Think of Horses by Mary Clearman Blew

Author:Mary Clearman Blew [Blew, Mary Clearman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000 FICTION / Literary
Publisher: Bison Books

16

Tam’s fine words to Libarriby Sibidibel, I’ll write something worthwhile—her first tentative attempts at a journal—have been crowded out by thoughts of horses. Legend or not, someone has to have ridden a horse for the first time. Perhaps a horse like Tam’s linebacked buckskin, whose dark line along her spine was supposed to indicate ancient lineage? Or perhaps a proto-horse that looked like the little burro?

How would that first horseback ride have come about?

Dogs, well—easy to imagine an early species of wolf, drawn to the side of the campfire by the warmth of flames and the scent of meat dripping on a spit. Gradually a partnership, a kind of symbiosis, developing. If you’ll feed me, I’ll hunt for you. I’ll fight beside you. I’ll curl up close to you in the cold.

But a horse wouldn’t have been drawn to the warmth of a campfire, even by curiosity. Tam has searched the internet for information about early domestication and learned only that horses probably were used first as beasts of burden, capable of carrying heavier loads than dogs, in what is now the Middle East. She dimly remembers a novel she must have read as a child, of a young girl rescuing a colt from a bog and earning its gratitude—bleah, as Calvin would say. She has no desire to write a cave-girl novel.

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