horse

Horses are a recurring presence in Ben Givens’s life, linking the work of the family orchard with hunting, mountain travel, and the open country beyond the trees. They are never given individual names, but their uses are distinct: they are farm animals to feed, sure-footed mounts for journeys through snow and sage, and part of the practical knowledge passed between generations. In Rachel Lake’s riding, the horse also becomes a means of independent movement through the landscape.

Farm Work and the Country Beyond the Orchard

At the Givens family orchard, horses belong to the ordinary infrastructure of agricultural life. The farm has a stable, and the daily round of work includes caring for its animals alongside making apple boxes, milking cows, clearing irrigation ditches, and tending trees through every season. The horses are not decorative against this laboring landscape: they are among the living responsibilities that make the household’s working year concrete.

Beyond the orchard rows, horses carry Ben and Aidan Givens into the desert country where they hunt quail, chukars, and sage grouse. When the brothers ride, their shotguns hang across their backs and their canteens slap against the saddles. The mounted journeys lead to camps in the sage, where they prepare the birds they have taken, cook them over twig fires, and spend the night talking beneath the sky. Horseback travel makes this country reachable, but it also gives the brothers a way to inhabit it slowly: by ridges, canyons, and the changing light of a journey rather than from the edge of the orchard.

Horses also connect the brothers’ outdoor life to the more distant mountain country. The Givens family takes the train to Stevens Pass for late-fall climbs, and Ben and Aidan grow up imagining longer explorations into the forests and high country. In winter, they ski; on one December ascent of Mission Peak, a mountain goat appears close by as Ben works his boots into his bindings. These moments belong to a wider family practice of entering the mountains, while the horses chiefly serve the routes through the ranch country and surrounding hills.

Hunting, Instruction, and the Family Inheritance

When Ben is ten, he rides with Wright Givens and Aidan Givens on his first deer hunt. They cross the river at Coleman’s Landing and follow the Colockum Stagecoach Road through new snow, camping above the river before riding into Stray Horse Canyon at dawn. The horses carry the party through the cold search for a buck, while Wright teaches his sons to read its tracks, droppings, and likely direction of travel. The animal’s movements shape the hunt’s route: the riders follow its passage, climb to a ridge, and tether their mounts downslope before taking their positions at a saddle.

Wright shoots the buck after the party has waited, and the hunt turns from tracking to the work of taking meat. He explains how he prepares the carcass; the boys watch, and the deer quarters are lashed over the saddles for the ride out. The horses thus carry the material consequence of the hunt as well as its participants. The lesson is practical and familial: Ben sees the animal’s role in the full sequence, from following tracks across snow to transporting food home. His father presents the hunt as knowledge Ben and Aidan will need when he is no longer there.

The animals remain part of the brothers’ shared life as they grow older. Fifteen months after The attack on Pearl Harbor, Aidan Givens is drafted into military service. Before leaving, he asks for one last ride through the Colockum Country with Ben. They set out at dawn, cross the river, and travel through the day, eating from their saddlebags and riding up Dry Springs Canyon. Aidan shoots two blue grouse at dusk; the brothers camp near Spring Gulch and watch a thunderstorm from their tent. The horses carry them through a farewell that is not ceremonious but extended across a day’s journey, a shared meal, a hunt, and a night in the country.

The next morning, they ride to a ridge and take in the river and snow-covered mountains. On the return journey, they cross the Columbia River by ferry and reach the orchard at dusk. They lead the horses between the rows in silence, and Aidan runs his hands along the tree limbs as he passes. The horses bring the brothers back to the place where their working life began, while the ride marks the approaching separation between them.

Rachel Lake and Independent Movement

Horses also figure in the summer when Rachel Lake arrives at the orchard to work the cherry harvest. Ben sees her riding alone across the sage-studded ridges, moving with ease in the saddle and galloping beneath the early moon. From a spring in the willow canyon, he later sees her horse tied nearby as she kneels to drink. When he notices the mare, he recognizes it as her uncle’s horse; Rachel says that her uncle lets her ride it.

The mare is described as old and visibly worn: swaybacked, scraped, and scarred by time, yet with straight, clean cannon bones and a well-kept mane and tail. The details make this particular horse more than a passing mount. Its age and condition distinguish it from the horses used in the brothers’ hunts, while its continued soundness explains how Rachel can travel on it. The narrative gives no account of ownership beyond her uncle’s permission, and no name for the mare; what matters in the scene is their shared presence at the spring and Rachel’s ability to ride through the country.

Rachel’s riding recurs as an image of her freedom of movement during the harvest. Ben sees her cross the sage hills and pause to look toward the mountains; elsewhere, she rides with solitary ease across the ridgelines. Their paths intersect through the work of picking and the landscape around it, but the horse allows her a separate range of motion. Her rides give Ben glimpses of her beyond the orchard rows, where she appears not only as a worker among the pickers but as someone moving on her own through the open country.

A Practical and Narrative Presence

Across these episodes, horses are defined by what they enable without being reduced to a single symbolic role. They are housed and fed as part of farm life, ridden on hunts and long journeys, and used to carry the weight of harvested game. Their work belongs to a physical world of saddles, rivers, steep country, cold mornings, and the return to the orchard. In the brothers’ farewell ride, that practical function acquires emotional weight through the journey’s timing and destination: the horses take them out together and bring them home on the eve of Aidan’s departure.

The contrast between the brothers’ shared mounts and Rachel’s solitary riding also gives the animals different narrative relations. With Ben and Aidan, horses accompany inherited family knowledge and a life shaped by shared work and excursions. With Rachel, the old sorrel mare accompanies an individual passage through the hills. The horses remain distinct from the human story rather than speaking or receiving names, yet their presence helps give that story its physical scale: they make distance crossable, connect labor to landscape, and carry moments of instruction, companionship, and parting.