The Teacher Will Appear
Of all the lessons I’ve learned — horseback or otherwise — one particular phrase continues to center my life.
I sat cross-legged on the ground and looked up. A few feet away stood a tall and lean horse, coat gold and gleaming, nostrils and eyes wide.
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “It’s okay.”
Still seated, I scanned my body. My arm stung, my bottom hurt, but everything else seemed clear.
A few moments earlier, we’d engaged in a bouncy standoff in my round pen. A round pen is just what it sounds like. It’s a small circular arena designed for working horses or livestock. The energy follows the line of the fence. It’s supposed to, anyway.
During my fourth ride on Seven, a 3-year-old Mustang, we’d made some progress and she felt ready to step into the canter. This is the horse’s natural third gait, the one that comes before the fastest one we all know, the four-beat gallop we clamor for in the Kentucky Derby and barrel races at local rodeos. The canter (or lope, interchangeably) holds three beats. It’s my favorite gait to sustain, the rocking horse waltz of riding.
Horses get stuck, just like people. Their personalities typically fall into two distinct categories. For laypeople, we can call it “hot or not.” A hot horse chooses forward motion as its safest escape route from what it perceives as overbearing pressure; these are the runaways, the ones that take the rider with them until energy finally disperses. A “not” horse tends to freeze and forego forward motion, but the pressure must be released somewhere. These horses tend to build internal friction against forward motion and then buck. Bucking, at its most fundamental, is a release of pressure in place rather than with forward movement. It’s like popping the top on your Instant Pot. Steam rises.
For months I’d worked with Seven on forward movement on the ground, but it stalled once I climbed on her back. Sometimes, with these stickier horses, you push through a few small bucks and the forward motion naturally happens. The horse’s mind finally makes the connection. I’d gotten there before with other horses. I decided to, as the youth might say in harsher terms, mess around and find out.
I bumped her up into a nice-moving trot, then turned the pressure on, using the kissing sound she knew from the ground, closing my legs around her ribs, and sending my own energy forward.
Up she went. No real violence lived in her effort, just a bumpy argument. I sat the pockets of my jeans into my saddle, rode it out, still asking for a little more, a little more, hoping we’d connect to the place in her brain that said forward. We went beyond the eight-second bell in my brain. The imaginary rodeo crowd going wild, I nudged her a bit harder, over the precipice.
In that moment, she made her final statement of the ride, and I went straight up out of the saddle and landed neatly in a sitting position. There I sat.
Whenever I come off a horse, I think of the first time I ate dirt. My first trainer, a salty and funny man named Wayne Ackerer, imprinted the moment on my budding psyche.
Eleven years old in the summer of 1995, I participated in my first bareback lesson as part of an eight-week riding program. Instead of a saddle, the kids in my group class strapped fleece pads around our horses, sans stirrups, saddle horn, or anything to grip. I sat atop a tall black Quarter Horse named Delight; she had four white socks and a big white blaze down her nose.
Wayne called for a canter, and I stuck it for a few laps but lost my balance around a corner. I went facedown into the soft dirt of the indoor arena. Wayne calmly called for everyone to stop, someone caught the horse, and he knelt beside me. Fear and humiliation overwhelmed my kid body, and I teared up. But I wasn’t hurt. He saw both of those things.
“When we fall off, we get back on.” No tone of harshness lived in his voice, only firm kindness. “Even if your arm is broken, we get back on. Just for a second. Then, if we need to, we go to the doctor, okay?” I nodded.
“Are you hurt?” No. Just shaken. Tears streaking the dirt on my cheeks, I stepped up to the side of the big black mare, and he gave me a leg up onto the bright blue fleece pad on her back.
“Alright,” he said. “Canter.” Off the half-dozen little girls on fleece pads went, sitting deep into that three-beat gait, me among them.
The ironic folly of being born with horses in your bone marrow is that, if you’re worth your salt, a horse will likely be the nexus for breaking some of those bones along the way. It’s not if you’ll fall off, but when. The stats prove this out.
