Page:Hints to Horse-keepers.djvu/87

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INDIAN PONY.
79

They are very docile, apparently as intelligent as dogs, good-tempered when not stallions, and extraordinarily high-couraged. We once saw, some five-and-twenty years ago, large herds of these ponies running half wild in the great meadows of the Mohawk Reservation, on the banks of the Grand River, near Brantford, in Upper Canada; and afterward travelled many days in succession in a light wagon, drawn by a pair of these little shaggy brutes, not much bigger than Newfoundland dogs, both thorough stallions, hardly able to see out of their little fierce eyes through their thick shag of hair; and we were singularly impressed with their qualities. They were driven with the least possible quantity of harness, and that chiefly made of rope, without breechings, bearing-reins or blinders. The driver had no whip, and said he dared not use one to them if he had, but ruled them perfectly, when he chose to do so, by his voice. Chiefly, however, he left them to themselves, and admirably did they perform. The roads, if they could be called roads, were atrocious; often axle-deep in mud; often over corduroy tracks, made of unhewn logs, through deep, shaking morasses, full of holes that would have engulfed a big horse and his rider, and, at times, passing over large, deep, boggy streams and rivers, on a species of bridge which we never saw before or elsewhere, and trust we may never see again. Whenever they doubted their ground, the ponies lowered their noses, snorted, snuffed at the doubtful place, and seemed to examine it with more than human intelligence, and always in the end scrambled over the difficulty, and brought us through or over it in safety. At the end of the trip we parted with our small equine friends with real regret, and never have forgotten them. This stamp of Canadian pony, we think, by all odds, the best animal of the sort on this continent for teaching boys to ride; and we should feel