Conversations with The Gray Goose

I have had a long talk with Goose.  Goose knows a lot about me, including one or two things nobody else knows.  She is a good listener, like all her kin, and she will never tell.  Each time I talk to her, telling her the long, drifting narrative that spools out as we ride straight roads, me letting her have her head and dreamily trusting her to keep on course, a little more of me goes out into the space contained by her body and each of us becomes a little more a part of the other.  It usually starts with an apology, reassurances that I do not love her less than the other.  It’s just that there is so much history with that other horse, the blue one.  I am at pains to explain to Goose why I, or more often others, will refer to her by the wrong name, forgetting she is not the same as the other one, the beloved, the heroine who I envision as a great blue roan, probably Percheron crossed with some long-lost indian pony from not long after the Spaniards arrived, a mix both mysterious and great.  A horse quintessentially American, born in the heart of this land and having galloped its roads.  A heroine with an ungainly, even an ugly name, but a name which has become like a prayer, a whispered lament, a great, sorrowing cry into the night.  A name which has become beautiful, in the way that a homely face becomes beautiful when it is the face of one much loved.

Goose is very much like the other one, yet she is not the same.  There is great familiarity, great comfort in her wide, solid embrace, in her familiar smells and sounds, and in how my hand knows just where to go to direct her warm breath onto me in the chilly nights, or her cool blowing on hot days, or to put her into the gear that lets us go leaping off the road into the wild, unpaved desert tracks.  She is of the same race, though she does not have the same wicked sense of humor, the cranky, sometimes willful penchant for disobedience (though there are times that disobedience was in response to a cry from afar, really an act of loving service given as perhaps a final act in a long history of service).  Goose is more biddable, a quieter, more peaceable soul, but it may be because she is a bit younger and has not been worn so hard by as many miles.  It may be that her first girl, a woman by the name of Laura Graham, shaped her into a gentler creature, created the foundation that I would one day build upon.  I never met Laura and know little about her, except that she took delivery of Goose back in 1989 and kept her until she passed into the hands of a lovely couple with the wonderful last name of Buck.  And then she came to me. 

It pleases me that Goose belonged to a girl first, it feels as if she is meant to belong to a girl, though you wouldn't think it to look at her.  But I think she is meant for a tough girl who has places to go and has a lot of gear that needs hauling and wagons that need pulling.  A girl with a secret pain in her heart which very few people would understand.

I lean my forehead against her, lay my hand on her, weep, tell her she is good and true and strong, and that God has given her to me just like I was once given another.  She does not ask me if I would trade her for the other one if I could, if I had to.  She is patient and stands quietly, her great heart beating steadily, awaiting my command.  I draw a ragged breath and tell her there has been enough loss and despair, we should think of other things, things more pressing to the moment.  Like the road that is waiting for us.

I tell her I am a little scared.  Actually, if it comes to it, more than a little scared.  I tell her I have never been as far on that road as I am preparing to go.  She says, calmly, “I have.”

I blink, look at her regarding me peacefully with the gentle gaze of her round gauges.  “You have?”

She tells me what I should have already known, talking in the way she has that is not words but pictures that spring into my mind, showing me what she wishes to convey.  She says that when she first came west she did not gallop all the way herself, but rode on the back of another beast, but that she remembers the wind in her face, the scenery going by, the vastness of the Great Plains, the beautiful emptiness of the desert. 

“Don’t be afraid,” she says.  “I know the way.”

And I smile.