All the Tired Horses in the Sun

One day I took a lazy horse ride along the path behind my cabana, from where the sound of the horses had came on that first morning. Once a horse mad child, I hadnt ridden for a long while. As I expected the poor horses were quite thin and their tack was tatty. The people are poor and the horses are poor. The smiling guide asked me if Id ridden before and I told him I had, however, not wanting a spirited mount after such a long break I didnt elaborate. This didn’t develop into a favourable tactic. As a result of this short survey I started out at the back with only the expedition leader behind me and there I remained.

Слушнав моден на нов силен гранче и почувствува стресе од моите качи на неколку пати пред некако бев принуден надвор од кожурец на кукавичлак и не сакајќи да "занишаат бродот" да му каже да го запре. Се разбира, тој didnt како тоа една малку, но immeadiately распространети стап во селата и sulked, tantrumesque за остатокот на возење. Тој веќе не можеше да се задржи целата работа оди од тепање мојот монтирање, кои би, кога шлаг, преплавуваат Коњот пред во огромна него да оди побрзо. Тој имаше стратегија во уредувањето на неговите коњи и водење на целата работа оди.

Сценографијата ликвидација преку долината беше спектакуларен. I had chosen to go at four o clock to avoid the mad dogs and midday sun and the late afternoon had a dreamy sun drenched and shadowed quality and the only sounds were the sounds of the horses hooves and the man behind me occasionally shouting ‘Rosella!’ at a apparently troublesome mare. We meandered through the narrow gullies in the fertile red soil.

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I had just about cleared the first (metaphorical) hurdle. My horse was no longer flinching, the man behind me was no longer surreptitiously whipping him and the red soil was blazing spectacularly in the early evening sun. Then the German woman in front of me decided that she was so relaxed that she needed a cigarette. I had been enjoying the fresh fresh air in the valley and felt this tainting of it an affront but rather than create the cinemaesque tension that ensues after telling someone to stop talking I decided simply to overtake. This wasnt simple. Everytime the I egged my switch freed steed forward the German woman’s horse speeded up. I retried this manoeuvre a couple of times before it dawned on me that it wasnt the German woman’s reluctance for me to overtake but her horse’s, she wasnt actually doing anything other than sitting back in an almost post coital way and smoking into the cleanest air I had breathed for years. It dawned on me that the horses always went in this order, her horse was outraged that mine, the obedient one was trying to disrupt the order of things.

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So eventually of course her cigarette was finished and my horse continued to plod nose to tail behind hers on the journey he probably made a couple of times a day like a commuter. And my mind wandering away from the marvels of the scenery to dwell on the characters of the horses. Ascribing ‘human’ traits such as the compulsion to keep up one’s place in some sort of social order to beings other than human or to inanimate objects we call anthropormothism. But humans dont have the monopoly on so called human feelings and traits just as they dont have the monopoly on joy, pain and sadness…

 

6 размислувања за "All the Tired Horses in the Sun

  1. Amazing, thought-provoking and terribly sad … I had a similar experience in the Galapagos. Having had so many wonderful encounters with creatures which were protected and unafraid of humans, it seemed all wrong to find, as you did, a bunch of poor horses who were treated with no respect at all.

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