One Hundred and Four Horses. Mandy Retzlaff

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      He told me all about that, but most of all, he told me about his horses.

      I had never met a man as in love with horses and animals as Pat. He came from a long line of horse lovers. His maternal great-grandfather was the Baron Moritz Hermann August von Münchausen, an officer in the Prussian army who married an American heiress and built an enormous castle in Bokstadt, Germany. It was there that he founded a stable for breeding Thoroughbreds and became famous across Europe for producing champions. The most famous horse the baron had owned was named Hannibal, which he had bought for a great deal of money in those days, and whose skeleton, Pat told me, could still be seen in a Frankfurt museum.

      Pat had inherited his family’s ancestral love and skill with horses through his father, Godfrey, who had grown up in Tanzania and moved with his family to Rhodesia in 1965, just before UDI. In Rhodesia, Godfrey became the manager at a cattle ranch in the southwest of the country, and he would spend every day in the saddle, cantering around the eighty thousand acres of bush. His favorite horse—and the one that, even into his old age, he would always vividly remember—was an Arabian stallion named Paul, after both his grandfather and his eldest son. Paul the stallion liked nothing more than to drink beer and would let nobody except Godfrey ride him. Over the years, many bets were placed on this, with cocksure young horsemen eager to prove their worth by climbing into the saddle—but Godfrey always won. With a little help from his friends, Paul, it seemed, could make his own beer money.

      With family like that, it was only too clear that Pat would devote his life to horses—and, even on that very first night, I knew that it was so. And there was one horse in particular who had changed Pat’s life, one horse who had been with him since he was a boy, one horse to whom he would always keep returning.

      Her name, he told me, was Frisky.

      In 1970, Rhodesia was five years into her civil war—but life, with all its loves, passions, and deaths, still went on. Pat was thirteen years old and on his way home from the school where he boarded. It was a year before his mother would tragically pass away from cancer, and he thought of nothing but running wild on the family farm. He had chickens and cattle of his very own, and would spend the holidays on horseback riding the farm horses, including his father’s chestnut gelding, Bridle.

      Pat reached the farm and was racing up to the farmhouse, dropping his school bags along the way, when he saw his mother and father standing out front. At first, he wondered if something was wrong. Perhaps something had happened to the cattle, which were his pet project, or the few chickens he still kept from an earlier obsession. Yet, when he reached his mother and father, they were smiling.

      They did not welcome him home. That could wait. They simply told him to follow and led him to the back of the farmhouse.

      Here, Bridle was in his paddock with two of the family’s other horses. Pat ventured to greet his father’s old horse, but, before he got there, he saw a new mare, a stranger come to the farm. She was small, fifteen hands high, a skewbald mare with beautiful markings and a willful look in her eyes. Pat stopped short, looking between his mother and father.

      “Her name’s Frisky,” his mother told him. “Well, go on!”

      Pat rushed over, stopping a few yards away from the horse to approach her more gently. She had already been tacked up. He put a hand on her muzzle and let her nibble at his hands. Her ears twitched as she became accustomed to this strange boy. Pat draped his arms around her, threw a look at his parents.

      “She isn’t saddled up for nothing,” his father intoned.

      His left foot went into Frisky’s stirrup. Then, swinging his body over, his right found the stirrup on the opposite side. He lifted the reins in one hand, in the way he always rode, and started talking to her. It is a special moment, he knew, when a boy climbs into a horse’s saddle for the very first time, even more special when it is his very first horse. Frisky walked slowly forward, to the edge of the paddock, where Pat looked down on his mother and father.

      “Be careful with her,” Pat’s mother began. She had a tone that verged on the ominous, and Pat wondered if there was a story hidden here, something buried in Frisky’s past of which he was not aware. He looked down at her, judged her to be ten or twelve years old. Hardly a foal, she must have had owners before, ­people who loved her like he knew he would.

      “Well,” his father said, “what are you waiting for?”

      Pat brought her around. Across the farm, there were antelopes such as the tiny duiker or huge kudu to chase. He ran a hand through Frisky’s mane. She was, he knew, going to love this.

      Duiker on the left, kudu on the right. Frisky would rather chase the tiny duiker, but today she was happy to indulge Pat and they set off toward the kudu. Soon, the small herd scattered, and Pat and Frisky were through them, following a dirt track into the bush. The msasa trees were low here, and Frisky banked, first one way and then another. They were on the tail of some bushbuck when Pat ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch. He timed it badly, smashed into the bough. Beneath him, Frisky cantered on. Momentarily Pat grappled with the branch. Then, he fell. When he hit the ground, all the wind was expelled from his lungs. He lay there and heaved. Blackness came over him.

      When Pat looked up, Frisky’s face was all that he could see. She was standing over him, nosing forward, as if to make sure he was all right. When he began to stir, she walked away and turned slightly, presenting her saddle.

      Get up, Pat, she seemed to be saying. We haven’t got time for lounging around. That bushbuck’s already got away …

      When they reached home, Pat tried to hide the fact that he had fallen off—but his mother had already raised two other sons, and somehow she just knew. It was time, she told him as she dusted him down, for a story.

      Frisky had once belonged to the relation of a local farmer, a gift for their young daughter. She had been the daughter’s pride and joy, and she had spent long hours being ridden and groomed, doted on by all members of the family.

      It was on a ride through the bush that tragedy had found Frisky. Startled by some smaller creature shooting out of the bush, she had shied away and the girl in her saddle had been thrown. Like Pat had done, the girl lay in the dust; but unlike Pat, she would never get back up. Stricken with grief, the girl’s parents could no longer look at Frisky. Their daughter’s death hung heavy about them, and Frisky was a symbol of it. She would have to be sent away, or else destroyed.

      Two weeks later, she arrived at Pat’s father’s farm.

      “So you must be careful,” Pat’s mother concluded.

      After the story, Pat did not stop to get changed. Instead, he went back to the paddock, where Frisky was waiting. He spent the night checking over her hooves and grooming her. Whatever happened in Frisky’s old life, it was not her fault. In the years to come Pat would come off Frisky many times—a hole in the ground that she did not see, the assault of a low-hanging branch—but not once would he be thrown. All he ever had to do was remember the way she waited for him as he lay, winded, in the dust, and he knew: Frisky would look out for him just as much as he would look out for her.

      That night in 1976, talking to this strange man in his ill-fitting and bloodstained suit, I was suddenly transported back to memories of my own childhood horse. I had longed for a horse like Frisky, one who would be my best friend and protector and in whose saddle I could lose myself for days at a time, but I was not as blessed as Pat. The horse I remembered was named Ticky. He was a fiery little piebald pony and threw me from the saddle СКАЧАТЬ