Over 100,000 horse-related accidents occur yearly in the U.S., and 83.4% of these accidents occur because of a fall. This only takes into account falls that get reported when riders seek care. In my 29 years of riding, I have gone to the hospital after a fall twice. Believe you me, that is not representative of the gift of grounding offered up by equine friends.
Riding is more dangerous than skiing, football, or riding motorcycles. Each year, 710 people die from injuries sustained in horse-related accidents, most of which are preventable. Two out of three accidents are deemed preventable; broken tack, slipped saddles, and lack of safety checks and equipment are cited as the top reasons. Falls from horses account for an insane 45.2% of all sports-related traumatic brain injuries. The lifetime acute cost of a TBI can be up to $3 million, and folks with TBIs experience a 60% unemployment rate.
It’s important to note that the better you get at riding, the more serious the injuries become. Why? The speed and complexity of different equine sports lend themselves to profound risk. High-octane offerings include three-day-eventing, reined cowhorse events, barrel racing, reining, o-mok-see, showjumping, and polo. I began playing arena polo through Colorado State’s club sports program in 2003. Back then, ‘statistics’ was just a 300-level course I didn’t want to take. Years later, I’ve done the math.
The rate of polo injuries has only been researched in small studies, but it’s sobering at best. Incidence of injury occurred at a rate of 7.8 per 1000 hours (less than soccer or rugby), but 64% of these injuries were considered serious. In polo, we do have to wear helmets. But for many years, most of these ‘helmets’ lacked any sort of certification and they proved inadequate in high-speed wrecks. In the past decade or so, certified helmets thankfully became the norm.
Most performance-related injuries I’ve seen don’t have anything to do with a horse’s level of training or ill behavior, but with completely random incidents. A horse trips and falls, the rider loses balance, the footing is too slick, and so on. In polo, the trajectory of the ball itself is dangerous. That little white sphere can move at speeds of more than 110 mph. Imagine getting hit with a top-tier MLB fastball on horseback. Imagine that same ball occasionally hitting your horse in the ass. Then imagine it hitting you in the face. It all happens.
The variables are as many as the outcomes. Or, as we horse folk like to say more succinctly, shit happens.
In June of 2019, a cowboy asked if I wanted to go riding. He was cute, and we’d known each other for a while at that point, so I said yes. When I showed up, a big paint mare and a little gray horse were tacked up and ready to go. Massive but lighter-boned, she exuded the athleticism of a quarterback who could also run the ball.
“She’s an ex-bucking horse,” he said of the paint, “But she doesn’t buck anymore.” I swung up on her back, and we took off for the Montana sagebrush.
For years, I’d ridden English, in what Western folk tend to call a “flat saddle.” I craved the feeling of a full-out gallop on an ex-racehorse or a long-legged equine soaring through the air over a jump, the flat saddle offering a level of closeness to the musclebound power beneath me. On a good day, I could hit a ball at a dead run. I can’t remember a speed-related moment where I didn’t strap a helmet onto my head.
Then, I moved to Montana. Real cowboys still exist here, they can loop a calf while smoking a cigarette, humming a Dave Stamey tune, and shifting the body of their horse to manipulate the cow on the other end of their rope. They calve 24 hours a day each spring, covered in frozen mud and blood in -10-degree weather. They ride rank horses into the mountains, trailing cattle to summer pasture. Then, they do it all again in the opposite direction before winter hits. They fix fence. They write poetry. They invite girls on gallops across the sagebrush. And they definitely don’t wear a damn helmet. These stoics are romantic. They cut a particular cultural image into the horizon, and they know it.
In this culture, my helmet gathered dust in a storage unit. I too wanted to cut an image. I bought my first cowboy hat since I’d shown horses in high school. I admired the dirt that began to collect on its black edges.
The cowboy hit fourth speed by the time we caught up to the sagebrush sea. I set my hand forward and felt the big mare explode underneath me. Not up, but forward. She ate up ground and sage in huge thirsty strides. I turned her loose, and away she went, no kissing or prodding necessary.
Freedom sings on the back of a great horse. And a great horse galloping through rough country is an entirely different pinnacle of greatness. The paint loved to run. Still, she honed in on my hands, the shifting weight of my body, and my voice as we covered terra firma without wavering.
