Mounted Combat and Precision Horsemanship

Not too long ago, a couple of friends and I were discussing one of our more energetic and curious pastimes: medieval mounted sword combat. They were opining that everything one learns in ground-based martial arts regarding how to swing a sword has to be changed for mounted combat because the torso and hip movement unavoidably confuses the horse and he winds up shouldering-in or spinning or something when you least want him to.

I haven't been doing the whack from horseback that long--Jack and I have been working on it off-and-on for about two years now and just authorized SCA heavy mounted combat in Sacramento last summer. However it's been enough that I think we have a comfort level with most of it. (Except the charging down strange horses part. We're still working on that.  I have a greater appreciation for the aplomb of polo ponies now.)

I don't even notice any issues with inadvertent cuing while trying to integrate effective swordwork with riding almost entirely from my seat... and as a lifelong fighter, I'm not sure I know how to not "uncork from the hip"--Even when swinging "light". Control and precision comes from the hip, not the arm and shoulder, so the swing is always a whole-body effort even when contact is zero.

My explanation for why this is a nonissue when riding is pretty simple: Jack can tell the difference between when I'm asking for something and when I'm not. We've done this often enough together, and done related things like roping, jousting, fidgiting, etc. that he's learned to distinguish movements that are cues from movements that are "noise".

This isn't magic. A common example of this level of discrimination in other aspects of horsemanship: Asking your horse to back up from the ground by just closing your hand around his halter lead under his chin versus asking him to lower his head for bridling by a very similar motion but with a different feel. Horses very quickly learn to distinguish between these.

If you're not sure you believe this, ask yourself the following question: "How does your horse know, if you approach his butt from the side, when he's supposed to stand quietly and let you futz with his back girth and when he's supposed to be already swinging his hindquarters away from you and getting out of your way?" In the case of our horses, they can tell because there is a different feel in the way we approach and even though a tiny distinction, it's more than they need to be able to figure out what's going on.

Cheese and Onion: A Classic British Sandwich

I've eaten enough meals in the UK now that I feel I can state with certainty that the old adage regarding the horror of British cooking is right on the money.

A British expatriate friend of mine insists that the reason for this is that whenever a particularly lovely dish was invented, it quickly became illegal. At my blank look, he pointed out that historically, the phrase "poached salmon" had an entirely different connotation than it does today.

So it was with visions of Robin Hood and the King's deer running through my head that I stopped into Tesco's the last time I was cooling my heels waiting for a train connection in London. I hurriedly grabbed what I thought was an egg salad sandwich only to discover that it was in fact cheese and onions, a combination I'd never heard of. It turned out to be quite nice and I've been making them for myself and MountainHorseGrrl ever since.

Here they are (sans Brixton Pickle):

Cheese and Onion Sandwich

1 bunch green onions
2 cups grated cheddar cheese
Pinch of mustard seed
Mayonnaise (to taste)
White bread
Several baby dill pickles

Chop the onions, including the green tops. Grate cheese coarsely into a mixing bowl. Add onions and mustard seed. (That's mustard SEED, not powdered mustard. It adds a little zing.) Add enough mayonnaise to make into a sandwich spread, stirring with a fork. As you stir, break the grated cheese strips up with the tines of the fork but don't turn it totally into mush. Leave some chunkiness to it. Feel free to play with the proportions of the ingredients until you get a consistency and flavor balance that you like. I typically do it by the "looks good, tastes good" method.

Spread on white bread. I use either potato or buttermilk bread because I just can't stomach the spongy horror that serves for a true British sandwich. If you want to be really authentic though, look for WonderBread or SaraLee or the equivalent. Finally, slice a couple of baby dill pickles and lay them on top of the cheese and onion spread before closing up your sandwich.

For the full experience, slice in half and and pile them on a plate. Serve with a cup of milky Earl Grey tea while enjoying old reruns of Good Neighbors or To The Manor Born.

The flavor is enough different by American standards to make for a nice little adventure but the texture is similar to chicken salad or egg salad and the contrast between the cheese and the onions is interesting.

Happier Than a Puppy with Two Peters

"Natural Horsemanship" has a touchy-feely reputation to it.  Granola and Raiki Healing and Equine Phrenology and all that nonsense.  Riding with folks who come from the hardcore vaquero tradition which spawned the NH movement however is a bit different.  It is a thoughtful and kind approach for the horses but can be a little rough on the riders.

The following were heard mostly in clinics or lessons.  For the "in crowd", you can amuse yourself guessing which teacher each of the quotes is from...

Student: How do I keep my horse from pawing?
Teacher: Teach him to paw with the other foot.

Student: (riding with their reins tangled up around their head)
Teacher: With that much slack, you're busier than a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest.

Student: (riding slowly and timidly)
Teacher: Ride that thing!  Ride it like you stole it!

Student:  (riding with their halter under their bridle)
Teacher:  You forget to take your pajamas off this morning too?  That's how a sheep farmer rides.

