new from Molly Gloss

The Hearts
of Horses
a novel
t h e b o o k t h a t h a s Kent Haruf,
A my Bloom, Andrea Barrett
a n d Jane Kirkpatrick r a v i n g :
“The Hearts of Horses is a shining example of Molly Gloss’s gifts.”
— Amy Bloom, author of Love Invents Us and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

“Truly, one of the best books you’ll ever read.”

— Jane Kirkpatrick, author of All Together in One Place

“What a gorgeous novel this is! I loved its pitch-perfect voice, the utterly engaging characters, the
deft re-creation of what one corner of America felt like during a foreign war.”
— Andrea Barrett, author of the National Book Award winner Ship Fever

“With The Jump-Off Creek Molly Gloss has made herself a permanent place on the shelf of
American literature that features tough, smart, independent women. Now with The Hearts of
Horses she’s given us another woman in that same vein.”
— Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong and Eventide
CONTACT: Patrice Taddonio
Houghton Mifflin Company
617.351.3832 phone
617.351.1109 fax
Patrice_taddonio@hmco.com

“Gloss ... offers an acutely observed, often lyrical portrayal that mirrors our own era and, title
notwithstanding, has as much to say about people as about horses.” —Kirkus Reviews

“With obvious appeal for horse lovers … varies in action between a gentle canter and energetic
gallop. Strongly recommended.” —Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW

“Gloss’s austere latest (after Wild Life) features a wandering taciturn tomboy who finds her place
in rural Oregon while the men are away at war ... following stubborn, uncompromising Martha as
she goes about her work provides its own unique pleasures.” —Publishers Weekly

“Martha’s tail end of the frontier adventures is chronicled in a delightfully down-home, matter-of-
fact voice by Gloss, author of The Jump-Off Creek.” —Booklist

Out now, the stunning new novel from the author of

The Jump-Off Creek:

THE HEARTS OF HORSES

by Molly Gloss
You could be forgiven for assuming that the biblical adage “There is nothing new under the sun”
holds especially true for fiction about horses and feisty female heroines. But on picking up
PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Molly Gloss’s stunning new novel, The Hearts of Horses
(Houghton Mifflin, November 6, 2007), you’ll be proven entirely, wonderfully wrong.

Set in eastern Oregon in the winter of 1917, The Hearts of Horses tells the story of nineteen-
year-old Martha Lessen, a tall, big-boned young woman whose shyness around other people is in
sharp contrast to her tender yet confident manner with horses—and her fierce advocacy on their
behalf.

There’s not a cliché to be found in Gloss’s lyric, literary prose, which sets Martha’s story in an
unvarnished, unromanticized World War I–era American West. This West isn’t filled with brave,
uncomplicated cowboys; rather, it’s peopled with individuals whose everyday lives are fraught
with the stark realities of war, cancer, death, alcoholism, and the agony of unrealized dreams. But
Gloss’s writing is realistic, not pessimistic, and she weaves the elements of The Hearts of Horses
together to form a one-of-a-kind story about the connections between people and animals that is
moving and heartfelt, with an abundance of historical detail.
The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss
Publication Date: November 6, 2007 * 290 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-79990-9 ISBN-10: 0-618-79990-7
Jacket scans and press materials are available at www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
The Hearts of Horses is classic, breathtaking Molly Gloss. In the words of Amy Bloom, award-
winning author of Love Invents Us, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, and Away: “In
all of Molly Gloss’s work, lyric descriptions and unforgettable characters are supported by an
open, wide-ranging intelligence and not at all undone by dry wit and an open heart. The Hearts of
Horses is a shining example of Molly Gloss’s gifts.”

Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation, echoes Bloom’s praise: “The Hearts of
Horses tells the moving story of an unconventional, strong-willed woman bucking society's norm
to gently train horses without breaking their spirit,” Grandin says.

