26 August 2007 THE HEARTS OF HORSES by Molly Gloss, Houghton Mifflin, November 2007, ISBN: 0-618-79990-7

"He had told her everything that she now began telling Henry -- everything about the terrible plight of the horses over there -- how they died on the transport ships from fear and trampling; how they pined with homesickness and consequently took cold or pneumonia and died at the remount depots before they even got to the front; how they were often starved and thirsty to the point of eating harness or chewing their stablemate's blankets; how as many horses were invalided by war nerves as were killed in battle -- their hearts and minds not able, any more than the men's, to bear the airplane bombs and grenades, falling fuses, the shrieks of wounded men and animals."

"The Yanks are coming,

The drums rum-tumming

Ev'rywhere.

So prepare, say a pray'r,

Send the word, send the word to beware.

We'll be over, we'll be coming over,

And we won't come back 'till it's over

Over there." --George M. Cohan

I drove over to Sacramento yesterday to spend the afternoon showing my friends' Nubian dairy goats at the California State Fair. Having, myself, ceased decades ago the adventure of clipping, transporting, and scrubbing my own goats in order to spend a series of nights trying to sleep along the periphery of a behemoth, allergen-filled barn through which humongous tractors push around piles of soiled bedding at 3 AM, day-tripping to State Fair in August to help Lynn and her mom Dodi on Show Day has become an annual ritual for me. And so, I rose before dawn, fed my own goats an early breakfast, grabbed some tunes for the ride over the hills, and headed East toward our state capital.

After we'd completed the showing and had time to escape the echoing barn in order to talk, the subject turned from goats to horses as Lynn, who is a decade younger than I, told me about a pair of fillies she has that she will soon need to begin breaking. Lynn noted that she is not looking forward to doing the breaking herself, as the effects of hitting the ground after being thrown off a young horse is more and more difficult to deal with as the years go by. And so she is considering having someone else start them for her.

It is similar to what 19-year-old Martha Lessen encounters in Oregon in the winter of 1917 when she come riding down "through the Ipsoot Pass into Elwha County looking for horses that needed breaking out." All of the young men are gone, being trained for deployment to Europe, and there are a lot of farmers and ranchers who can use the services of this young horse whisperer who has escaped the stupidity and violence of her own father's parenting and horse-breaking tactics.

Thanks to the kindly assistance of George Bliss, the first farmer to provide her horses for breaking, Martha arranges a circle of farms with horses for her to train. Once she has each of the horses started, she will spend her days riding a horse from one farm to the next, exchange horses and head to the next farm on the circuit, and so on. Thus, a series of horses will get a lesson each day, and all of the horses in training will be attended to on a regular schedule.

"Martha had read a little book about famous men and their horses: Alexander and Bucephalus, El Cid and Babieca, General Lee and Traveller, the knight Reynard and his charger Bayard, the horse that had outraced Charlemagne's army. She sometimes imagined herself one of them, or a famous woman, famous as Annie Oakley or Joan of Arc, on a famous horse. Riding over the low hills between the McWilliames' and the Romers' she fell easily into thinking again that she was Mattie (this was how she'd be called, once she was famous), a horse-woman renowned all over the West, on her horse Meriwether Lewis, a tall black with a metal sheen to his coat and a fiery eye behind a long wavy forelock, a horse she had trained, like the Virginian's horse, to come straight to her at a certain four-note whistle and to carry no other rider but her. Always in these imaginings it was forty or fifty or sixty years ago, when she'd have been able to ride all over the valley of the Little Bird Woman River without seeing a fence and without getting down from her horse, not even once, to open and close a gate."

Of course, with Martha riding this circuit, she comes in contact with the varied cast of characters who inhabit the ranches and farms that are spread out in the swale between the Clarks Range and the Whitehorn Mountains. And the stories of these individuals and families, on the home front during World War I, provide a colorful look at a distant time and place in America during the dying days of the "Wild West."

"Some of the fellows homesteading up and down the valley in those years were such poor farmers they could hardly raise Cain. They would break up the fields of bunch grass to grow pinto beans or turnips and nothing would thrive but star thistle. If there was timber on the land -- and it grew thickly in those years, yellow pine and spruce and fir up to four feet through -- they'd log it off and pull out the stumps and be surprised to find scrub juniper and rabbit brush growing back instead of the grass they'd expected to pasture their dairy cows on. When they cleared the sage and willow from around a spring, sometimes the spring would silt up, and when they opened up a spring to make a farm pond, as often as not the water dried right up or got salty. Quite a few people who might have given a good account of themselves under other conditions were just taken in by rosy visions of 'rain following the plow,' which was the widespread, spurious claim of not a few commercial and government interests. In those years it seemed as if all you might need to grow wheat or alfalfa or field peas on the dry slopes of Elwha County was a stack of pamphlets and bulletins from the Department of Agriculture or a handbook put out by one or another of the companies making farm equipment."

But, above all, this is the memorable coming of age story of a young woman in the days that, we know, would soon yield the right of women to vote. Martha Lessen lives, breathes, and understands horses. In THE HEARTS OF HORSES, we get to know Martha as she gets to know herself.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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