By Carol Moen Wing
Gold Solas Award-winner in the Animal Encounter category
This horse I’m riding is smaller than I’m accustomed to — although I’m not sure if “accustomed to” is even a fair thing to say anymore, since my own horse has been gone for nearly a decade, and I’m lucky if I ride even once a year now. Or maybe it’s the wide open steppe that makes him seem small, the vast stretch of undulating hills and waving grass all around us, the view I see framed by his delicate brown ears. He doesn’t have a name, like most of the horses here, and so I give him one in my head. Bataar. He doesn’t need to know it, but I do.
We’re getting along, this horse and me, despite my shifting around to find my balance in the stiff Mongolian saddle. We speak to horses by the way we use our bodies. You don’t use your legs to communicate as you would in the West — here, it’s all about the reins. Once I understood that, we settled in together just fine. One of the girls in our group rode up next to me half an hour ago, another American, the one who’d been mouthing off earlier about her childhood of riding lessons and horse shows and the difference between Hunters and Jumpers. She was red in the face, laying her leg on hard against her horse’s side, mouth turned down in anger.
“These horses aren’t even trained,” she said, “They don’t do anything you ask!”
I told her about the reins, showed her what I meant, and my little bay gelding reacted right on cue. I thought about how the kids here are put on horses before they can walk, how useless their stumpy little legs would be, how the race horses are all ridden by children who perch high above their backs, and the adults ride standing straight up in their stirrups.
“You have to speak Mongolian to them,” I said, trying for a joke but then realizing I meant it.
So is that why it feels okay to be here, with this horse? Why it even feels good to be here, looking out through that window made by the frame of his ears? My first time on a horse without sadness. But that thought makes me sad, so I push it away.
A week ago, in a place many miles of steppe and several mountain ranges from here, I stood in a circle of men showing photos from home: my house, my office, my dog. When I came to the photo of my horse, my pretty grey mare Loni, they murmured appreciatively. Our guide, Ider, translated one man’s comment. “This is a good horse.”
I told them I’d had her for more than twenty years, that she lived to be thirty-three, and I could tell from their reactions that they appreciated this. I felt proud of this moment, thrilled by the connection with people who lived in a world so different from my own. I wondered if they were thinking what I was thinking — about the ovoos where Mongolian people line up the skulls of their best horses, to honor them. I thought about how I wished I could do that for my horse, that she deserved it. And then they flipped to the next photo and saw me riding my horse along the fence line of an arena, and a boy reached out to trace his finger along that fence, puzzled by it. Why was I riding so close to a fence?
How different that constrained little world I had shared with my horse, and this wide-open world I’m in now with Bataar. He’s trotting, his gait smoother than I expected. Or maybe it’s that I’ve figured out how to stand in these stirrups and not hit my pelvis against the saddle with every step. I know how to talk to him so that he understands what I’m asking. I can feel the bellows of his breath beneath me, can smell his musky sweet scent, and when I touch his neck, I am glad he is brown and not grey. I want to take him home with me, but that would ruin his life. I will have to settle for having this one good day with him, the wildflowers rushing by beneath us in a blur of color, the wind in our faces, the way his fluff of black mane lifts off his neck, and I braid my fingers through it. In nearly ten years, I have not ridden a horse without sadness. But today we have this wide open space, this sunshine, the bowl of the eternal blue sky above us.
Ider rides up beside me, standing tall in his saddle, the way I’m trying to do. He smiles.
“That horse,” he says, “he’s really feeling you.”
“I’m feeling him, too,” I reply, and my heart surges with the truth of this.
We ride together in silence for a few minutes, me feeling dazzled by the sky, and then Ider says,
“Loni is here with you today, you know.”
I think, first, that he’s only being kind, a good guide. And then I blink hard behind my sunglasses against the sting of tears, because I realize it’s something else. He knows what it is to have a horse like that, a horse whose skull you want to place on a high hill under the bowl of heaven. I nod, not trusting my voice.
I ask Bataar to gallop, and I feel the surge of muscle and strength and will beneath me as he leaps forward. I feel them both: this horse that carries me, and the one that runs beside us, unseen, carrying my heart.
~ ~ ~
Carol Moen Wing is a writer based in Oakland, California who recently wrapped a 20-year career as a creative researcher for Bay Area film studios. Her publications include short fiction and a children’s book, and she won First Prize in Writing at the 2024 Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference. Wildlife conservation has been her passion (and occasionally even a paid gig) for the last two decades — she’s worked with human-wildlife conflict mitigation programs in Uganda and Kenya, helped care for parrots rescued from the illegal wildlife trade in Guatemala, volunteered with scientific research in Thailand, Canada and South Africa, and helped design behavior observation protocols for African elephants and Bornean sun bears.