Indeed, when Martha shows up on George and Louise Bliss’s doorstep looking for work breaking
horses, the Blisses at first doubt the effectiveness of her gentle, unconventional methods. But
Martha’s techniques yield miraculous, near-immediate results, and soon she gains the respect of
the men, the friendship of the women, and the solid, hold-your-chin-high satisfaction of having
done right by the four-legged creatures she’s loved all her life. And along the way, Martha—who
left her home intending to live a footloose, unattached life, and who was once happiest among
men when they seemed to forget she was a girl—finds herself becoming an intrinsic part of the
fabric of her community.

Molly Gloss’s novel The Jump-Off Creek is a Pacific Northwest classic, winner of the Oregon
Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner
Award. The Dazzle of Day, a novel of the near future, received the PEN West Fiction Prize and
was a New York Times Notable Book. Wild Life, set in the woods and mountains of Washington
State at the turn of the twentieth century, won the James Tiptree Award and in 2002 was selected
for the citywide program If All Seattle Read the Same Book.

Filled with indelible characters—some of whom have four legs rather than two—The Hearts of
Horses is a breakout book that will find a place on the bookshelves (and in the hearts) of readers
everywhere.

The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss

Publication Date: November 6, 2007 * 290 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-79990-9 ISBN-10: 0-618-79990-7
Jacket scans and press materials are available at www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
 SOME THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW
HISTORICAL FACTS MOLLY GLOSS DISCOVERED
WHILE RESEARCHING THE HEARTS OF HORSES
Women’s rights came first to the West. Nevada, in 1915, became the first state to grant no-fault
divorce. In 1916 the first woman elected to Congress was Jeannette Rankin of Montana. By the
time national suffrage passed into law, in 1920, almost all states in the ranching West had already
given women the right to vote, starting first with Wyoming Territory in 1869.

While progressive social policies were common throughout the West, so was the influence of
the Ku Klux Klan, which increased its membership in the western states during and immediately
after World War One, riding a tide of intolerance fostered by wartime anti-sedition laws.

Cancer was a rare thing in the 1910s. It would not have been at all unusual for a rural doctor
to practice medicine for forty or more years without seeing a single case. And although cancer
was generally thought of as a women’s disease—twice as many women were diagnosed than
men—there was no mention of breasts in medical texts of the 1910s, and many doctors never
touched their female patients. A woman might describe a complaint but never undress to reveal it.

Horse-breaking methods based on the understanding of a horse’s natural behavior have been
around since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. In fact, Xenophon’s treatise on horse training
includes many of the principles we think of as modern “horse whispering.”

In the 1910s there were numerous books in print advocating and describing humane and
gentle methods of horse training. At the time several men were traveling the country
demonstrating that almost any “untamable” horse could be tamed by working with the horse’s
own nature.

It wasn’t uncommon for women and girls to take on the job of breaking horses, particularly
during the war years, when many of the cowboys had gone into the army—and women were
much more likely than men to take up humane methods.

Western films and traditional western fiction have left us with the impression that the frontier
West ended around 1895, but in fact more people went west to homestead in the twenty years
after 1900 than in the fifty years before.

During World War I in England, recalcitrant or ill-trained army horses were entrusted to
horse-wise young women from the countryside, and returned to service after the girls had made
them biddable.

An average small town in the West in the 1910s could boast, among other things, a bowling
alley, lunch counters, a dance hall, sidewalks, electric streetlights, health ordinances, building
codes, a library, auto repair garages and auto parts stores, a J. C. Penney store, a movie theater, a
music and stationery store. But by the 1930s the populations of small towns in the West had
entered a long decline. Many of the same small towns that in 1920 enjoyed a thriving population
and booming growth are today reduced to a few residents and a row of mostly empty buildings.

