THE MEXICAN LETTERS: EXCERPT

AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL

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How to Catch a Runaway Horse

22nd October 2015

Week 6, Day 4

Do you know how to show a horse who’s boss? Jessie does. It’s all in the feet.

“Whoever moves the feet is in control,” she explained as she lead Bandido around the round-pen today, the jumpy thoroughbred who ten minutes earlier had trotted around with his head high and ears pinned back now following her like a dog. He had his head low and ears forward, tuned into Jessie’s every movement without her so much as raising her voice. Jessie stopped, he stopped. Jessie walked, he walked.

Jessie turned around and looked at him, he looked like a kid caught with his hands in the cookie-jar. She only had to lift her whip an inch for him to step back, set it down and he’d stop.

“Never pet a horse when they do something good,” she explained as she set about walking again, not even looking at Bandido as he followed in her tracks. She stopped. Bandido stopped. “The only reward a horse understands is a drop of pressure. Let down the whip, or the lead rope, or just get out of his face. That’s all he wants. Ever seen how horses act in a field?”

I didn’t even begin to answer; it was evident it was a rhetorical question. Jessie, wearing purple tiger-striped Lycra hot pants, a white triangular bikini top and her totally unrecognisable, once leopard-print trainers, was in the horsemanship zone.

“There’s always a lead horse, right? Here, it’s McKenna.”

“McKenna?” I asked. “Old, shaggy, stubby-legged fatty McKenna?”

“Yup,” she said and turned Bandido around. “He’s the oldest. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. But every corral has its own lead horse, too, just like every group of humans has a boss who might not be boss in another social constellation. You see it in the morning, when you give them hay. Who can chase whom away.”

“Right. Marilyn can chase Chief off, but then Quintana will chase her off.”

“Exactly. It’s all about hierarchy. And the way to gain the respect of a horse, is to simply act like you’re higher than they are in the hierarchy. You have to be the lead horse.”

“And how do you act like a lead horse?”

“By moving the feet.”

“What if you can’t?”

“There’s always a way.”

“Alright,” I said, cockily leaning my elbows on the round-pen fence. “What about Bullet this morning. I went to catch him in the corral, and he ran off. Then how do I “move his feet?””

Jessie got all French about this.

“Well, well, well,” she said and started prancing about stroppily. I might have imagined this, but I could’ve sworn Bandido got more French, too. “I am glad you asked, madame. Let me demonstrate.”

What happened next was a thing of beauty. Jessie unhooked the lead rope from Bandido’s halter and started swinging it around. In response, Bandido took off like a bullet and went rodeo in the round-pen. He started bucking, kicking and twisting about, turning this way and that, creating his own miniature storm of dust.

“Mon dieu,” Jessie said, “Seems he needed to let off a bit of le steam.”

We watched together as Bandido let off steam until he seemed pretty much worn out. Then Jessie walked over brusquely to him, in the way you should never approach a horse: head-on, looking into its eyes. Not surprisingly, Bandido smelled danger and trotted off.

“If you wanna catch a horse,” Jessie said and began jogging after Bandido, “and it runs off, what you gotta do is chase it.” She began running, spinning the lead rope around and making faces. Bandido, understandably, was running for his life. “Sounds counterintuitive, I know,” she went on, adding a few growling noises. “But the thing is, you see, that if you run after a horse for long enough, that horse will eventually forget that it was his idea to run in the first place. Especially if he stops, and you keep chasing, he will start thinking that it was your idea to move him. Which means –“

“You’re the lead horse.”

“Très bien.” She stopped moving, crouched down and turned away from Bandido. “Just watch.”

And sure enough, Bandido, after throwing some suspicious glances at the formerly very loud figure now crouching in the middle of the round pen, came sauntering over. Head low, eyes forward, snorting a little. Without so much as getting up from her crouching position, Jessie hooked the lead rope back on.

“Have a go?” she asked and held it out to me.

I did as she said, and it worked. Not as seamlessly as when she did it, of course, but I did manage to move Bandido around at walk and trot, change directions, back up, and move the front and hind quarters. That’s a pretty good start, but you know what’s even better?

I realised I’ve been treating you like a horse.

A runaway horse.

Now wait a minute, you might say – aren’t I the one who’s ten thousand miles away from home?

Well, yes.

But I only ran off after you’d already done it. You hadn’t left me, physically. But you and I both know you’d left the relationship. You just hadn’t bothered to take your body with you.

And so I ran even further, in a bid to make you think all that space was my idea. Hoping that you, like Bandido, would be so impressed by my strength that you’d simply walk back up to me, and let yourself be caught. I was the one to run away but honey I did it in self-defence. I broke up in self-defence.

When I was a kid I always said I’d marry a horse. I think I knew myself better at nine than I do today.