A Circus Horse with no Circus

Gus

Back in 1955, a circus came to town.

Nothing unusual about that—except that the town was Fairbanks, Alaska. Alaska was not even a state yet, and the circus thought they would make expenses by playing to the towns along the Alaska Highway. Since the Alaska Highway was still basically a dirt road when I first drove it fifteen years later, and the towns were pretty small and far apart, they arrived in Fairbanks practically broke.

And then it rained.

Eventually they had to sell the animals to give the performers the money to get back to the States. Among those sold was a liberty act of six palomino horses.

I don’t know what happened to all the horses—the initial sale was well before I came to Alaska, and I looked up the details in the local paper. I’ve heard some died in the frigid winter of 1961-62, with ten consecutive days of daily maximum temperatures well below – 40° F. But I did come to know two: Gus and Shorty. Gus, in fact, became the first horse I ever owned.

I met Gus in the mid-60’s, as a rental horse at a riding stable. I saw him bluff a 6-foot G.I. into thinking he was more horse than the guy was ready to handle, but he never gave me any real trouble. Maybe he appreciated the fact that I was (relatively) lightweight and knew a little of how to ride. In fact I was helping out at the stable by that point, though I was also working on my Master’s thesis.

I did not, however, go along on the fall guided hunting trips—and Gus came back from one of those with a horrendous saddle sore in the middle of his back. It appeared to heal over the winter, but when the weather moderated, it was apparent he had a permanent lump on his back. He could still be ridden bareback, or with a special pad under his saddle cut out to assure no pressure on the scar, but as a livery horse, he was through. I was just finishing my M.S. and starting my Ph.D., and figured the stipend I was getting could be stretched to cover Gus’s board, so I became the owner of one palomino ex-circus horse in the spring of 1967.

I don’t know how old Gus was at the time. As a trained circus horse he was probably between six and twelve years old in 1955, which would have made him between eighteen and twenty-four when he became mine—but at that time, I did not know his history or how long he’d been in Fairbanks. I rode him sidesaddle in the Golden Days parade that year, and discovered that he’d been the parade marshal’s  horse at one time—certainly he never twitched an ear at the general excitement of the parade. Later I hitched him to a cart and drove him—and that, too, he simply rolled his eyes and accepted.

In fact he was pretty unflappable, for a horse. He was also exceptionally intelligent, and quite willing to use that intelligence to get out of any work he could. He could only be caught with food, for instance. (He was always greedy, possibly a holdover from that cold winter.) A bit of grass was no good—it took a bucket of feed. He’d leaned from one previous owner that if he charged a person trying to catch him, the person would give up. He tried that on me once—and got his face slapped with a bridle. He never tried it on me again, but he’d do it if someone he thought he could bluff tried to catch him. While most of the horses at the boarding stable where I kept him could be led with a bit of binder twine around their necks, Gus needed a halter—he knew if a person was really in control or not. And though he never charged me after that once, he was a genius at positioning himself so that the only way to get to him was to go right behind another horse—preferably one that kicked.

With time I added a younger horse to my string, and Gus was semi-retired. His neck began to show wrinkles when he turned his head, and one day I found him working at a mouthful of grass and finally letting it fall from his mouth. Tooth floating time? The vet tried, but Gus had simply run out of tooth length. Not that it affected him all that much—the stable relied on a complete pelleted feed, and he’d take a mouthful, dunk it in his water bucket, mouth it until it became mushy, and swallow it. His water buckets were invariably a mess, but Gus stayed in good condition.

He died in 1982, almost certainly in his 30’s and possibly pushing 40. He taught me a lot about horses, some of which I have used in my novels. And he was a part of Fairbanks history, coming into the state before statehood, seeing the changes that took place during the pipeline years, and closing his eyes on an Alaska people born when he was would never have recognized.

R’il’nian Language (Homecoming Glossary)

R’IL’NIAN (LANGUAGE): The inherited language of the R’il’nai. The R’il’nai could understand it and speak it as soon as neurological development had progressed to the point that they were capable of the concepts, usually shortly after birth for understanding. Non-R’il’nai are incapable of some of the sound discriminations needed.

Kava Pods (Homecoming Glossary)

KAVA PODS: A kind of high-protein Riyan vegetable, eaten while the pods are still green and the enclosed seeds are tender. It can be eaten raw, but is much easier to chew if cooked.

Genetics Board (Homecoming Glossary)

GENETICS BOARD: The group responsible for determining matings among R’il’noids and latents, and for insuring that any children of such matings are properly reared and socialized. If one or both parents want to raise the child this can generally be arranged, but the welfare of the child overrules any “rights” of the parents.