While electricity and indoor plumbing had reached almost everyone living in the cities and
towns by the 1910s, the outlying farms and ranches of the West weren’t widely electrified until
the mid to late 1940s.
 MEET THE CHARACTERS OF
THE HEARTS OF HORSES
MARTHA LESSEN In 1917, when she arrives at the home of George and Martha Bliss in Elwha
County, Oregon looking for work breaking horses, 19-year-old Martha Lessen knows that she
never wants to give up her life outdoors in order to get married. But she also knows that there’s
never any way to say My mother had six babies in six years and I don’t know why anybody would
want that kind of life. She hasn’t come to Elwha County intending to stay there. When she smiles,
it causes her eyes to widen as if she’s been happily surprised. She loves to read, especially Black
Beauty, and her shyness around other people is in stark contrast to her confidence with—and
fierce advocacy for—horses.

GEORGE BLISS An Old Oregonian who’s quick with a wink, he hires Martha to break his horses,
though she is the first girl he’s seen advertising herself as a broncobuster. When Martha overhears
him persuading the neighbors of her good horse work (“I expect she’ll just about have them
standing on their hind legs and talking American by spring,” he tells them), she remembers it for
the rest of her life.

LOUISE BLISS George’s wife. There were plenty of women back then who thought they were old
at fifty and who made a practice of unhappiness, but Louise Bliss isn’t one of them. She has lost
her third-born child, but in other respects has been fortunate in her health and marriage. She is
comfortable in her own life and smart enough to know it. But she worries about her son Jack,
who’s off at war, and when she talks to God, her prayers take somewhat the form of a
negotiation.

THE WOODRUFF SISTERS Two maiden ladies who grew up on their father’s ranch and went on
ranching after his death, unconcerned by convention, riding cross-saddle along with their
cowboys even now when they were becoming too old to keep up. They are exactly the sort of
women Martha admires.

HENRY FRAZER The Woodruff sisters’ foreman. He is 30, and his coffee-brown hair is already
shot through with gray; nobody has ever mistaken him for handsome, and he has more than the
usual wear of weather around his mouth and eyes. Martha quickly sees that he wouldn’t hurt a
horse unnecessarily. He imagines Martha must think of him as old, or a bachelor too set in his
ways to ever be housebroken.

EL BAYARD His first name is Ellery, but don’t ever call him that—he goes by El. His right arm is
fixed or nearly fixed in a half-bent position, as if it was broken once and poorly set. He’s one of
the Bliss’s hired hands.

WILL WRIGHT The Bliss’s other hired hand. When Martha arrives at the Bliss household, Will is
a lanky boy not yet filled out, with buckteeth and a crop of pimples but a smile that comes easily.
He is engaged, and expects to be shipped to France to fight soon after getting married.

REUBEN ROMER A good husband and father when he’s sober, but he has lost jobs one after the
other on account of his drinking. He spends his shame in the coin of anger and swagger.

DOROTHY ROMER Reuben’s wife. Takes a shine to Martha because she’s been starving for
female company (so long as it isn’t a child—she has several of them). She is only 28, but she
feels old. She regrets that the only things she is good at are housekeeping and rearing children, as
these are not things other people are anxious to hear about. Any chance she might have had to be
a cowgirl and go around the countryside breaking horses had passed her by a long time ago.

WALTER IRWIN A bachelor homesteader who came out from somewhere in New England with
money but no knowledge of farming or horses.

ALFRED LOGERWELL Lazy, conceited, ignorant, and cruel, he is Walter’s hired help. Martha
sees right away that Alfred is the sort of person she will never have a use for. He reminds Martha
of her father.

DOLLY Martha’s badly scarred mare—and, in Martha’s words, “an awful good horse.” Dolly is
old enough and has been though enough trouble in her life that she likes to keep to herself, and
other horses usually let her go her own way.

T.M. Martha’s liver chestnut. Short for “Trouble Maker,” because if Martha lets him stand in
pasture for very long he forgets every bit of his manners and what he’s learned about being a
good horse and gets fractious and full of himself.

EMIL THIEDE Of German heritage, and as a result, many homesteaders blame him and his family
for everything the German army has done over the past four years. Owns a ranch called the T Bar.
Martha does not freeze out Emil and his family like many of the townspeople do; she makes up
her mind that people who treat horses decently must be decent people.

