[CALIBK12] Richie's Picks: THE HEARTS OF HORSES

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Richie's Picks: THE HEARTS OF HORSES by Molly  Gloss, Houghton Mifflin, 
November 2007, ISBN: 0-618-79990-7
 
"He had told her everything that she now began  telling Henry -- everything 
about the terrible plight of the  horses over there -- how they died on the 
transport ships from fear and  trampling; how they pined with homesickness and 
consequently took cold or  pneumonia and died at the remount depots before they 
even got to the front; how  they were often starved and thirsty to the point 
of eating harness or chewing  their stablemate's blankets; how as many horses 
were invalided by war nerves as  were killed in battle -- their hearts and 
minds not able, any more than the  men's, to bear the airplane bombs and grenades, 
falling fuses, the shrieks of  wounded men and animals." 
 
"The Yanks are coming, 
The drums rum-tumming
Ev'rywhere.
So prepare, say a pray'r,
Send the word, send the word to beware.
We'll be over, we'll be coming over,
And we won't come back 'till it's over
Over there."
--George M. Cohan
 
I drove over to Sacramento yesterday to spend the  afternoon showing my 
friends' Nubian dairy goats at the California State  Fair.  Having, myself, ceased 
decades ago the adventure of  clipping, transporting, and scrubbing my own 
goats in order to spend  a series of nights trying to sleep along the periphery  
of a behemoth, allergen-filled barn through which humongous  tractors push 
around piles of soiled bedding at 3  AM, day-tripping to State Fair in August to 
help Lynn and  her mom Dodi on Show Day has become an annual ritual for me.  
And so, I  rose before dawn, fed my own goats an early breakfast, grabbed some 
tunes  for the ride over the hills, and headed East toward our state  capital. 
 
 
After we'd completed the showing and had time to  escape the echoing barn in 
order to talk, the subject turned from  goats to horses as Lynn, who is a 
decade younger than  I, told me about a pair of fillies she has that she will soon 
need to  begin breaking.  Lynn noted that she is not looking forward to doing 
the  breaking herself, as the effects of hitting the ground after  being 
thrown off a young horse is more and more difficult to deal with as the  years go 
by.  And so she is considering having someone else start them  for her. 
 
It is similar to what 19-year-old Martha Lessen encounters in  Oregon in the 
winter of 1917 when she come riding down  "through the Ipsoot Pass into Elwha 
County looking for horses that needed  breaking out."  All of the young men 
are gone, being trained for  deployment to Europe, and there are a lot of 
farmers and ranchers who  can use the services of this young horse whisperer who has 
escaped the  stupidity and violence of her own father's parenting and 
horse-breaking  tactics.  
 
Thanks to the kindly assistance of George Bliss, the first  farmer to provide 
her horses for breaking, Martha arranges a circle of farms  with horses for 
her to train.  Once she has each of the horses started, she  will spend her 
days riding a horse from one farm to the next, exchange  horses and head to the 
next farm on the circuit, and so on.  Thus, a series  of horses will get a 
lesson each day, and all of the horses in training will be  attended to on a 
regular schedule.    
 
"Martha had read a little book about famous men and their  horses: Alexander 
and Bucephalus, El Cid and Babieca, General Lee and Traveller,  the knight 
Reynard and his charger Bayard, the horse that had outraced  Charlemagne's army.  
She sometimes imagined herself one of them, or a  famous woman, famous as 
Annie Oakley or Joan of Arc, on a famous horse.   Riding over the low hills 
between the McWilliames' and the Romers' she fell  easily into thinking again that 
she was Mattie (this was how she'd be called,  once she was famous), a 
horse-woman renowned all over the West, on her horse  Meriwether Lewis, a tall black 
with a metal sheen to his coat and a fiery eye  behind a long wavy forelock, a 
horse she had trained, like the Virginian's  horse, to come straight to her 
at a certain four-note whistle and to carry  no other rider but her.  Always in 
these imaginings it was forty or  fifty or sixty years ago, when she'd have 
been able to ride all over the valley  of the Little Bird Woman River without 
seeing a fence and without getting  down from her horse, not even once, to open 
and close a gate."
 
Of course, with Martha riding this circuit, she comes in  contact with the 
varied cast of characters who inhabit the ranches and  farms that are spread out 
in the swale between the Clarks Range and the  Whitehorn Mountains.  And the 
stories of these individuals and families, on  the home front during World War 
I, provide a colorful look at a distant  time and place in America during the 
dying days of the "Wild  West." 
 
"Some of the fellows homesteading up and down the valley in  those years were 
such poor farmers they could hardly raise Cain.  They  would break up the 
fields of bunch grass to grow pinto beans or turnips and  nothing would thrive 
but star thistle.  If there was timber on the land --  and it grew thickly in 
those years, yellow pine and spruce and fir up to four  feet through -- they'd 
log it off and pull out the stumps and be surprised to  find scrub juniper and 
rabbit brush growing back instead of the grass they'd  expected to pasture 
their dairy cows on.  When they cleared the sage and  willow from around a 
spring, sometimes the spring would silt up, and when they  opened up a spring to 
make a farm pond, as often as not the water dried right up  or got salty.  Quite 
a few people who might have given a good account of  themselves under other 
conditions were just taken in by rosy visions of 'rain  following the plow,' 
which was  the widespread, spurious claim of not a few  commercial and government 
interests.  In those years it seemed as if all  you might need to grow wheat 
or alfalfa or field peas on the dry slopes of Elwha  County was a stack of 
pamphlets and bulletins from the Department of Agriculture  or a handbook put out 
by one or another of the companies making farm  equipment."
 
But, above all, this is the memorable coming of age story  of a young woman 
in the days that, we know, would  soon yield the right of women to vote.  
Martha Lessen lives,  breathes, and understands horses.  In THE HEARTS OF HORSES, 
we get to  know Martha as she gets to know herself. 
 

Richie  Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com
Moderator,  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/
BudNotBuddy at aol.com
http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks






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