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Some relationships with horses are kinetic: body-to-body, muscle-to-muscle, soul-to-soul.

Jasper was bred to be a high-priced Arabian cutting horse. But after his mother delivered him, Vincent, his
breeder, watched him stand to nurse, observed his narrow body and Roman nose and loathingly said, “Get that ugly thing off of the place as soon as possible.”

Jasper ended up on a ranch in the wilds of northern Nevada, where Vincent’s daughter Linda and son-in-law John had a ranch with a bottomless need for horses. In spring, summer and fall, because their 1500 cattle ran on the open range. Gathering them and moving them around demanded lots of horses. Every day on the range we rode 30+ rough miles, and for every day in that hilly, rocky country, a horse needed two days off. Linda and John didn’t care if a horse could win a beauty contest.

On the ranch, Jasper got hung up on a barbed wire fence and lacerated one of his knees. The vet was more than an hour away. John drove the truck and Linda stayed in the trailer with Jasper, pressing her hand to his knee to slow the bleeding.

He recovered, seemed to walk just fine but no one got around to breaking him. Once day when I was riding out in the open range with John, he said, “I’ve got a horse that you might like.”

When Linda herded Jasper into the barn, he wildly raced around, showing the whites of his eyes. It looked like he’d never been brushed, his mane hung from his neck like dreadlocks. He was five years old, a bit “mature” for an untrained horse, but he was right for me. I’m narrow-hipped and short, he was also short and had a narrow chest and abdomen. I’ve ridden a lot of hefty horses with appropriate names – Buns (for the size of her hind end) and High Pockets (for where your pockets were when you rode him).

I bought Jasper for a “friends and family” price of $200 and was the first person to ride him. The first time he felt me on his back, he didn’t buck, but he spooked, galloped around and around in the ranch’s round corral. I moved with him, sat deep in the saddle and discovered that he was the smoothest horse I’ve ever ridden, before or since. Eventually, he slowed down, then walked.

Jasper was bred to be a cutting horse, a specialized skill needed by ranchers and cowboys when separating calves from their mothers or bulls from the herd.

The first time Jasper and I did that, I felt his breeding kick in. Instinctively, he got down low in his front legs and quietly pivoted back and forth from his back legs, smoothly responding to pressure from my right or left leg. We communicated, muscle-to-muscle, my judgement to his movement. The cow went in one direction, the calf in the other. I felt like he and I were one.