Margot Kiser   Letters to Annie from KAFTANISTAN

get a rope....

The year after I moved to Montana my mother had heard that I was taking a writing clinic. No, I said, a riding workshop. As in horses. Tom and Meredith Brokaw, my upriver neighbors, were hosting a three day “horse whisperer” course starring Buck Brannaman.

Horse whisperer?

By 1991, the year I took the workshop, the world of “natural” horse trainers had already ordained Buck Brannaman, a shaman or Dr. Doolittle of sorts, long before Nicholas Evans’s book, The Horse Whisperer, published in 1995. Indeed, Buck — the man who understood “horses with people problems” — was one of the inspirations for the title character.

It became quickly apparent that the then young Buck favored horses over people. If you were thrown off or your hat fell off and spooked the horse, it was your fault. His job was less about making us comfortable and safe around horses and more about training horses to feel comfortable and safe around clueless humans, who spent little time on horses.

No wonder my downriver neighbor (you know who you are!) let me ride her psychotic horse.

But my dozen or so horse whisperer class-mates and I didn’t yet grasp the subtle yet Copernican concept. We had assumed that we’d learn some special method of controlling these hulking, unpredictable beasts — like talking quietly instead of yelling at them.

Buck tried teaching us how to get the horse to back off and back up when it was in your face by putting up his palms a respectable distance from the horse and with great ease and elegance command the horse to walk backward. Tom, John and I were waving our fingers Hula dance-style as though trying to hypnotize the animal.

I haven’t yet seen the documentary film about Buck that’s in theaters now. But I recently read a Facebook friend’s post mentioning that he had been a victim of child abuse. This didn’t surprise me. It explains the affinity victims of abuse often have with the animals that, like children, are vulnerable and powerless at the hand of man.

Probably no surprise either that he saved his best “trick” for last. An unbroken horse burst out its trailer in a bucking rage and Buck managed to calm it down enough so that it returned to the trailer on its own accord only two or three minutes later.