IRENE THIEDE Emil’s wife. Martha sees right away that Irene sits a horse as well as anybody she
knows. She is English through and through, but she still hears low whispers of “Heinie” and
“Kraut” when she travels through town.

TOM KANDEL A thinking man with a curious mind and more common sense than most. He buys
a horse for Martha to break, which strikes some of his friends as a foolish distraction from the
business of dying (he’s been stricken with cancer). But it is something he and his wife had talked
about before he became ill—they want to give their son, Fred, a horse when he turns 13.

RUTH KANDEL Tom’s wife. She is not one of those women for whom husbands or fathers make
all the decisions. She was as eager as Tom to come West and try herself against the land and raise
their son on a farm. Now that Tom has cancer, the sympathy of her friends and neighbors is just a
weightlessness in her arms. She accepts it because it isn’t their fault they have nothing else for
her, nothing that is any help at all.

W.G. BOYD His wife, Anne, has died of cancer. He rehabilitates sick or mistreated animals—
horses, milk cows, goats, dogs, rabbits, pigs, as well as wounded owls and orphaned fawns. He
never turns away an animal, and though he is unschooled, he has a natural gift for seeing what is
wrong with sick creatures.
 A CONVERSATION WITH MOLLY GLOSS

What made you decide to write this book? How long did it take to complete?
I’ve had this book in mind for about fifteen years—since first hearing about girls and young women who were
breaking horses in the early decades of the twentieth century—but the idea was just a few sentences in a
notebook until I happened to read a description of a “circle ride,” which some old-time horse breakers used to
finish their horses. The circle is such a perfect narrative device, and I saw right away how it would knit
Martha’s story to the stories of the farmers and ranchers for whom she breaks horses. From that point, the
writing itself took around four years.

What kind of research did you do to anchor the book accurately in its historical era?
Several years ago, I had done quite a bit of reading and writing about the twentieth-century homesteading
movement and its impact on the western landscape, so it was mostly a matter of refreshing what I knew. My
first real research for the book involved reading novels written around 1917 and memoirs about the ranching
West during the First World War. I find that novels especially are a good source of period details—and since
they’re also written in the syntax and vernacular of the times, they help along my narrative voice. And of
course I also did a great deal of research about horse-breaking methods of the times; about World War I and
especially its impact on horses; about social conditions in the small towns and on the ranches of the West
during the war; and about cancer treatments in the 1910s.
I also spent a couple of weeks on a large working cattle ranch in Idaho, the Harris family ranch,
where I got reacquainted with horses after a twenty-year hiatus, and was able to soak up a lot of information
and stories about ranching and horse breaking, some of which made it into the novel. Then I went to a couple
of BLM (Bureau of Land Management) mustang adoptions and watched Lesley Neuman give demonstrations
of how to “start” a wild horse (see “First Touch”). Within an hour Lesley can bring a horse that is as wild as a
deer—literally climbing the corral rails—to accept a first touch, and then can halter it, lead it, even get it to
lift up its feet, the whole thing accomplished through body language. Later, with Lesley coaching me from the
corral rails, I was able to have this amazing experience myself, which I wanted not only for research purposes
but for pure personal satisfaction.

Did you have any particular goals in mind when you began writing The Hearts of Horses?
My husband died around the time my last novel, Wild Life, was published, and for the next three years I really
wasn’t able to write at all. When I began The Hearts of Horses I deliberately set out to write a book that
would honor him, sometimes in ways that are visible to anyone who knows me or knew Ed, and sometimes in
ways that no one else would guess or know. More than that, I wanted to write a story that I knew he would
love. It was that goal that got me through the first difficult months of writing, while I was still struggling to
climb back in the saddle, so to speak.

