View from the North 40: You can temper steel with fire, too

Horses are psychic — if you don’t believe it, just watch them be jerks about it.

I just spent three days researching, reading, interviewing and writing about livestock predation due to grizzlies, wolves, mountain lions and coyotes — which is the technical way of saying I was drowning in the details about large, wild meat-eaters making a meal out of livestock.

The day I finished with the project, my horses spent the entire time I was out feeding them, in the dark, spooking around in their pen — even leaving their food, which they never do. Well, no. Never is strong language and, strictly speaking, untrue because “never” ends the moment they can spend a little time messing with my head.

Yes, I’m saying they were deliberately getting me psyched out a bit in the dark.

Somehow they always know the thing, the one thing, that’s going to get in your head any given day.

If you’re in a hurry, they slow down. If you’re distracted, they trip you up. If you’re in a bad mood, they do the one thing sure to annoy you. You just want to have a lazy “me” day? They break something. Showing them to someone who’s afraid of horses? They will swarm you, get pushy, try to eat someone’s clothes. Showing them off to someone you want to impress? Can’t find ’em, then when you do they’re covered in mud, one’s limping, one’s forgotten all of its manners and the fancy one, the one you really bragged up, is doing an ugly trot-around until it stops in a stance that clearly mimics an aged cow.

They know.

And they’re diabolical.

Somehow they knew I had been immersed in a world lives-lost statistics and predators, and then they acted like they were being stalked by one in the dark.

“So here’s the plan. She comes out to feed, we wait and wait and wait back here where she can’t see us, then we rush out of here to the feeder. I’ll keep spooking sideways. You do that head-high-looking thing. When she finally points her flashlight where you’re looking, let’s run off a few yards and act like the danger is coming from a different direction. It’ll seem like we’re surrounded.”

It worked. It shouldn’t have, but it worked. I fell for it, shined my flashlight around. Several times. Got jumpy, kept planning escape routes and assessing my surroundings for self-defense options.

I kept watching the horses and their fear-antics knowing that if there is danger they would, surely, leave me there as the sacrifice whilst they ran hither and yon to safety — me being the slow, dumb, defenseless, plodding human.

That’s what I would do if I were fleeter of foot.

But I also kept thinking about a video clip I’d just watched about the Spanish festival of “Las Luminarias” in San Bartolome de Pinares where people ride their horses through fire. Actual fire, not metaphorical fire.

Many churches and religions celebrate St. Anthony, the patron saint of animals, by blessing their parishioners’ animals Jan. 17, St. Anthony’s Day. But in San Bartolome de Pinares on the eve of the blessing the locals hold this nighttime festival during which the horse-people ride their horses down the cobble streets to a spot where other celebrants are keeping fires lit. These aren’t campfires.

They’re making bonfire-height flames with piles of dry brush. The horses are calmly walking and trotting up to and jumping through these smoking, crackling, 8 to 14 foot high walls of flame. I have no doubt drinking is involved, but those horses, though? They are stone-cold sober and jumping through fire.

They’re like “We are bred to fight bulls, I’m sure I can take whatever bulls—t you fools are trying to pull off tonight.”

Y’know, a former pastor at the Episcopal church in my town used to invite me to bring my horses to the St. Anthony’s Day animal blessing. I always turned her down because I couldn’t convince her to seal the blessing with the brush fire. She swore it was unnecessary, but I would assure her that it would take a fire, a substantial fire to get a blessing to stick to a horse.

It’s like pottery, I’d say, you won’t get the enamel to seal the pot until you fire it in a kiln.

Perhaps I should’ve introduced her to my horses. You know they would’ve rubbed their snotty noses on the clothes she was trying to keep clean, scraped some paint off her car hood or passed gas when she walked by downwind. Horses are big on that fart joke.

Meanwhile, back at my nighttime feeding, the cat ratted out the horses’ shenanigans.

He took one look around then sat down and started cleaning his fur — a clear signal no predators were around or near-death experiences imminent.

We left the horses to their own snorting, clearly they had fooled themselves into believing their own predator story.

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I still haven’t given up on the riding through fire idea at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .