farmland of my grandparents, it happened. Whatever fault was at work in her, her brain switched and she was lost to me. Her head raised, the reins came short and ineffective in my hands, I yelled in fear and anger but she was gone beyond reaching. As she galloped down the steep mud track, me a hapless passenger at sea, I saw them. A crowd of deer, russet red, like the clay of the fields, they rose in terror at our sudden, noisy arrival and joined us in our run from imagined dangers. Their shockingly fresh white rumps rising up and down around me, like a mad, over-fast carousel. I was on my machine horse among them, sailing steeply down in terror and awe among wild beasts. I couldn’t even guess how many there were, enough to fill me with a wild, free ecstasy. The deer flanked both sides of the horse.
Looking ahead, to my horror, I saw a wall of rough wood the loggers had built as a rudimentary crash barrier for their machines in the recent winter conditions. The horse hadn’t seemed to register it.
The deer bounded, effortlessly up and over and all around, floating like gravity has no hold, like they are made of starlight and imagination, utterly immaterial. At the moment we crashed, heavily and full-blown, the huge herd of deer ceased to exist like only deer can, melting into the fabric of reality, crossing over.
I dismounted. The horse had sharp logs and shards of rough discarded wood jutting into her legs and guts, somehow she had her forelegs on the other side of this barrier. In my rage, fear and untethered teenage emotions I beat her. She stood unflinching as I scream and hit her face. Nothing. No one at home. She stood quivering and sweating, her eyes unseeing fish eyes. I sat, recovered myself. And finally, as she returned to her mind, I disentangled her. Incredibly there were no injuries.
Now I wander if she didn’t have a brain tumour, or something that caused these events. It was never malicious, it was like a short circuit.
Riding her taught me to fall.