I sing-songed the word “easy” when I wanted her to soften and slow down a bit, and yipped “Let’s go!” when the ground opened up. The rhythm of her surging gallop, her ability to leap the big brushes and swallow the small, her perfect responses to my small asks — this sort of horse is carved of dreams and wind.
Horse girls get a funny rap in modern culture. The word ‘crazy’ springs to mind, and sometimes it is that. Really, we’re addicts to a presence that can be both fierce and gentle. We’re meditators at breakneck speed. We’re at our most zen at a full tilt. When you finally get comfortable at that level of riding, the reward shoves risk into the bottom of the pack. It’s not a drug; it’s nirvana.
“You can really ride,” the cowboy told me as we walked back to the ranch, “You should jump on my colt. He’s going to be fancy.”
I felt tired from 6 miles of riding hard, but I didn’t want to lose face. He sang the colt’s praises as we walked the last stretch back to the ranch.
“Sure,” I said.
The colt stood as big as the mare, a thunderdome of a young animal. The cowboy warned me he could “get offended” if you didn’t let him relax into the ride. I took it slow, not knowing or bothering to ask what that meant. After a few minutes, I picked up my outside rein minutely and tapped a little with my inside leg, that’s all. In horse speak, it is a small ask of bend through the body, something any colt as far along as he supposedly was should know or at the very least take in stride. But that small bit of pressure didn’t just explode — it blew up.
The huge animal broke in half underneath me. He bucked once small, bucked twice medium, then let loose with a lever launch that sent me high above his head. I went up before going down, likely somewhere 8 to 10 feet above ground. When gravity pulled me back to earth, all the wind escaped my body. I groaned without being able to control it. I couldn’t get up.
The colt, frightened, took off at full speed once I hit the ground. He galloped wildly as I lay still in the dirt. It’s the one time in my life when I wondered if this was it. If I would die because of this. I had no feeling about any of it beyond the feeling of blunt impact. I waited for my breath to return and curled my knees up toward my chest.
“Are you okay?” the cowboy called. I said nothing back. That moment lived between me and the earth alone, no colt or man, no sky. I didn’t want to look up where I just came from. I went within myself, and I held there until my lungs restarted. In decades of riding, I’d always been able to get up fairly quickly. This time, I didn’t. I couldn’t. For 45 minutes, I lay on the ground.
The cowboy collected his colt, tied him at the rail, then came and sat down on the ground with me. I slowly rolled into a sitting position. The quiet terror moved out of my body. My nerves came to some sort of moderate stasis. A military veteran, he was unshaken and patient. I tried to make light of it; he played along for posterity.
When I finally got up, I felt ribs around the right side of my body moving freely. The ground shifted with what I already knew to be a severe concussion. I couldn’t physically get into my truck to drive home. I was stuck.
Forced to stay overnight, I gripped the island in his kitchen after doing my best to walk normally into his house. The world tipped side by side and nausea rose in my throat. I remembered once being kneed in the head in a soccer game, watching the flat field rise to 45 degrees as my brain swished around in my skull. In seventh grade, I hit a goalpost at a tournament, and it knocked me out cold. I recalled the sensation of looking down on my body from above, then coming to on the field. I played the next day.
“You don’t have to go to the hospital, do you?” he asked, handing me a cold, domestic beer — the chosen balm of cowboy injuries. I swigged two Tylenol then feigned drinking the rest of it.
“If I need to go, it can wait until tomorrow.” Really, I didn’t want an emergency room bill, the annoyance of being there late into the night with a near stranger, or the dependence on someone else to drive me. In horsier terms, pride cometh after the fall.
I spent a half hour sitting on the bathroom floor. Ever the gentleman, the cowboy offered up his bed. I accepted, laying awake, wondering about the old adage of not sleeping when you had a concussion, remembering somewhere along the line that maybe that had changed? I didn’t have the energy to look it up. My ribs throbbed. My head ached. I went in and out of consciousness, as anyone scared of falling asleep does, needled by movement and somewhat wary of stillness.
