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expected him to burst out laughing any minute. I was clearly not getting through. But something else was bothering me, something beyond beginner’s clumsiness. Cash and I had bonded just a few days before in the round pen, and this exercise was not strengthening that bond.
    I was trying to learn a specific task, or, rather, trying to
teach
a specific task.
    Or both, I suppose.
    But what I wanted most was to understand what made this huge wonderful beast tick: how he learns, how I could communicate clearly with him, what it meant to him when I did this with the rope or that with the stick. Only then could I better figure out how to get Cash to understand what he clearly wasn’t understanding on this particular day. I was trying to follow a DVD’s instruction, move by move, when what I felt I should’ve been doing was experiencing this from his end of the rope.
    It wasn’t long before Cash sent me straightaway back to the books and DVDs, which, I soon discovered, had no intention of teaching me how to understand Cash until I first knew how to back him up. And move him sideways. And so on.
    Truth be told, I actually went back to determine whether the stick was supposed to be in the right or left hand. As if it made a difference to Cash.
    But I found myself skipping ahead, to the end of the series. Looking for some conceptual meat. Then to the end of the next series. Racing past the task-based learning. Searching for comprehension, meaning. Something that would connect the dots. What I found is that all these programs pretty much never get there until the end.
    How backward, I thought.
    Now that you’ve come this far, we’re going to teach you why all these tasks we’ve taught you work. We’re going to show you how to understand the horse so you can figure things out for yourself.
    But I didn’t want to wait. Not that the tasks don’t have good and proper purpose. It’s just that they would mean so much more to both of us, to me and the horse, if I understood why he was getting it, and why he wanted to. Learning, then, would surely happen so much faster. His
and
mine.
    The early lessons in the books and DVDs never said: Before you start this program, go spend a few days out in the pasture just watching the interaction of the herd. Make note of how the smallest of gestures, when delivered accurately, can get the desired result.
    Wow! Why wasn’t that up front?
    I went immediately to the pasture. And watched.
    Again and again.
    The DVDs didn’t explain, in the early lessons, that when a leader horse swells up and pins her ears and moves toward a follower’s butt, it means move that butt. Now! And that such a move doesn’t mean
I don’t like you.
Or
I want you out of my pasture.
It simply means,
I am the leader here and I want you to move your butt over.
That’s it. A few minutes later the same two horses will be huddled next to each other, head to tail, swishing flies out of each other’s faces.
    This is a difficult concept for humans to grasp. We are such emotional beings. We don’t like to hurt another’s feelings. Usually. So it’s hard for us to realize that with horses, such behavior is simply leadership in action. And is actually building respect for the leader.
    It was important for me to learn that the horse was not going to think less of me if I swelled up like a predator, pinned my ears, and pointed at his hindquarters. He would actually think more.
Hey, this guy knows the language. Cool. I respect that.
    And then it struck me: These horses accepted me in Join-Up. I’m
supposed
to be part of the herd. It stands to reason that I need to know how to behave like a herd leader.
    The hard part was remembering to swell up. And I had trouble pinning my ears. I suppose that’s why we have fingers. And eyebrows. Eyebrows are good.
    I was beginning to understand that, in effect, we must find a way to be a horse. We shouldn’t even try to relate horse behavior and communication to human equivalents. Or even