A magical way with horses
Dick Budden can talk horse and if you get him on the subject of his life spent with them, the stories come thick and fast. Carly Thomas went for a ride and a natter with the horseman extraordinaire.
Dick Budden doesn’t suit being inside. Within four walls, he is like a painting that has been hung slightly off-kilter. But once he’s out and striding through a paddock, with a horse in tow and his little foxy Cookie at his heels, the world settles back on to its axis and the birds start to sing.
Horses turn their heads when he goes by, he is their friend. If there is one thing Budden understands better than anything else, it’s horses.
Casper and Rocky are tied up to Budden’s trusty old float. It’s not flash, nothing about Budden is, but it works and when something feels right, this wizened horseman sticks with it.
Casper is Budden’s new ‘‘buddy’’. He sat idly in a paddock at the end of Manawatu’s Makino Rd for years. I gasp when I realise this is the horse my kids and I nicknamed ‘ghost horse’ many moons ago.
He’s a horse that wouldn’t look out of place in a Clint Eastwood film, pure white except for a jaunty splodge of black on his back. He’s with Budden to get ‘‘sorted out’’ and his new rider is besotted.
‘‘I like him. He’s got a bit of spunk.’’
We head to the beach, saddles thrown in the back, Cookie on my knee and the sun telling us to hurry up and make the most of what Budden declares is a ‘‘beaut day’’.
We natter easily and fast about some of the horses Budden has sat on over the years. People send them Budden’s way. Sometimes, it’s because they have become too hard for them to handle, or they are youngsters who need to learn the ropes. Some have earned themselves the label of ‘no good’ and others, like Casper, have sat in a paddock for a decade becoming more landmark than horse.
Budden believes you just have to treat them right and ‘‘make them your buddy, then they will do anything to please you’’.
He wasn’t born into the horsey way of life. Budden instinctively went in search of it when he was young and growing up in the outskirts of Wellington.
‘‘I would get up early in the morning in the weekends because there was a little riding school in town and the horses were spread all over the village.’’
A couple of ropes and halters would be handed to the young Budden: ‘‘I was only 6 or maybe 7’’, and he’d be sent out to catch some horses.
‘‘I’d scamper off to the far side of town, pick up a couple and jump on and ride them in. If you were quick enough, you might even be allowed to go and get some more.’’
It was his first introduction to riding, ‘‘jumping on and not wanting to fall off’’. He found his love of horses and all that comes with them was strong.
‘‘I really hankered to just do that. I wanted to work with horses right from the time I was very little, I really did.’’
But owning one was a problem. His family, as Budden says, ‘‘don’t know one end of an animal from another’’ and were thoroughly unhorsey, so until he left school and earned enough to buy one himself, he continued to ride whatever came his way.
‘‘And often they were horses that didn’t want to be ridden and in the end people would say ‘well, that kid there can actually ride them’, so I had made myself useful.’’
Budden learnt a trade but when he’d learned enough to build a house on his own, he said to his dad ‘‘I don’t want to do this’’.
What he did want, however, was clear to him.
Budden had been watching the local farrier working and it ‘‘really appealed’’.
He’s not a big man. Budden is a wiry bundle of energy, more stick thin than tree-trunk thick. So there was doubt at first that he’d be up for the very physical and strength-based job.
‘‘But when I was 18 I filled out a bit and I was given a try.’’
He found he didn’t need to use brawn like the others did to get the horses to behave, because he’d found something else, some other way and whatever it was, it was a little bit magic.
‘‘It’s something unusual. It is what it is and I know it’s there but what it is exactly, I don’t know.’’
A horse out at Massey that wouldn’t let a farrier anywhere near it fell under Budden’s spell. It was a ‘‘bundle of nerves’’.
‘‘This poor horse was in a pen tied up and he looked at me and he was petrified. He was so frightened he couldn’t think straight and so I didn’t even unpack any gear, I went in there, jumped the fence and I just stood with him.’’
He laid his hands on the trembling horse. The horse relaxed, the tools were fetched and the horse was shod.
‘‘My hands have something. They have a gift and it’s not something that needs to be understood.’’
Budden knew he had some sort of communication with horses back in those Johnsonville days. Some horses had escaped at night and Budden heard them clatter past his house. He was out of bed in a shot and tracked them down. The police had found them too, and had their lights flashing.
‘‘They had run up an alley, which was a dead end, and the cops didn’t know what to do.’’
He talked a police officer into letting him have a shot at catching them.
‘‘[The horses] were really frightened and nervous, but I got some rope and told the cops to just wait. I took my time and in the end led them home with the cops following. But I growled at them and said ‘no flashing lights!’.’’
Budden understands that a horse’s language is all about the way you place your body, the tone of your voice and the energy you give out to the world.
And riding out now, with Tangimoana Beach all to ourselves and Casper owning every confident stride like he is the king of the world, Budden’s energy is happy indeed.
‘‘I’m lucky, I really am and I know that. I’m retired, really, from the shoeing, it’s too hard now, but I still have my people that I go to.’’
Because that’s the thing with Budden. He doesn’t just like horses, he likes people, too. His longstanding customers are friends who have become riding buddies on the hunt field or in recent years, in competitive distance riding.
He has always hand-picked his customers, so those that were good for a chat, a scone and a cup of tea in the shade on a hot day became regulars. Some of the teenagers that he shod horses for back in the day now have teenagers of their own.
It’s been a life full of horses and good people with a landscape of hills to canter up and the soundtrack of hooves on dirt and laughter, always laughter.
We are in a fit of giggles as we turn the horses into the trees, where their foot fall is muffled by pine needles.
Even Casper snorts when Budden jokes how he might be riding a handsome horse like the stunning Casper now ‘‘but one day, it’ll have to be an ordinary old standard bred and then when I’m 90, I’ll probably have to go on to a mule’’.
It’s hard to imagine Budden doing something other than this and he says he never tires of it.
‘‘I’d rather ride than anything else. I have no idea what it is, it’s just a really strong pull. Life is complete just because I’m working with horses.’’
We get back to the float and flop down on the grass to have a cup of tea from Budden’s battered old flask. A date scone makes it a real occasion and the scent of the horses smells like memories of summers long gone.
Right at this moment, things are as they should be and for Budden, they’re just as he has made them.