Was it difficult to achieve the balance between evoking a bygone era and sentimentalizing it?
Like Martha in my novel—and like people everywhere in the world, as a matter of fact—I’m a sucker for the
cowboy myth and its romantic images—riding across unfenced prairies, camping under the Milky Way,
waking up to find deer grazing with your horses, and so forth. And I grew up reading Zane Grey and the rest
of that crowd, novels about lonely heroes trying to give up their guns but in the final scenes always turning to
violence as the only way to save the town from the bad guys. Much of my life has been spent exploring that
mythology and the way it has shaped and influenced American culture, thinking hard about the paradoxes and
ambivalences in the western movement and looking at the dark underside of the myth. In all my work I’m
always striving to retell that story, to find a central place in it for women, to retell it as a narrative of
community, and to shape it around the realities of the historical West, realities that are sometimes darker but
always more complicated and therefore more interesting—and more human—than the stories we usually hear.
I don’t know if I always succeed, but I’m always conscious of trying.
Black Beauty touches Martha Lessen deeply. What books have had that sort of impact on you?
As a girl, the book I read and reread obsessively was Shane. Shane comes out of the heart of the wilderness,
where his strength of character and his skills of fighting and shooting have been honed, and he saves us from
the forces of evil; and when he’s finished with the necessary killing, he sacrifices himself to loneliness and
heads back into the wilderness. He’s our classic American hero, and as a girl I was always deeply moved by
that story. But I wasn’t thinking too hard, then, about the dark side of the cowboy myth. I still love to reread
Shane, and I’m still moved by it, but what I see in it now is all the sorrow that underlies the violence. As an
adult, the books that have deeply affected me, and I suppose have shaped my writing, have had other sorts of
heroes: Willa Cather’s western novels, for instance, especially Death Comes for the Archbishop. And Leslie
Silko’s Ceremony, which I’ve read at least half a dozen times. When I squint hard, I can see Silko’s book as a
retelling of Shane, but in this retelling Tayo turns away from killing, and he doesn’t ride off into the
mountains at the end. He heads toward the embrace of his people.

Did you make a decision at the outset to include issues with contemporary echoes and implications in The
Hearts of Horses, or did those issues become part of the story organically?
When I write about the West, I’m always trying to find a central place for women—women who own their
own lives and their own livelihoods—and at the same time, and surely not at odds, I’m always returning again
and again to the question of loneliness, of what it is to be loved, or unloved, or to feel so, and the questions of
marriage and children, their place and meaning in a woman's life. These questions seem to me to arise
naturally whenever you’re writing about women, whether it’s women today or a hundred years ago. And just
from a practical writerly standpoint, if your hero is a woman, and your novel is set in 1917, you’ve got to
make decisions about whether she lives alone and prefers it, whether she’s married, whether she has children,
and crucially you have to figure out how those things may complicate her heroic role in the novel. And yes,
I’m aware right from the get-go that I’m grappling with questions every woman still grapples with. There are
no right or wrong answers—that’s the only thing that remains certain to me after years of turning these
questions over and over in my mind and in my writing.
The war was something I hadn’t realized would resonate so strongly as a current issue. I set the novel in
1917 because I knew that women had taken up a lot of the ranch jobs when the young men went off to fight in
Europe; it was largely just a practical consideration. And I expected it would make an interesting backdrop to
what was happening on the ranches. But I was stunned, when I dug into the research, to find so many specific
contemporary echoes: people calling sauerkraut “liberty cabbage,” for instance, and eyeing suspiciously
anybody who spoke German or had a German surname; accusing antiwar protesters of being unpatriotic; and
the espionage laws that eroded civil rights during those years. I can’t say I’m happy about all the parallels, but
it does give the novel a layer of relevance I hadn’t expected.

What would you say is the central theme of The Hearts of Horses?
That’s a hard one. Can I refer you back to something I said earlier, about the darker, more complicated, more
interesting, more human story of western settlement? That was one thing I tried to keep in mind while I was
writing this novel, and it might have to stand as the central theme.

