Chapter II begins with Rawlins and John Grady working at La Purisima, and it appears they’ve found their paradise: jobs they love, a beautiful setting, a hacienda owner who is enlightened and loves horses, and a beautiful young girl who rides around on her black Arabian saddlehorse. John Grady is quickly promoted to breeder after their amazing feat of breaking sixteen wild mustangs in four days. The great-aunt of the girl invites John Grady to play chess, and he excels at that, too. Then the inevitable love affair, initiated by the dark, passionate girl, begins. But at the end of the chapter the two young men are dragged away at daybreak in handcuffs.
What happened to their almost perfect world? In the interview with Rocha, after the breaking of the horses and when John Grady is being considered for the horse breeding position, John Grady is asked if it was just the two of them who rode from Texas. For some unknown reason, John Grady, who is so honest about his abilities and in general very honorable, lies. He denies that Blevins had been with them. In the first chapter, Rawlins repeatedly warned John Grady that Blevins was trouble and that he would always reappear, but they have not seen him since the split-up after they retrieved Blevins’ bay horse. So the chapter ends on this terrible unraveling, and the reader is eager to read on to find out for sure what has gone wrong and why Rawlins won’t even look at his friend, John Grady.
But in the middle of the chapter is the heart of what the novel is really about—horses. The adventure, the love interest, the family histories, even the Mexican Revolution play second string to the horse lore and stories.
First, we read long scenes in which John Grady and Rawlins break the sixteen mustangs. The animals are so wild that John Grady says they do not smell like horses, they smell like wild animals. The horses are a varied lot in color, and some are spotted horses, or paints, which is reminiscent of Faulkner’s short story “Spotted Horses.” But here the boys are not pulling a con to sell the ponies; they are going to make them into decent riding or work horses for the ranch.
They use a method called sidelining to break the horses, which involves hobbling the horses so that when they kick and buck they fall down. In traditional bronc busting, a couple of cowboys catch and hold down a horse, putting a saddle on it. Then a brave “bronc-peeler,” as Blevins had claimed to be, gets on and rides the bucking horse until it tires out and starts to run straight. This method of breaking horses can be witnessed at some rodeos where a “wild horse” division is put on. The work is dangerous, and, using this method, a totally unbroken horse is not really rideable for several weeks.
When the sidelining method is used (the method used by John Grady and Rawlins), a horse can be “greenbroke” in several days. The hobbling of the horse teaches it very quickly to stand without kicking. The horse also learns to walk without humping and dipping and lowering its head in preparation for a good buck. Simpler methods of sidelining exist than the method John Grady uses. Some of those methods involve just tying the back foot to the headpiece; another method ties the horse’s neck around to the side. But John Grady does not have a lot of time, so he ties up all their legs with loose slipknots so that he can more quickly get these very unruly horses to stand and walk quietly.
The second part of John Grady’s method is the sacking out. He drapes one of the gunnysacks he has slept on over the horse’s face. For fifteen minutes, he rubs the horse with this sack and talks to it. He does this to build trust in the horse and so that the horse is less jittery about saddle blankets or the saddles that will be used on it. After this complex preparation, the first time John Grady gets on one of these horses, it just stands still, to the amazement of all the onlookers. Rawlins teases him that he is ruining the show, that this is not what everyone came to see. Of course, the audience expects John Grady to be bucked off right away.
John Grady is a precursor of the recent whisperers who have taken the horse gentler tradition and developed it into a third method of training horses, which has become popular in recent years, used by Monty Roberts and the movie The Horse Whisperer, which was very loosely based on Roberts’ experience with a difficult, injured horse. This method involves going in a ring with a wild horse and bending down on one’s haunches and very quietly getting eye contact with the horse. The trainer waits until the horse comes to him. Visual techniques are used to tame the horse, cues Roberts learned from watching horses. When the horse insists on a behavior the trainer does not want, the trainer, using the “whisperer” or visual technique, turns away from the horse until it starts again on the desired behavior. This shunning seems to work and is what mares use to control their young colts. The trainer also talks softly to the horse to encourage its trust and good behavior. Demonstrations of this method are put on all across the United States today. The current attention paid to this method does not give the credit it should to the long line of “amansadores” and gentlers, men like John Grady, who always use these methods of communing with horses. We see this when John Grady talks to the horses and in how they respond to his treatment.
