Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/195

166 reckless riding that few men who have passed their first youth retain sufficient nerve for the business.

Ground that is strewed with lumps of broken granite must be galloped over as unhesitatingly as if it were English turf in a chase where the advantages would at first sight appear wholly on the side of the loose horses; the mounted ones, however, compensated for the weight they carry by the intelligence that guides them, succeed at last in turning the troop into the right direction, along which rush pursuers and pursued, with cracking of the stock whips and tearing up of the ground as if men and horses were alike demented, the bells worn by many of the loose animals increasing the confusion of sounds. We once had a horse for whom a cavalcade of this description possessed as irresistible an attraction as the tinkling herd had for our cow, so that the accidental passing of a party of horse hunters, outside the field in which he was grazing, was sure to make him attempt to follow, and we were therefore compelled to hobble him whenever he was turned out, in spite of which impediment he got about so nimbly, by a series of jumps, that Binnahan often called me to look at "horse galloping in jail things." It then occurred to my husband that the universal trick of buck-jumping that prevails amongst Australian horses might be traced to the no less general practice of hobbling them. An animal that is hobbled can move from one spot to another only by an action that resembles the earlier processes of buck-jumping, and the frequent necessity for thus artificially crippling the creature renders the action so habitual that at last it becomes hereditary.