Do you tackle the writing process differently depending on the genre in which you’re working?
Really no, not at all. There’s always research to be done before and during the writing. There’s always a great
deal of effort to bring life to the page. And to my way of thinking, there’s a continuous line between historical
fiction and science fiction. We are every bit as distanced from the past as we are from the future. We have as
much trouble believing the past was real, that its people walked the earth and felt the same things we feel, as
believing there will be a future world and people will go on living their complicated lives after we are dead
and forgotten. So bringing those worlds to life, whether past or future, involves the same rigorous evocation
of detail and the same attention to the old human questions, which in my case, and even in my science fiction,
are questions that circle around the western experience.

What is the most important piece of advice you can give to aspiring writers?
Keep writing. Write every day. There is no real way to teach someone how to write well, but you can learn it,
and you learn it mostly by the practice of writing every day. There are so many things that can keep us from
writing—family responsibilities, financial considerations, all the daily distractions. And when you begin
trying to publish, there’s almost always discouragement, rejection, which can go on for a long time. So you
have to find a way to fit writing into your life, and then find the diligence, the heart, the will to keep at it.
Many of the most promising writers I’ve met in workshops are not the ones who’ve had some later success.
It’s the ones who’ve kept writing.

When readers finish The Hearts of Horses, what do you hope they will be feeling?
I hope they’ll read the last lines and wonder what Martha meant by those words—and that they’ll go on
thinking about them after they close the book. I hope they’ll feel glad to have met these people, to have come
to know them and even to love them, and saddened now to leave them behind. But of course that’s one of the
pleasures of a novel, isn’t it? You can always open to the first page again and find those people right there
waiting for you.
 PRAISE FOR MOLLY GLOSS’S PREVIOUS NOVELS

WILD LIFE
“As Molly Gloss’s unconventional heroine affirms herself as a feminist, natural historian,
mythologist, parent, and adventure seeker, she reminds us that opportunity exists inside the self as
well as outside it.” — New York Times Book Review

“The writing is gorgeous . . . the story transforming.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Never before has there been a more authentic, persuasive, or moving evocation of this elusive
legend: a masterpiece.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Adventurous in character, story, and thought; cannily constructed; epigrammatic and beautifully
written, Gloss’s suspenseful . . . and exhilarating tale cajoles us into asking what it means to be
alive on this teeming sphere.” — Chicago Tribune

“Molly Gloss’s penchant for creating strong, witty, intelligent protagonists is at its best
in Wild Life, a feral fantasy solidly anchored in historical reality. This is a hauntingly beautiful
journey into the heart of humanness — and beyond.”
— Jean M. Auel, author of The Clan of the Cave Bear

THE JUMP-OFF CREEK

“In fewer than two hundred pages, Molly Gloss, in her first novel, has created a classic
of its kind.” — Los Angeles Times

“[It is] a rare treat to find characters we can care about this much.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer

“Gloss’s conscientious, McPhee-like detailing of hard-blistering homesteading toil is achingly

effective; but it’s the author’s reading of lives locked in by hardship, loneliness, and real danger,
and of their careful steps toward community, that is so appealing. A moving and engrossing
first novel.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Every gritty line of the story rings true . . . extraordinarily fine writing.”
— Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“A remarkable depth of emotion and authenticity . . . This is a fine addition to our western
literature; literature in the true sense, worthy of comparison with H. L. Davis’s masterpiece of
early Oregon, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Honey in the Horn. A fine work that
deserves attention.” — Oregonian

“This is the West behind the swaggering and hokum: these people really work, these guns really
kill. But Lydia and Blue and Tim live their hard, silent, lonesome lives with courage and passion,
and their story has the clear beauty of the mountain light.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
 FIRST TOUCH

