Dropped Threads 3 Read Online Free

something from a fairy tale or dream. The copper-coloured beast is tied up to a corral railing, somewhere on the Alberta prairie, circa 1952. The sky is a blue inverted bowl, the August sun almost at its zenith. The heat is unreal. Everyone’s sweating.
    The child’s mother stands several yards away on the veranda of the ranch house, not just because of the shade, but because she’s scared silly of horses. The child’s father is not, although horses don’t interest him much. He rode a few times as a child, then fell hard for airplanes and the sky. But he can see his daughter is mesmerized. A man in chaps and a dented cowboy hat asks the child if she’d like to sit on the horse. The child nods, so he scoops her up into the western saddle that feels as broad as a couch. The horse, its head low in the heat, doesn’t move. A few feet away, the father and the cowboy chat desultorily, but the child barely hears them. She leans down to touch the bright shining neck of the horse, she inhales its scent of sweet grass and warm earth and dust. No one offers to lead the horse around—perhaps they think she’s too small to stay on, even at a walk—but she doesn’t care. She’s in some kind of swooning ecstasy.
    A few minutes later, her father reaches up to take her offthe horse. The child makes a face. “Noooo,” she whines. “It’s time to go now,” says the father sternly, and begins to pull her out of the saddle. A much decorated World War II pilot, he won’t have a four-year-old defying him, no sir, especially in front of another man. The child stubbornly grabs the high pommel and hangs on with all her tiny might. The father pulls, she begins to wail: “No! No! No!” Her mother comes rushing over, but slows down uncertainly several feet from the horse as her maternal instinct collides with her terror of the beast.
    The child is screaming now, but it’s no use—the father yanks his flailing daughter off the horse and unceremoniously carries her to the car. The child’s screams pierce the summer afternoon as the family drives off, the parents embarrassed as hell over the mystifying behaviour of their child.
    •    •    •
    That child was me, and I can still hear my own screams from that day. Of course, at the time I couldn’t explain what had happened. All this over a horse? Well, yes. I had just found my primary totem animal, my spirit guide, my religion. And they had torn us apart.
    Horse crazy, they call girls and women like me. It’s a sex thing, snicker the boys and men. They are
so
wrong.
    What makes a small child know so strongly, so deeply, that she has connected with something vital to her soul and heart and body, something that seems to come out of nowhere, with no immediate precedent? Do we humans have genes for our passions? Researchers are beginning to think there’s a gene for religious faith or belief. That might explain why some people find God so fervently and definitively, and others, like me—despite fifteen years of rigorousCatholic brainwashing—thoroughly lose God as soon as they’re old enough to think for themselves.
    But animals … go figure. My father’s mother loved animals, horses and dogs in particular. Did I somehow inherit my passion from her? Or are past lives operating here? I don’t know, but I do know this: I’m not alone.
    Whether it’s horses or dogs or cats (if the horse is my main totem, then the cat ranks just below it), there are legions of women (and some men) who love animals. I’m not talking about celebrities who dye their poodles pink to match their wardrobes, or stuff their chihuahuas in Vuitton handbags as though a dog were just one more accessory. And while I know some of us are guilty of infantilizing our kitties or turning our pooches into human-companion surrogates, I also know that many more of us have made deep soul connections with animals that are mystical, mysterious and profoundly healing.
    But this is a passion that until recently