The next morning, coffee was made, and I climbed into the driver’s seat, wincing. I knew the doctors couldn’t do anything about ribs — I’d broken them before — so I didn’t go into the hospital. A deep purple bruise rose from the depths of the impact, eventually covering the property from my left armpit down to my quad.If you looked closely, the blood dripped beneath the skin down to my knees.
When I got home — Wayne’s voice in my brain — I stood on a mounting block and tried to climb on the back of my steady brown mare. Lou stood patiently and still as stone. My broken ribs wouldn’t let me lift my side body. Though I knew I’d get back on eventually, I did my best to make good on my promise to Wayne. I’ve only broken it a few times in my life. I patted her on the back and stepped down. This would be one of them.
I bought Lou for $1100 a week before Christmas in 2018. I should have put a giant red bow on her head when she arrived at the boarding facility. After 30 years of ponies on impossible Christmas lists, of mucking out stalls to pay for lessons, of working for horse trainers and dreaming of being on the other side, I owned my first horse.
I boarded her in a pasture that measured about a quarter mile from the barn and indoor arena where we’d ride. The first time I went to walk her from pasture to barn, she balked, planted her feet, and refused to move a step forward. I was flummoxed. Spending most of my equine time around well-trained horses meant that I missed the process of educating them. My training toolkit held little for young or green horses. A decent technical rider and well-educated in fundamental care, I possessed only rudimentary skills to get an entirely unwilling horse from point A to point B.
After a tussle, we arrived at the arena where she balked again. And again. And again. I attempted to lunge her; I couldn’t get any forward motion. Eventually, the barn’s owner took pity on me. Joani kindly showed me where to be on the ground to create momentum, how to check in from the saddle, how to employ the one-rein stop, and all the things I missed over many years of riding. Seeing how these small changes offered such huge benefits, the rabbit hole of horse training sucked me in with a reckoning force.
I stacked up books on training, asked Joani a million questions, went to clinics with legendary horsemen, sat on the rail at horse shows listening to trainers talk, watched hundreds of hours of tape, and experimented with whatever seemed to be next in the process. I unearthed the simple verbiage that horses learn from the release of pressure, not pressure itself. This notion changed the way I viewed everything in an instant. It gave me a new language to work within, and this new understanding made for magic unstopped from a bottle.
A deft student, Lou got the pressure/release game easily. We went from balky walks to her following me quietly without a lead rope. Our rides went from choppy and short to quiet and smooth. She knew how to smile when I got her, so I kept adding tricks to her repertoire. With a series of small leading steps, I taught her to hand me a drink off the tailgate of my truck, and we nearly figured out how to get one out of the cooler. She often beat my black Chevy to the gate, waiting to come out and play.
The one downside to Lou ended up being a weakness in her back. After a long trail ride in the Montana mountains, I couldn’t catch her. She didn’t meet me at the gate. Instead, she ran white-eyed from me, and a suspicion rose in my chest. I ran my hands over her loins and her body nearly fell out beneath my touch. Stout and tough as she was, she needed a smaller, lighter rider. A week later, I sold her to a family where she got just that, her own little girl. My heart fell in my stomach as they drove away with her in the trailer.
It’s dirt-eating of another sort when you make room in your heart for something and then have to make a decision that refutes the desire of that same heart. In addition to feed and water, horses demand pragmatism. It should be written into their bill of sale. I sold Lou knowing other teachers would appear. In my case, I tried and bought a young Appaloosa named Spots shortly after I sold Lou in 2020. In the fall of 2023, a 2-year-old Wyoming Mustang came up for sale. I added her to my little remuda, as well.
I’d owned Lou for only six months when the cowboy’s colt bucked me off. My nascent horsemanship journey certainly didn’t dictate that I should be getting on an unknown youngster. I knew that implicitly. But the mare galloped out so nicely, and the cowboy rode so well. There are moments where trust seems a given even if my gut says otherwise. Let me assure you, it did. I felt tired from the long ride and didn’t want to climb on that colt. My body told the truth when I tried to save face. That’s likely part of the reason he sent me to the moon.