Student: (looking bored and avoiding assigned task)
Teacher: Don't worry.  In the next exercise You'll be busier than a cat burying crap.

Student: (allowing their horse to stick its nose in their pocket)
Teacher:  That's your horse, not a teddybear.  You want to snuggle?  Buy a puppy.  A puppy won't kill you when it jumps in your lap.

Student: (riding with their reins tight on the horse's mouth for the nth time)
Teacher: Well, I know this is a journey for each of us and we each come from a different starting point and we have to ride from where we are, and we're all trying our best to surmount the challenges in front of us.  However, you goddamn son-of-a-*, what kind of a slack-brained pig farmer are you?  You yank on that horse's mouth again and I'll damn well help him buck you off!

Student: (protesting being upbraided for having their reins tight and yanking on their horse's mouth)
Teacher: I'm not your mother.  I'm your horse's lawyer and if you don't quit HAULING ON HIS MOUTH he's going to own your house!

Student:   How do I keep him from laying down?
Teacher: Don't let him.

Student: This is my fifth clinic with you.  Any thoughts?
Teacher: Well you don't terrify me anymore.

How to Hold a Leadrope

When you're in the saddle, your critical interface to the horse lies in your seat, your legs and your hands on the reins.  How you sit and how you hold the reins matter a lot.  They affect how well you can communicate with your horse.  While there are a lot of ways to sit and to hold the reins, each way has a right and a wrong about it and if you were to look at all the various right ways you'd find they have a lot in common.  They're all trying to get the job done; to minimize problems and maximize opportunities for communication and success.

Following the same reasoning, when you're on the ground, your critical interface to your horse is the lead rope in your hand and the way you position and move your body.  A lead rope is not just for dragging your horse from his stall for saddling.  It's a tool that can let you talk to and work with your horse almost as subtly as when you are in the saddle.  It makes me crazy how many people -- even ones who take their horsemanship very seriously --  don't know the best way (or any decent way) to hold a lead rope and are not very effective at relating to their horse on the ground.

Bill Dorrance once said something like "The best way to learn about horses is to get a piece of rope with a horse on one end and you on the other and see what you can get done."

So I'm going to show you how to hold a lead rope the way I was shown.  It's the right way and it has a lot of advantages but it's not the only right way.  It is, however, the best way I know.  If you hold and use a lead rope this way, then there's a lot of effective things you can learn to do with your horse on the ground that will make you and your horse better with each other because you will both understand clearly what's being said between you.

Let's start with the observation that, when properly used, a lead rope is a double-ended tool.  With it, you can apply tension and pressure to your horse in order to communicate your intentions.  One end is attached to the horse.  This end lets you apply tension (taking slack and bumping) and pressure (pushing feel, which when done inexpertly can look like rope-wiggling).  The other end should have a leather popper on it and is also good for applying pressure (swinging the popper) and tension (opening up), though by using different techniques.

A second useful observation is that each of these techniques needs to be done with varying degrees of strength.  Sure, your goal is to be able to do them so subtly that an onlooker would not even be able to see your hand or body move.  However, a green colt with his mind set on his own agenda could also require you to exert your full body weight in a millisecond to swing his hindquarters away from you and keep yourself safe. It's important to hold your rope in a way that makes it possible to do any of these things at any time with any necessary degree of effort.  If you have to set up or switch or fumble around, you'll miss the opportunity to communicate clearly with your horse and you might even get hurt.

Which brings us to a third useful observation:  Getting dragged is the second most common form of equestrian injury next to falling out of the saddle.  So it would be wise to not loop the lead rope around your wrist or over your shoulder or around your waist or any other equivalent thing.  This is not just an issue with horses.  Sailors, tree-trimmers and machine-shop workers are also familiar with this problem.  Many years ago, a friend of mine who was an SCA knight died because he had the excess slack of his belt (which he was not wearing) tossed over his shoulders to keep it out of the way while he buffed the metal buckle on his electric buffing wheel.  The wheel caught the buckle and wound the belt around the arbor, yanking him forward and breaking his neck instantly.  I think of him every time someone leads their horse past me with the slack end of the lead rope thrown around their neck or over their shoulder and I pray that nobody slams a car door, starts a tractor or loses a plastic bag in the wind until that horse gets safely back in its stall.

With these thoughts in mind, the right way to hold a lead rope is simply this:

Notice that the thumbs are toward each other and the bottom of each fist is toward the two respective business ends of the rope, rather like the way you would hold a quarterstaff or a kayak paddle.  This is important.  Holding the rope with the business ends exiting from the bottom of your fists rather than the top provides vastly more mechanical advantage while simultaneously allowing you more control.  If you don't believe me, get your kayak paddle out and play with it for a while.

