River of memories and hearing the thrum of horses

The last day of the year was as warm as a kitchen and the dog and I went to cool off at a pond we know. The dog waded in up to his belly and stood, while I just sat on the bank. I have always liked to be by water. A river’s best, but all water’s good. It generates such life. In comparison the land is barren.

Ten yards away the ground was baked like a brick and the grass was the colour of camels. But where I sat it was green as spring and the reeds on the water’s fringe stood tall and supple.

Be still by water long enough and the place absorbs you and forgets you’re there and resumes the life that you disrupted by arriving. Though having a dog with you doesn’t always help.

Blood-red damsel flies clung to the reeds and huge-headed dragon flies shimmering blue. And a thousand types of insect I have no names for danced and hovered and flicked, and feeding swallows skimmed the water’s skin like tiny fighter jets.

A brood of ducklings sat on the water and barely touched it, just bundles of buoyancy. And in the shallows a heron stood, a sleek and angled threat, and leaned so slowly forward and then stabbed. I could make out only a wriggle of silver as the bird aligned the fish with its beak then flung up its head to let gravity draw it down the gullet to extinction.

I felt the horses before I heard them, felt them through the hardbaked ground, sensed them as a thrum and bass vibration. So too the dog, standing suddenly alert in the water, his ears pricked, his body and tail stiffened, ready to react.

The thrum grew and round the corner came two teenage girls on chestnut mounts. Both girls were up in the stirrups like racing jockeys, urging their horses on. Lost to the thrill of it the girls didn’t see me or the dog. They thundered by perhaps ten yards from us, hooves drumming. And down on the ground I felt very vulnerable indeed. If the girls had turned the heads of their horses and borne down on us there would have been nothing we could do but curl and pray. Those hooves.

For thousands of years the most fearsome thing on earth was a ridden horse. When the author of the last book of the Bible wanted an image to terrify the faithful, an image that presaged the end of the world, he reached for men on horseback, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and he called them Pestilence, War, Famine and Death. They were always depicted trampling people, people who flung up their arms in self-defence as they were stamped to a pulp.

I don’t know who first thought of riding a horse but it certainly wasn’t a horse. They instinctively hate to be ridden. They have to be broken. Perhaps the first person to break a horse was a girl, for girls have always felt affinity with horses.

The primary school I attended was impeccably co-educational. The boys had to do sewing classes and the girls had to do woodwork. But for all the best efforts of the adults, girls and boys remained separate tribes, different species almost. And one stamp of that difference was the horse.

I was scared of horses: their sheer size, their skull-cracking kick, those teeth that seemed needlessly huge for a herbivore. But girls doted on them, read stories about them, loved to groom and ride them. Every girl wanted a pony for Christmas. What with that and ballet, girls were aliens.

I felt the horses before I heard them, felt them through the hardbaked ground, sensed them as a thrum and bass vibration.

But if it was a girl that first rode a horse, I bet it was a man who first used it for war. Men use everything for war. We may not like to admit it but we make a weapon of every invention – metal, gunpowder, internal combustion engines, jet engines, radio, atomic power, the internet, there is nothing we won’t fight with. We are limitlessly bellicose.

And the horse was a weapon for thousands of years. From the Mongol hordes to the charge of the Light Brigade we rode to war. And little wonder. For how do you resist a cavalry charge?

It came to an end only with World War I when men and horses died by the hundreds of thousand. I feel sorrier for the horses. The men had been duped by their own kind and their own urges, but the horses had simply been sent. And they died trapped in mud to their bellies.

But that was a hundred years ago. And fortunately it was the war to end all wars, they said. Ha. Happy New Year.