Coming Off the Horse

When you fall off a horse, it’s called “coming off the horse” or, in a more humorous vein, an “unintentional dismount.” 

I had one recently. It was a hot, humid afternoon. We were walking along on our two Icelandic horses on a dirt road through the woods. Nancy was riding her gelding, Naskur, and I was on my mare, Sædis. The flies were bad: the whole bloodthirsty crew of blackflies, mosquitoes, deerflies, a horsefly or two circling and looking for a chance to land. We’d slathered bug repellant on the horses, but they were still under persistent attack. 

Finally Sædis got so fed up with the flies, or maybe she was just bothered by an itch, that she stopped and dropped her head to rub the side of her face against a front leg. These things tend to happen quickly, but as near as I can reconstruct it, I think I took up the slack in the reins and gave her a tap with my legs to move her forward. Startled, she jumped a bit. I got off balance, she became more alarmed, I grabbed the reins (I should have just let them go, but that’s hard to do), she responded to the pressure by throwing her head up and spinning – and I was on the ground. 

I landed on a patch of leaf-covered dirt. Unhurt. I wouldn’t even say my pride was dented; I can count on both hands the number of times I’ve done an unintentional dismount. Well, possibly three hands. It doesn’t do to think about such things too much.

two dandies in trouble with their horses in a 1787 cartoon. wikimedia commons.

The fact is that if you ride, you will come off the horse at some point. If you never do, maybe you aren’t really riding. We ride a lot; last year I rode around 175 times. The year before, over 200 times. Almost all of those rides were on dirt roads and trails near our home.

I mine my riding experiences for my writing. Gideon Stoltz, the sheriff in my mystery series, rides throughout fictional Colerain County to uphold the law. Here’s a passage from Nighthawk’s Wing, a few days after Gideon, uncharacteristically drunk, fell off his mare Maude, hit his head, and suffered a concussion with a memory loss:

“He considered the gap in his memory and wondered whether he might someday recall his accident – where he had been, how he had fallen off Maude. He hadn’t come off a horse since he was a boy. He was a good rider. He loved the swift fluid motion of the animal coming up through his seat and into his body so that it seemed as if he had four legs himself and flew across the ground on them. He liked to gallop flat out – he’d won races on Maude back home in the Dutch country. But he hadn’t been in a race since he’d come west to Colerain County – when? Two years ago? Three?”

Plenty of riding scenes show up in the third mystery, Lay This Body Down, as Gideon investigates a murder and tries to locate people he fears have been kidnapped to be sold into slavery in the South.

Doing research for my historical fiction, I’ve watched online videos showing how people washed clothes in the 1800s, dressed millstones to grind grain, hitched teams of horses to wagons, loaded and fired flintlock guns. Can you get the feel of riding a horse from a YouTube video? This one, viewed more than 3.6 million times, captures the panic that can grip a rider clinging to (and ultimately coming off) a runaway horse.

But mostly I don’t need YouTube to know what an unintentional dismount feels like. I’ve done it.

The other day when I came off Sædis, it was my fault, and I knew it. Nancy turned Naskur around, dismounted (intentionally), and picked up my mare’s dangling reins. She asked me how I felt, and I said “Fine.” I got up off the ground, brushed off the dirt, and went to my horse, standing jittery on the road. I told her everything was all right between us. I stroked her neck and made sure we were both calmed down. I adjusted my saddle. Then I hoisted my septuagenarian bones back up on the horse, took a deep breath, and rode on.