One Week Behind the Plow: A Greenhorn Goes to Draft-horse School

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We're a diverse group, certainly, but almost everyone here shares longtime involvement with horses (alas, I'm the lone exception). Some students, like Frank, have had experience with workhorses and have come here to pick up additional skills. The others are familiar with riding horses, but not with draft animals (the difference being akin to that between an MG and a GMC).

I, on the other hand, am a rank novice. I've been atop a saddle horse only once in my lifetime and have never had the opportunity to be around workhorses. The fact is, I'm no less apprehensive about driving a pair of powerful draft horses than Grandpa would have been about climbing aboard a flying machine. The school is going to be a personal challenge for me (and, I suspect, I will be a challenge for the school).

At the moment, the bunkhouse is quiet; it's late and everyone has gone to bed in anticipation of a long day tomorrow. Frank is sleeping soundly in the cot across from mine; I wish I could be as calm, but I have to admit I'm not. It's this vision I keep having: an enormous Belgian gelding, eyes blazing with fury, dragging my harness-tangled carcass across the Montana countryside.

MONDAY

What a day this has been!
We spent much of the morning hunched over a pile of buckles, snaps, and leather straps on the floor of the main barn, trying our best to restore the perplexing mass to its original form: a fully assembled horse harness.

Rod Bailey, our instructor, was the instigator of this exercise. Rod—apparently a firm believer in hands-on learning—was not content to simply show us the various components of a harness and how they work together to transfer the power of a horse to whatever it's hitched to. Nor was he content to see us struggle only once to assemble all the parts (of which there are many: hames, top hames strap, bottom hames strap, back straps, back pad, spider, brichen, breast straps, belly band, quarter straps, tugs, trace chains, Conway buckles, keepers, and more).

As soon as we had almost solved the puzzle, Rod took the rigging apart again, dumped the pieces to a second harness on top, and mixed the whole caboodle together. "Now, there's a challenge for you," he said, and ambled away.

Rod was right; it was a challenge, but somehow, eventually, with the seven of us working as a team, we managed to produce two reasonable facsimiles of horse harness (with, ummm, a few "extra" parts left over).

Imagine hoisting a wet mattress onto your shoulder, carrying it a dozen yards, and then hefting the whole thing up onto the top of an eight-foot stone wall. Putting a harness on a full-grown Belgian is a lot like that, only more complicated. Rod led Sharon, one of the ranch's working mares, out from her stall and demonstrated the procedure for us. It's a very structured, methodical process—a series of steps that our teacher emphasized should always be performed in the same order, so that both you and your horse know what to expect next, and so that the sequence becomes automatic to you. Forgetting a step (say, neglecting to attach a strap) can render a harness as effective for pulling a load as a broken guitar string is for making music. And in some cases, such an oversight can result in a serious accident.

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