If your rope is too long and you must take care of your excess slack, carry the slack in a coil like so:

Handle it like you would the coils of your lass rope or riata.  You can transfer the coil to whichever hand is currently not operating its business-end of the lead rope.  You can also drop the coil completely when you need to give more slack to your horse.

That's it.  If it seems easy, that's because it is.

But doing it right makes a huge difference and sets you up to be safe and to be able to do a lot of advanced things in the way of communicating with and handling your horse.

Horse Training

Recently, someone asked me "What do YOU define as training?  Are lessons and training the same thing or different things to you?"  Since my answer is sort of conventional for the cantankerous, vaquero-tradition-inspired crowd, I thought I'd share it here...

•  Every time you reach for your horse for any reason, you're doing it "with quality" which means offering a good feel and expecting a clean response and coaching/teaching/supporting/working with your horse until you get what you asked for.

There is no separate "teaching" activity any more than as humans we have a discrete "learning" activity.  It's continuous and you have little choice about it since you can't exactly tell your horse to pay no attention to your actions when you don't happen to be in training mode at the moment.  Your horse is going to learn from everything you do whether you like it or not.

Parents whose children have cheerfully  burbled some overheard cussword inappropriately in front of strangers know the truth of this.

• "Lessons" are when someone else teaches you something about how to work with your horse.

• "Horse Training" is what people call it when they get money for something they do related to horses, whether it does the horse any good or not.  "Trainers" are the people who get the money for what they do.  The "Horse" is the target of the exercise... and sometimes the beneficiary.

Quick Bourbon Beans

I've always loved baked beans.  I blame it on my mother, not on my fondness for things western.  She essayed home-baked beans on brown bread a couple of times, using one of those cool beehive-shaped ceramic bean pots with delicious results. I can still recall the taste today.

More often though, it was canned beans to go along with bratwurst or hotdogs for a quick supper on a busy weekend night.  Since opening a can was easy, preparing the beans was often delegated to one of us kids to "teach us how to cook". As we dumped them in the pan or microwave bowl, she encouraged us to experiment with ways to make out-of-the can beans taste better.

While my brother's experiments tended along the lines of improving the ballistics of the spoon-launched projectiles he would direct my way when I antagonized him behind Mom's back, my efforts focussed around what ketchup and dijon or stone-ground mustard could do.

Recently I've been making beans as something quick and comforting on a cold wet night in the Santa Cruz mountains after getting home late from work Yet Again.  Here's my latest (and best) variation.

Quick Bourbon Beans  (Prep time: about 10 minutes)

4 strips thick-cut bacon
1/2 onion
Dash of Worchestershire sauce
2 tbsp bourbon
1 can Bush's ORIGINAL baked beans

Slice the bacon into 1" chunks.  Dice onion.  Throw the sliced bacon chunks into a large saute pan (skillet, spyder, frying pan, hubcap or what-have you) and let them heat, frying in their own fat on medium heat for about five minutes or until you judge them about halfway done.  The fat should be translucent and the meat browning but not crisp.  Add the diced onion and continue to saute until the onions are soft and translucent and the bacon looks nearly done.

Add dash of Worchestershire sauce and 2 tbsp bourbon to the pan and stir for a moment.

Now, I'm a Booker Noe man myself.  However you won't catch me putting Booker into baked beans, or into coffee or visiting ignoramuses for that matter, no matter how fancy I'm feeling.  That's showing off and doesn't impress much except your wallet.  Bulleit makes a nice, moderately priced frontier bourbon whose rougher, sharper flavor actually works better for cooking than the smooth subtlety of Booker.  I've used various amounts, from 2 to 4 tbsp, but I find that for my taste, 2 tbsp is plenty.

For the pyromaniacal among us, try the following experiment:  use more like 6 tbsp of bourbon and let it stay on the flame for a few extra seconds until it starts to evaporate, then tilt the pan and slide it halfway off the burner so that the vapors spill across the open flame.  You'll get a gratifying whoosh as the alcohol, heated past its flashpoint, goes off in a roil of flame.  If you're careful, you might even still have your eyebrows afterwards.  If not, you'll get to re-experience the adolescent delight of riding in a bright red firetruck and hanging out with the firemen.

Now stir in the beans, straight from the can and turn the heat down to low, letting it simmer for five minutes or so.  Add pepper to taste.

Starting Things Off

In the spirit of starting things off, here's a picture of myself with my filly Emma in the colt starting class at Buck Branaman's clinic in Chico last spring.

If you don't know who Buck Brannaman is, well...  I guess you're either in for a treat or an annoyance depending on how you look at things like itinerant experts and unabashed hero-worship.  His name comes up a lot when I talk about horses.  What little I know came by way of him... and Ray Hunt....  Peter Cambell... and the indefatigable Bonnie Stoehn.

Welcome to Cowboy Coffee.

Pour yourself a cup and settle a spell.  Don't mind me, I'm just going to chat a bit about things I enjoy: art, adventure, good food and better horses.