The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“A conosoor, sir, a conosoor, or, as plain folk put it, a good judge of horseflesh, and I served as an adviser to the remount officers.”

“So that’s it!”

“Yes, sir, I’ve selected and trained a good few thousand steeds. I’ve broken such wild beasts as, for example, the ones that rear up and then throw themselves backwards with all their might, and the rider can have his chest crushed right then against the pommel, but with me not one of them could do that.”

“How did you tame that kind?”

“I—it was very simple, because I received a special gift for it from nature. When I jump into the saddle, straightaway, without giving the horse time to collect its wits, I pull its ear to the side as hard as I can with my left hand, and with my right fist I bash it between the ears, and I grind my teeth at it something terrible, so that sometimes you even see brains come out its nostrils along with blood—and it quiets down.”

“And then?”

“Then you dismount, stroke it, let it look you in the eye and admire you, so that a good picture stays in its memory, and then you mount up again and ride.”

“And the horse goes quietly after that?”

“It goes quietly, because a horse is smart, it feels what sort of man is handling it and what he’s thinking about it. Me, for instance, by that same reasoning, every horse loved me and felt me. In Moscow, in the manège, there was one horse that got completely out of hand, and he learned this heathenish trick of biting off a rider’s knee. The devil simply caught the kneecap in his big teeth and tore it off whole. Many men were done in by him. At that time the Englishman Rarey visited Moscow¹¹—the ‘furious breaker,’ as he was called—and the lowdown horse nearly ate him, too, and put him to shame in any case; they say the only thing that saved him was that he wore a steel knee guard, so, though the horse did bite his leg, he couldn’t bite through, and so he bucked him off; otherwise it would have been the death of him; but I straightened him out good and proper.”

“Tell us, please, how did you do that?”