In order to get inside the mind of The Hearts of Horses’s heroine, Martha Lessen,
Molly Gloss got up close and personal with a modern-day horse gentler—and a mustang
named Buck. Here, Gloss (above left) takes us along on her journey into the pen.
26 May 2005 (Burns, Oregon) 10 June 2005 (Corvallis, Oregon)
Drove over to the BLM wild horse corrals in Burns I sat with about a dozen people, mostly adopters, watching
today. The horses are filthy, hanging on to their winter Lesley Neuman’s clinic. The whole time she was working
coats in matted patches. Some of the young ones thin she kept up a stream of talk, but her attention was all on
but not so much as you might expect; mostly they the horse, a shapely little brown mustang about three years
look healthy, well built, just ungroomed. The wran- old. Sometimes I could see what Lesley was getting at—“I
glers are in the middle of vaccinating and gelding, but want him to turn up and face me when he changes direc-
by the end of next week they’ll start sorting out which tion, not put his hind end to me like he just did”—and
horses to take to Corvallis for the adoption event. sometimes, even watching closely, I couldn’t see it: “I’m
They tell me Lesley Neuman is coming up from Cali- pushing his hip away,” she said more than once, when all
fornia to give some gentling demos over there. she seemed to be doing was walking back and forth with
her hands in her pockets. “There’s his thought, and I’ll let
The horses are hanging on to their winter that happen.” What thought? What was she letting hap-
coats in matted patches ... mostly they look pen? But gradually I began to see the very small, very brief
healthy, well built, just ungroomed. gestures of her body or the gelding’s, a language they were
speaking that had almost no verbal equivalent. After less
than half an hour, he allowed her to touch him for the
first time, and by the time she climbed out of the corral at
the end of an hour, or maybe an hour and a half, he was
comfortable with being handled all over. After Lesley left
the corral, the same BLM wrangler who had had a hell of
a time hazing this mustang into the round pen walked right
up to the horse, scratched him around the ears, took hold
of his halter, and quietly led him out of the pen. Amazing.
11 June 2005 (Corvallis) Watched Lesley
demo four more mustangs today. Interesting—every horse
a completely distinct personality, and Lesley’s response and
method varying a fair bit depending on the horse. She told
me afterward, “It’s a pleasure to find out what works for
each horse. I don’t always know why I’m doing what I’m do-
ing—I guess I just listen to the horse and talk back.”
21 August 2005 (Portland, Oregon)
We’re trying to set up a time and place we can work to-
gether—and of course a horse to work with. Lesley’s friend
Becky Sheridan is planning to adopt a mustang colt out of
the Burns corrals after their fall roundup, and she might
agree to let us to “do our thing” with her new horse. If that “I don’t always know why I’m doing what
happens, I’d drive down from Portland and Lesley would I’m doing—I guess I just listen to the horse
drive up from Rescue (Calif.), and we’d meet at Becky’s place and talk back.”
in Lakeview, halfway between.
There are a hundred little things to watch for, and there
30 October 2005 (Lakeview, is the need to react as soon as you
Oregon) Spent most of the day today at glimpse the slightest response...
Becky Sheridan’s, working in a round pen with It’s like learning a complicated
“Buck”—and hoping that’s not an inauspicious dance with an unfamiliar
name! Lesley coached me from the rails, Becky partner who doesn’t
and a couple of her neighbors watching from speak your language.
the sidelines. I felt clumsy and slow, especially
at first—not as easy as it looked when I was
watching Lesley from the bleachers. A hundred
little things to watch for and hold in mind, and
the need to react very very quickly—as soon
as you glimpse the slightest response from the
horse. Like learning a complicated dance with
an unfamiliar partner who doesn’t speak your
language. But I did eventually begin to find the
horse’s rhythm, could sense when he was about
to disengage his hindquarters, or when his nose To make that connection—to realize we were communi-
was about to come down, or when he was just at cating across species—felt so exciting, so amazing, it felt
the beginning of softening to the rope—my sig- like one of the most profound things I’d ever experienced.
nal to quickly step away, loosen the pressure. He
was so smart, so incredibly quick to sort things
out—much quicker than me, for sure. He knew
when I was giving him a break, and he got busy
figuring out what he could do to earn another
one. By the time he let me touch him the first
time, I could see in his expression that he was
discovering how to be with me. It was as if he
were saying to himself, I can do this; it’ll be okay.
And oh boy, to make that connection—to real-
ize we were communicating across species—felt
so exciting, so amazing, it felt like one of the
most profound things I’d ever experienced.