Ask any long-time horseperson about their worst falls and you’ll get raised eyebrows, pursed lips, and mumbled answers about how much worse it could have been. We all carry that knowledge. Some of us don’t have the luxury of saying those words. Let me be clear in hindsight; I got off lucky, and it could have been worse.
In horse speak, I’d now say there were “holes in the colt’s training.” The best trainers I know rarely get bucked off; they simply develop a solid and seamless foundation of fundamental training in each animal to avoid it.
But there is another sort of trainer who can do both. This professional trains both human and animal toward a safe existence together. They do that by putting the untrained human on the trained horse, and the untrained horse with the trained human. Rarely does the combination of untrained human and untrained horse work out. It’s a graduation of sorts to move up the ladder. Becoming an educated horse or horseman alike is a balancing act, a rite of passage, and a formulaic system that goes back thousands of years. Ignoring the formula is asking for trouble.
I haven’t seen Wayne in 25 years, but the internet tells me he won a lifetime achievement award for his dedication to student-riders a few years ago. That tracks.
His lessons set a foundation for my life both with horses and far beyond. They continue to serve me as a lifelong horsewoman, a hunter and angler, a writer and editor, and an ever-curious human who frames failure as a learning opportunity. I always get back into the saddle. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who learned this from him. I can’t help but think of horsemanship as one of our last bastions of oral history that gets passed down through elders.
A great elder and horseman — whatever their gender — can instill these histories and traditions into the youngest among us. When you muck a stall, do your best work, every time. When life gets hard, stick it. Time and effort equals improvement. Pressure is the question; release is the reward.
When you fall off, get back on.
So it is with people chosen by horses. The statistics bounce off of us like we bounced off bicycles and ponies as kids. I just entered my forties. I don’t bounce like I used to. It’s not a fluke that the older most horse folk get, the better we get along with these creatures. Being thorough in foundational training creates horses that navigate life in the same way they teach us to navigate our lives, with thoughtful inquiry and quiet resilience. If the aforementioned research on horse accidents dug further, I’d bet top dollar those scientists would find dangerous incidents diminishing on a bell curve related to age and sticktuitiveness — a made-up word many horse folks know intimately.
The definition? Sticking to it. Horse people don’t have commitment issues. We have commitment blindness. The only way to the other side is through, and the option is singular.
I expected that my young Mustang would unseat me eventually no matter how thorough and connected I worked toward being. That’s the folly of youth. She’s still putting the big pieces of life together. I’m doing my best to figure out how to do that on her terms and mine, combined.
So, my miscalculated gamble toward forward motion brought me to the ground on that day in May. Chalk that one up to tempered optimism. I got it then, looking up at her from where she grounded me. It’s an easy moment to sit in. Change happens in real time.
There, in the dirt, no emotions rise and no tears well. No internal narrative of failure comes up. My first thought is to scan my body, my next thought is for the horse.
I talk to her softly, with reassurance, as I gather myself. She doesn’t spook, doesn’t run. She stands like she has stood for me a thousand times before, waiting for our next cue.
My helmet unmoved, I get to my feet, dust myself off, and catch my horse. I put my foot in the stirrup and swing my leg over the old western saddle, sliding onto her back. She tenses up, and for a moment we just sit there. I place my hand on her neck, quietly talking to her. I tell her she’s a good, brave girl, that she’s got this, that we’ll figure it out together. I say it because I believe it in both body and mind, for the two of us. From there, I tune into a familiar wave of connected energy between horse and rider, and I feel her muscles begin to release.
We walk around the pen for a few minutes, until all the negative residue rolls off of us. It catches a light wind and tumbles out over the sagebrush. I dismount with no issue. Quietly, calmly, the golden filly follows me out of the pen on lead. I pull her tack and release her into the pink evening, our neighborhood mountains shimmering on the horizon.
When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready, the teacher will disappear.
—Tao Te Ching
Nicole Qualtieri is the Editor-in-Chief of The Westrn. She’s written for Outside Magazine, USA Today, GearJunkie, MeatEater, Modern Huntsman, Backcountry Journal, Impact Journal, and many others. A lifelong horsewoman and DIY outdoorswoman, Nicole lives on the outskirts of Anaconda, MT with a full pack of happy critters.