Appaloosa

<i>I have always loved the word guitar </i> - David St. John I have never been bumped in a saddle as a horse springs from one diagonal to another, a two-beat gait, light and balanced, as the four-beats per stride become the hair-blowing, wind-in-the-face, grass-rippling, muscle-loosening, forward-leaning exhilaration of the gallop. And I have never counted the slow four-beat pace of distinct, successive hoofbeats in such an order as to be called The Walk. Or learned capriole, piaffe, croupade in a riding school, nor heard the lingo of outback cattle-cutters spat out with their whip-ends and phlegm. I have never stepped my hands over the flanks of a spotted mare; nor hidden a Cleveland Bay carriage horse, or a Yorkshire coach horse; a French Percheron with musical snicker; or a little Connemara its face buried in broomcorn, or in a bin of Wexford apples. I have never called a horse Dancer, Seabiscuit, Ned, Nellie, Trigger or Chester, or made clicking noises with my tongue, fifty kilometers to town with a baulking gelding and a green quartertop buggy. Nor stood in a field while an old nag worked very acre, only stopping to release difficult knobs of manure, and swat flies with her tail. And though I have waited for jockeys at the backs of stables in the mist and rain, for the soft feel of their riding silks and saddles, for the cool smoke of their growth stunting cigarettes, for the names of the yearlings and mares they whisper along with the names of horse-owning millionaires—ah, more, more even than them—I have always loved the word appaloosa.