“I’ve never seen anybody use a double bitted bridle before,” she said. “Well, this is the way horses are started in Spain and Portugal.” I knew I’d lost her. I guess going the next step and pointing out that these horses were used to fight bulls would have been as foreign as Mercury or Venus. The years I’d spent working with Fermin, Francisco and George passed by my mind’s eye. What a different world was the in-hand work with the double bridle. We’d come at it through the flexions of the Peruvian horse and the work around the single pillar. Then we discovered the flexions of Bancher, and the wondrous collected work of the Spanish school. Collection of a degree not even dreamed of in my youth. How was I to even begin to explain forty years of labor and discovery at the hands of Maters from around the world?

“Yeah, it’s a little different way of going at it but I feel better about throwing my pink body into the meat grinder when I have some assurance that I may actually survive intact.”

I still don’t think she got it.

As I picked myself up out of the soft dirt of the floor of the big outdoor school I told Earl, “I knew she was getting angry with me, I just didn’t pay enough attention to the signs she was giving me.” I had been trying to start her into the flexion of the loins, otherwise known as yielding the hindquarters away from the leg. The mare had tried rearing a little, then pawing, and darting her head to the ground. I had continued asking with my leg to have her step away, instead of backing up. Suddenly she bucked three times, hard and lightening fast. I was on the ground. Now I know that she has a limit, and when I push the limit she loses her sense of humor and tells me it is no longer fun or play for her. Better I should have stayed a little less serious, and asked a touch less, and allowed her to learn the flexions of the loin a bit more slowly. Making haste slowly.

I was attempting to explain some of our training methods to a young visiting observer last week. She asked if we used natural horsemanship. My mind flew as if in a time machine back through centuries and millennia to a time at the end of the last ice age, and space north of the black Caspian seas, the grass covered steppes of central Asia. There I saw the ancestors of the Scythian horsemen processing an idea for a new method of transportation using horses, which they were watching in herds as they migrated across the grasslands. These Neolithic people observed the behaviors of the horse families, and used the information gathered in that way to begin to domesticate these fleet animals. My mind slowly drifted back to me through increasingly modern times seeing refinements in these early methods. Scythians, Hittites, Simon of Athens, Xenophon, Celtic warriors, right on down to Grisone de la Gueriniere, Baucher, Steinbrecht, Oliveira all passed before my eyes.

"Yes," I said, "we use natural horsemanship," we use methods which grew out of the nature of the horse himself. If it makes sense to the horse, its natural. If it doesn't make sense to the horse, he won't understand, and it just doesn't work. Reminds me of my friend Ramon Becerra who said "I no work with horses anymore." I was distraught until he said, "I just play with them."