I THOUGHT I KNEW WHAT A BEAR HUNT WAS

When my children were little, one of their favourite picture books was We’re going on a Bear Hunt written by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, about a group of people heading out on an adventure to –you guessed it – catch a bear. This is how it went: “We’re going on a bear hunt, we’re going to catch a big one! What a beautiful day! We’re not scared.”

The protagonists waded through rivers, squelched through mud, and fought through a snowstorm. Then when they finally spotted a bear, they forgot all about not being scared and immediately ran away, right back through the squelchy mud and the raging river and everything else, sprinting all the way home where they slammed the door and hid under the bedcovers.

Funnily enough, until yesterday, I’d never really reflected on the moral of the story. I suppose it might be that it’s all right to not go through what you set out to achieve, that sometimes you bite off more than we can chew.  In this story, everyone lived happily ever after, including the bear.

Anyway, fast-forward twenty years.

Yesterday, I was hand-walking my horse, Dominic, around the yard. Dom is injured and off work for some weeks, needing me to walk him around numerous times a day. Of. Course, being a high-maintenance horse, requires all sorts of other time-consuming treatments, but I won’t get into those.

Dom and I plodded around and around the yard under the bleak grey January sky, our breath merging with the wisps of low-lying early morning fog. My dressage trainer was over from England and I could hear him teaching one of my currently more fortunate fellow horse-nutters in the indoor school. I sighed loudly, as did Dominic, so I gave his nose a velvety kiss, telling him the weeks would fly by and that before long he’d be back in the arena in his dancing shoes.

Ultra-randomly, We’re going on a Bear Hunt popped into my head and I began reciting it to Dominic. My horse loves being chatted to, and since I spend millions of minutes a day in his company, my handsome dude is well acquainted with the perpetual ping-ponging of my overanxious mind. A sudden loud hiss erupted as we plodded past the building hosting the yard’s horse water-treadmill, causing Dominic to spook slightly. A pat and a reassuring, “It’s ok, it’s not a bear. Good boy,” settled him within four rapid hoofsteps and dissuaded him from dragging me all the way back to the safety of his stable.

I don’t know why that particular children’s book came to me at that moment, but it got me pondering, sending my mind off on what I’m inclined to call mini-philosophical tangents.

I’ve recently been reading books that teach that you’re not a crap rider nor an absolute numpty for entering a dressage competition.

With Dominic, for the first time in my life, I have a horse who helps me believe that, with him, I’ll totally be able to slay the mind-effing dragons of the Prix St. Georges, possibly even finishing the test with a smile on my face. But with Dom injured, my mind is running scared, clouding the future with doubts, painting everything the same colour as this depressing January sky. My struggle to remain upbeat involves joking with my yard buddies, telling them that this morning Dom and I are on our way to Santiago de Compostela. The last stroll of the day might see us tackling the Route du Rhum since there doesn’t seem to be a Route de la Vodka. I’m on my own personal bear hunt, day after day, week after week, breathing deeply, telling myself not to be scared. But repeatedly insisting it’s a beautiful day is mentally exhausting.

Of course, everything is relative. My problems are eyerollingly pathetic compared to many problems.

Rationally, I’m aware I’m incredibly fortunate. But passion has a way of making everything ridiculously dramatic.

What if Dominic’s injury takes months to heal? What if he’s broken? What if I can never ride again at this level? What if I can’t have another horse? Will I soon be too old? Is it too late to aspire to top-level dressage? Is it all absolutely pointless?

It’s a big deal to me.

Horses have always been my passion. Riding saved me from free-falling when my children left home. Activities around my horse structure my day, and the long hours involved in caring for him are never begrudged. The yard provides me with a sense of community, a support system, a great social life.

*****

I wrote all of that eight years ago, about a horse with a strained tendon – or a sore back, or something else that sport horses tend to get – and a woman who thought the sky was falling. I never finished this essay, probably because the sky descended a little further, afterwards, when I began having shooting pains all over my body which eventually turned out to be fibromyalgia. On top of this, the meds given to me for my body pain appear to have triggered my inflammatory bowel disease.

I now find it kind of sweet that I once thought a few weeks of hand-walking Dominic was a bear hunt. I had no idea what a real bear hunt looked like.

I haven’t sat on a horse for six years now, apart from one or two desperate attempts that told me within seconds that that part of my life was over. Life didn’t hand me an injury I could hand-walk out of, patting a scented, warm neck and promising it would soon be behind me.

Carrots and sweet nothings have no effect on chronic disease.

My friends at the stables can’t joke about this with me because I no longer see most of them. Besides, I don’t need them to make jokes about it because I do so myself. These last few years, I’ve noticed that this is what I do with fear: I dress it in pretty words and plod on.

Nobody tells you that the book doesn’t end once you’ve come back from the bear hunt and hidden under the bedcovers. You’ll get up the next morning and go back out looking for the bear, because you can’t stay at home forever, hidden from danger and mud and crappy weather. I’ve realised the book – or life – was never about catching the bear, but about going out and saying “ooh, what shall I do with this lovely day?” even if it’s raining and you’re stuck on the toilet with burning bones in your legs.

I no longer really miss Dominic’s ears swivelling back to listen to me while I sang him the Quack song, or Your Song, or Patience (I remember singing that one a lot!). I no longer miss the delicious smell of the stables, although I will always be able to conjure it up when I close my eyes; there’s nothing quite like it. I no longer miss the other ladies who understood the drama of not quite knowing which blanket to put on your horse in the evening. Dominic is happily retired now and living his best life grazing all day with his best friend, Qrac. He’s fallen in love with a pretty mare called Tosca. Six years of not riding taught me that I’m capable of moving on, of finding my “beautiful day” elsewhere.

I doubt I’ll ever get back in the saddle, and that’s okay, even though there’s still squelchy mud in my heart when I watch my old riding videos.

The bear hunt never stops being about courage; it just changes shape. Some years the bear is a horse with a sore back. Some years it’s your own body. You don’t actually need to go out and catch the bear. You just have to keep heading towards the possibility of it, telling the people – or the horses – you love that you’re not scared, even when, in a quiet, albeit happy corner of yourself, you sometimes still are.