Adam's Task by Vicki Hearne

Author:Vicki Hearne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510704220
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

The speaker in this passage, Page, is at the moment in the hospital in Saigon for something like the sixth time, as a consequence of a piece of shrapnel in his head that ought to have killed him. For him and for the narrator, the only alternative to the “glamour” he is talking about is pallid luxury, a kind of life-in-death. And Flynn, the man whose maniacal joy Page celebrates, is horribly dead by this point in the book, as are most of the author’s buddies. If it is possible to earn the right to say that you can’t take the glamour out of war, Page and Herr have earned it.

Horsemen share with Page this much at least: the conviction that to turn away from risk is to live at best a life of pallid luxury, though I’ve not met many who thought that risk in and of itself had any value. But the horseman’s relationship to risk is an example of a frequent sort of human response to the knowledge that we die, and to the way it turns out that once death has gotten into the imagination, not even immortality will get it out again. (Think of Tennyson’s poem “Tithonius” in which Tithonius, Aurora’s lover, to whom the goddess has granted immortality but not eternal youth, pleads with her for the restoration of his mortality. His plaint is one of a long series in our literature.)

I don’t know of a trainer who hasn’t had experiences of the sort my partner had one day riding a horse who was suicidal and homicidal in a more organized though less committed way than Drummer Girl was. (I suspect that this horse wasn’t smart enough to achieve the kind of commitment Drummer Girl had.) He asked me to be on the ground whenever he rode the horse because, as he said, there ought to be someone there to get the forklift out and scrape him up from time to time.

At one point he said savagely, after a particularly malicious effort on the horse’s part, “You know what I’d do if this were my horse? I’d kill him, that’s what.” He recovered his trainerly philosophy fairly quickly after this lapse, but he really meant it, this man who loved horses as he loved his soul and most of the time gladly took informed risks for the sake of their beauty. And this, of course, is a success story, a story about the success of my partner’s imaginative courage, but it is also a story that needn’t have turned out this way. There was every evidence that this horse was a genuine rogue, and it did look for quite a bit as if destroying him was the only safe thing to do.

William Steinkraus, who knows quite a bit about risk, has this to say:

The only horse to whom the above recommendations do not apply is the rogue—the equine equivalent of the congenitally criminal personality. As in the case of humans, some rogues are so

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