On My Knightly Errands

[ID: photos of seven linoleum prints, all depicting animals in shield shapes printed in black ink. Animals are a squid, fish, panther, wolf, snake, moth, and songbird. end.]

Studies from life of some swifts I met, who were under the care of a wonderful swift rehabilitator.

Pine Beach - Isca Greenfield-Sanders, 2023.

American , b. 1978 -

is a 2019 book by British Lara Prior-Palmer, winner of 2013 Mongolian Derby. She was the first woman and youngest person to do so, at the age of 19. The race itself is grueling - 1000 km (600 miles) in 10 days or less. Riders are mounted on Mongolian ponies, half-wild, and switch out their mounts roughly every 40 km.

They are as likely to be tossed and have to walk 8 km to catch their stray pony as they are to hurtle at a gallop towards the next stopping place.  “Why do humans put so much thought into some decisions yet plunge into others like penguins into freezing ocean?” Lara asks in the opening chapter. She, herself, is more of the plunging kind. Lara herself leapt into the race woefully unprepared. She entered late, with barely enough money for an entry fee, and without more than a few month’s preparation for an event most people spend at least a year training for.

“The Right To Buck Off A Human Being is one of what I think of as universal horse rights,” she writes, describing the experience of her first mounting. Fall she does, over and over and over. Bruised and dehydrated and with extraordinary chafing, she carries on.

“I have created the horse, says God in one translation of a Bedouin text. I have molded it from the wind, I have tied good fortune to its mane. It will fly without wings. It will be the noblest of animals,” comes from chapter 21, as she races along on one of her best mounts.