The Life and Times of the Plume

It is night.  I am sitting on a horse.  It is twenty five degrees below zero and there is a wind pushing against the thick wool of my scarf.  My brow bone has worked itself free of the shelter of my toque, the exposed skin feels like granite, the cold is moving into the bone of my face.  I reach up with a thickly mittened hand to push my hat down low over my eyebrows.  A tendril of hair has escaped my scarf, it curls up near my cheek.  My breath has frosted it over and frozen it into a crispy twirl.  I can feel the heat of my horse rising up and out of the swooping curve of her back, my legs wrap down and around her sides, I squeeze her with my calf muscles and we step forward through the snow.  The coils of her spine shoot back and forth beneath my seat.  I slide one hand forward under the crest of her mane where the heat of her body pools and we pass through an open gate into a side pasture.  I ride bareback.  It is warmer.  It makes me feel more connected to my horse.  I ride without a bridle.  Sugar Britches wears a halter.  I have passed the lead shank up and around the thickness of her neck, and tied it again to the metal halter hoop that rests beneath her chin so that I have a sort of long loop of ropey rein.  I lay the coil of rope against her neck when I want her to turn and press her sides with my legs so that her body bends into the direction we are turning.  Poe, my sister’s dog, a huge German shepherd mix, is running beside me, I tell him to get up ahead and he goes, leaping in ground eating bounds across deep snow.  The night is quiet.  The snow is light and powdery.  It hasn’t yet hardened into crusty drifts that can hold the weight of a child or small adult.  Sugar moves through the pasture with long legged ease.  We go gently.  We are night things.  She snorts.  The air from her billowing and branching lungs enters the night in a white plume that immediately dissipates in the breeze.  Now the herd has joined us in the pasture.  My father has put out fresh, sweet hay for them and they leave it behind to be with the mare I am riding.  They are bound together and naturally move like this, in a pack of hooves and hide, tethered together by herd law and equine nature.   Nine horses gather around us as we move across the pasture.  I have to be careful.  They are frisky.  The wind makes them edgy.  They are collectively in a mood.  They move as a herd now but follow Sugar Britches, which is contrary to their usual order.  They are unsure of their individual status because I am Sugar’s passenger and she isn’t entirely free to fall into her place in the pecking order.  They nip at each other.  Swirl around me like frittering snowflakes on a prairie wind.  I stop Sugar.  Start her forward again.  Rein her around Brio and Lonesome Dove who seem to be settling something between themselves, tooth to rump, hoof to barrel.  Brio splits off from our jumble of long legs and shifting bodies, arches his neck, lowers his head and strikes out at the dog with a front hoof — he dislikes dogs and snaps at Poe, as though he is a mangy coyote after a foal.  I stop Sugar Britches again, to let the herd swirl and settle around us.  When we start forward again, I feel a tiny rebellion rise up in her as she shifts into a smooth, slow jog.  The herd picks up and lopes ahead of us.  I slow her to a walk, place my hand on her withers and tell her to go easy.  I rein her left and we make a wide ellipse through the snow, turning away from the herd, moving in a peaceful arc.  I remind her that for the time being, she is working, she must pay attention to me, we move together.  I can see two, gracefully winking stars through the clouds.  I see the quaint lights of Borden glowing on the belly of the sky.  The poplar bluffs stand in piles of inky sticks against the whitescape, sheltering the white tail deer as they doze, porcupines, a cougar or two, perhaps a badger.  I lick my lips.  They are foreign and cold against my tongue tip.  Sugar Britches reaches out a long neck and bites at a mouthful of bunch grass poking up out of the snow.  The herd circles back.  I think I have stepped out of my humanness for a small moment in time and then I suddenly feel awfully human.  I’ve never had a perspective like this before, moving inside the shifting brawn of a horse family, surfing the energy and complexity of a herd of large animals, while riding one.  They’re big.  They surround Sugar and I.  Huge bodies kicking out, hind quarters digging in and pushing off.  Powerfully.  That is the word.  Powerful.  They are powerful.  I am not.  If I fall off, I will be stepped on.  Perhaps kicked.  I can feel a wild sort of tension, electric and snapping against the bite of the air.  Gunner lopes ahead, tosses his head and bucks a little.  I am so small.  Here.  Everywhere.  My bones are fragile.  My skin, so precious and perishable.   I can be snapped into pieces.  Rifted meanly, from end to end.  Laid to waste, in wispy pools of particles, like a burned out star.  I close my eyes, in a long blink, against the icy nails of the wind.  I think I feel an infinite amount of trembling universe unfolding in the black prairie dirt that lays sleeping beneath all these snows, grasses, hooves.  Somewhere, under everything, is the delicate rooting of dormant croci.  The promise of prairie lilies.  Somewhere above us is a galaxy inside a universe-still-expanding.  Spools, hoops, spirals, upwardness and the quirks and quarks of energy.  I think I hear my cells singing.  I exhale a cosmic white: star drift, moon dust, the boiling magma of my bones.  I lift my face to a hidden moon, feel a slight shift in my spirit, like the edge of beginning, like the burgeoning of isotopes, the cusp of new.  I’m tied to it all in a meaningful, covalent bond.  Within the breadth of all this tremendous beauty, for the opposite leanings of everything that is, I feel so righteously aware.  I bend forward over Sugar Britches’ withers, wrap my arms around her neck, feel her slow slightly, in response to my shift of weight and I tell her, “You would carry me safely through this snow.  Dear girl, this is all so fleeting…let us ride together through this cloak of night and white.”  I ride like that for a moment.  Close my eyes.  Focus on the movement and the power of life that is carrying me.  Feel that energy, that heat, passing into me and spurring my very heartbeat.  My exposed nose tip is pushed into the coarseness of a black mane.  When I sit up tall again, the night is as quiet as ever.  We have ridden the circumference of the pasture.  We pass through the open gate again.  We walk, with the herd, around the edge of a poplar bluff.  Twigs scratch at my jacket and pull my toque off my head.  I bend low to miss a branch.  We walk.  We walk.  One hoof after another.  A four beat gait.  We reach another gate.  I slide off, open the gate, walk Sugar Britches through, and slog across thigh deep snow to the back of the barn.  My father slides the barn door open and I tell him, “I’ll take her in.  She worked for me.  I’ll give her some grain.”  I lead her into the barn, tie her in her stall, pour her a scoop of oats.  She digs in, with great pleasure.  In the tack room is a bag of apples and a rusty old knife.  I slice five apples into halves, slide through the barn door, and walk out to the herd where I feed the horses these sweet treats, one by one.  They gather around me and shove their noses against my chest and belly.  I smile as they breathe their hot apple cider breath on me, and nod their heads, as horses sometimes do, when they are chewing something delicious.