Jewel Tinerals (Homecoming Glossary)

JEWELS (TINERAL VARIETY): Tinerals with solid-colored, usually brilliant feathers. They are the friendliest and most spectacular variety, but not the best singers. (All tinerals are good singers; the jewels and skies just aren’t quite as good as the natures.)

Bounceabout (Homecoming Glossary)

BOUNCEABOUT: The crew’s nickname for the exploration ship XP-13.

Forcewebs (Homecoming Glossary)

FORCEWEBS: Force-field generators attached to the feet. They can be adjusted in a variety of ways to mimic snowshoes, sandshoes, skis, water skis, snowboards, or surfboards, among others.  Some (e.g., those used for avalanche surfing) have levitation circuits to reduce the operator’s effective density.

Crossbreds (Homecoming Glossary)

CROSSBREDS: a generic term for individuals who have at least one parent with obvious R’il’nian traits. All R’il’noids are crossbreds, but many crossbreds have Çeren indices well below the 72 required for classification as R’il’noid.

Full of Sound and Fury

True or false: The Chinese invented gunpowder a thousand years before it was known in the West, but being a peaceable people, they used it for many centuries only for fireworks.

This is one of those trick questions that is neither true nor false. The real story seems to be that the Chinese did indeed have fireworks at the time of the Roman emperors, that they did invent gunpowder, and that the use of gunpowder in war started sometime around the tenth century. Nevertheless, gunpowder was used as a weapon in China from the time of its discovery. The unstated — and false — assumption is that fireworks require gunpowder.

Early Chinese fireworks consisted of colored and perfumed smokes and noisemakers often called firecrackers. These early firecrackers were simply sections of bamboo thrown onto a fire. The bamboo sections would explode as the air and moisture inside the closed sections heated and expanded. The bamboo crackers may have been used initially to frighten more primitive tribes away from campfires, while smoke was used for fumigation and as a signal in warfare, so even these fireworks were not entirely peaceful.

The first evidence for gunpowder is in about the 9th century, and consists of a Taoist warning against mixing saltpeter, sulphur, arsenic compounds, and honey (which supplied carbon), on the grounds that burnt hands, faces, and houses had resulted from the experiment. By the beginning of the 10th century, however, there is mention of the use of “fire-drug”, the term later used for gunpowder, in war.

The early gunpowders were low in saltpeter and burned rather than exploding. They seem to have been well established in incendiary bombs, poison smoke bombs, and fire arrows — not exactly peaceful uses — by the eleventh century. At about the same time, a new and noisier kind of firecracker appeared, probably similar to modern firecrackers. Fireworks on frames were known by the 12th century, and may have involved gunpowder.

One kind of fireworks, definitely known by 1264, may have been the first step toward the rocket. This was the “ground-rat”, probably a bamboo tube filled with gunpowder and with a small hole in one end. When lit, it rushed violently around on the ground. (A dud firecracker will sometimes behave in the same way.) The exact date has survived because of an incident in which a ground-rat chased the Emperor’s mother at a fireworks display. Luckily for the officials in charge of the display, the Empress-Mother, though frightened at the time, had a sense of humor and was able to laugh about the incident by the next day.

At some point in the next century, ground-rats of this type were used in warfare. They would certainly have been quite as upsetting to horses as they were to the Empress-Mother, and in addition the military ground-rats were fitted with hooks to catch on clothing.

A ground-rat bouncing around on rough ground would at times take flight for a short distance, and some alert designer of weapons came up with the idea of fastening a ground-rat to an arrow. The result was the first rocket, an arrow that could be fired without a bow. The fireworks designers promptly stole the idea back from the military, removing the arrowhead and adding a gunpowder bomb, whether plain or packed with material that would produce colored lights. Modern flights to the moon and planets are based on exactly the same principle, though the details are more complex.

By the middle of the 13th century Dominican and Franciscan friars were traveling to the Mongol court at Karakorum. One of these friars may have sent a package of firecrackers to Roger Bacon, whose writings indicate a knowledge of firecrackers as children’s toys, an awareness of the ingredients of the gunpowder within them, and a realization of the military potential of larger versions. The Chinese, however, had at that time already been using cast-iron bombs filled with high-nitrate gunpowder for a century or more.

Çeren Index (Homecoming Glossary)

ÇEREN INDEX: A kind of DNA test that measures the fraction of genes active in an individual that are R’il’nian-derived. It has serious problems in that it gives no indication of what the genes code for, but it does provide an objective method of ranking crossbreds, something sorely needed at the time the test was developed.