Mr. Brown, The horse that cried

The phone call was like so many others I had heard, the voice said I am having trouble with my horse and I have heard that you are the one I need to go to. I had no way of knowing that this horse would present me with one of my most significant growth moments as a human, and as a horseman.

He arrived and he stepped down from the trailer with his head held high and almost an air of arrogance about him, a big brown non-descript kind of horse, that would stand out nowhere in a crowd.

He was polite on the lead, respectful through the gate, yet when I tried to ask him to lower the head that had been so intently studying the surroundings it was if I had placed my hand upon stone. Little things were being absorbed by my horseman's brain and were being weighed against past experience to begin the process of finding out who this fellow was.

I told the owner that I was too busy today to formally begin with him but in the morning he would be first out.

Early morning found me at his gate with a halter, I noticed that he had seen me coming and stepping away from the fence he had taken a stance in the direct center of the pen, facing me with his head up exactly as I had left him the evening before.

I had seen this look many times over the years, I call it the wooden Indian. It always reminds me of the cigar store Indians out front, enduring, stoic, solemn, hiding,, the face becomes a mask and personality has fled.

It is the first sign of serious abuse.

I walked in and haltered him, he never moved so much as a hair, his eye was not mad or mean but it was as hard as pond ice in January. A stone would have skipped off with not a chip left behind to mark its path.

Out the gate to the tack shed as polite yet as stiff as a perfect facsimile of a horse, I might as well have been leading a robot. About ten feet from the tie rail is where I actually finally felt the horse inside, there was just a slight hesitation in his motion and the float in the lead started to go away. My antennae are always up around horses, and something had already triggered them up even higher with this fellow so I instantly noticed the change. I remember thinking, "Do we have a set back problem?" And as I hesitated just a moment to allow him to either show me, or to give him the time he needed to decide, as quickly as it had came it was gone.

I tied him to the iron pipe rail in front of my barn and stepped through the porch to grab a brush, as I stepped back out and towards him I instantly noticed something else interesting. There was water running down the side of his face from his eye to his chin and dripping off his whiskers.

I thought what in the world has happened here? Was I inside longer than I thought? Did one of our special little desert whirlwinds blow through without me noticing and smack you in the eye with a piece of straw or a pebble?

I lifted his eyelid and looked for the offending object, yet there was none that I could see so I wrote it off to one more of those things that cowboys wonder about yet can't find an answer to. I saddled him and he stood like a trooper, led him off and there was absolutely no hump, no short steps, no attitude, no tail swishing,, absolutely nothing to indicate trouble ahead. Except perhaps, that there was so absolutely nothing.

I stepped aboard and attempted to direct him towards the arena, we went everywhere but there. I could not remember when I had been on a horse that felt more disconnected from me, the world, or even himself, in my life. We went everywhere but down, or over backwards, the only thing that he didn't do was run away with me or buck. I finally jumped off before he got his feet tangled with something or each other.

I led him back to the barn thinking that the single most strange part of the whole episode was that no matter how I had tried I had been unable to reach him mentally even one tiny bit during all of this. I had felt horses come apart at the seams many , many times in my life and yet never, not once, had I ever felt such a total lack of connection, even negative connection in my life.

He had slammed the door shut on his mind and had locked all the ugliness outside for me to deal with.

I didn't know exactly what to do so I put him away, so we both could sleep on it.

The next morning came all too soon for someone with no answers, yet I am getting paid to train horses and my father taught me to give a days work for a days pay so I pick up a halter and head towards the brown. My Grandfather used to have a saying, "We are going to do something, even if its wrong"

Its hard to understand the wisdom in that saying sometimes, yet I do, my Grandfather is a doer, life is not built upon perfection, it is built upon effort, and the mistakes of the brave pave the path for the rest.

I walked in the pen, same wooden Indian, same ice eye, only today I notice the vacant sign hanging in the window of his mind. We start towards the tack room and there is the same hesitation before I tie. I am seriously thinking, "Craig what in the hell are you going to do different today? Yesterday was not good and you are fixing to repeat it you idiot." And yet the other part of me, the hard headed, ignorant, by damned we are going to get'r done somehow won't let me quit going forward putting one step in front of the other until something happens or breaks.

As I step out of the tack room with a brush there was something however that did stop me, there was water running out of his eye, down his face to his chin and dripping off his whiskers!

WHOA! What in the hell is going on here? Yesterday I wasn't sure how long I had been inside and even though I didn't find anything in his eye I was somehow sorta convinced that it must have been.

Today was different, I stepped up and reached through the door for the brush and turned around, no more than a few seconds had passed and I know for a fact no dust devils had blown by, so what is going on here?

For some reason I don't know exactly why, I did something different from yesterday, I stepped over and looked on the other side of his face, and by danged there it is running down there as well.

What is this... he is standing there not moving a muscle, the line is slack, he is the perfect robotic horse and yet he is leaking, what in the hell is going on? something in the back of my mind is starting to tickle at me,, I remember now the little tiny voices in the back of my mind that were so faint and so foreign that the cowboy in me was shutting them down before they could even be heard.

I knew somehow, someway though that what I was looking at, and for was significant yet it was like when I first saw the smoking towers in New York on TV, The disconnected feeling that won't allow you to accept it as real.

As I stood there I moved my eyes towards his shoulder , and I saw it. It was exactly like those drawings of swirls and nothings that force you to un-focus your eyes and to look through the picture instead of at it,, and so then dolphins, palm trees, or whatever become apparent. It was exactly like that.

He was crying. My God, I am not supposed to see this! It felt like a twelve pound brick had just flipped over in my belly, I wanted to vomit it was such a dull sick hurt.

I didn't know what to do. But I knew this was indeed over the top of anything I had ever experienced in life. So I put him away.

My mind was a blank, what I had just seen was so far out of my realm of possibility that I knew without a doubt I was out of not just my league , but out of anyone else's league that I had ever heard of. Where do you go to find help on horses that cry?