August Epp’s Friendship with Frint

August Epp’s friendship with Frint grows out of a moment of care during a public protest and becomes a brief shared life in Wandsworth. August does not describe the horse merely as a possession or a means of transport: he names him as a friend, gives him a place with the people around him, and remembers him years later as part of his understanding of human attachment to horses. Their separation, when August loses contact with both Frint and the community that had housed him, leaves the friendship defined by its warmth and its abrupt ending.

Identity and Circumstances

August tells Ona Friesen about Frint while explaining an earlier period of his life in London. After his father disappeared and his mother died, August had nowhere to live. He was attending university and taking history classes when he experienced a nervous breakdown, left his studies, and joined anarchists, artists, and musicians who were squatting on derelict land near Gargoyle Wharf in Wandsworth, beside the Thames. He presents this history as the setting in which he encountered Frint: the horse entered a makeshift community in which August and his companions were already living outside ordinary domestic arrangements.

The account also reveals a facet of August that the colony’s women might not otherwise know. His affection for ducks, which he admits he failed to keep to himself even in jail, accompanies his story of Frint. That self-description makes his later attention to a frightened horse consistent with a broader fondness for animals, while the particular relationship with Frint rests on what August did and how he remembers their life together.

The Rescue at Hyde Park

The friendship began at a protest in Hyde Park attended by more than fifty thousand people, a number the participants learned afterward. A police officer had forced his horse to charge the protesters. After others pulled the officer from the horse, the animal was left riderless amid the crowd, panicking and stomping. August responded by climbing onto him and riding away from the crowd and the other officers toward a pond with a fountain.

At the water, August let the horse drink and cool off, speaking in what he hoped was a soothing voice. He recounts that no one paid attention to the two of them. The action carries the relationship’s central contrast: in the protest scene the horse had been made part of a police charge, but August’s response was to remove him from the crowd and attend to his immediate needs. The account does not claim that the horse understood August’s words or describe what he felt; it establishes the bond through August’s practical intervention and sustained care.

August then rode the horse back to Wandsworth and kept him there. He named him Frint, explaining that the name means friend in Plautdietsch. The name makes explicit the status August gives the horse within his life. Frint was not simply a rescued animal temporarily brought to safety; August recalls him as a companion and as a friend to the people around them.

Life Together and Separation

Frint also took part in the household’s work. The squatters expected every being to help, and Frint sometimes carried wood and other materials. August describes him as exceptionally well-trained and fit. These practical details show that companionship and usefulness coexisted: Frint contributed to the community’s daily needs, but August’s account does not reduce their relationship to labor. The name he chose and his later recollection preserve the distinction between a horse who worked among them and a horse whom he regarded as a friend.

That shared life ended when the other squatters were driven from their land and moved away. August had no visitors, and he never saw Frint again. He also lost sight of the friends with whom he had lived. His account gives no further information about where Frint went or what became of him, so the separation remains unresolved rather than becoming a reunion story. The community’s dispersal is the circumstance that breaks the relationship; the evidence offers no indication that August chose to leave Frint behind or that they met again.

Recollection and Significance

Much later, while working through a loose translation, August’s thoughts turn to Greta Loewen’s deep love for her horses, Ruth and Cheryl. He recalls Greta’s late husband travelling south to buy moonshine, becoming drunk, and being taken home in a blanket in a buggy whose horses found their own way. The memory brings August closer to understanding Greta’s attachment, and in the same passage he remembers Frint’s large eyes, long lashes, and velvet nose. The recollection links two distinct experiences of horses without making them interchangeable: Greta’s attachment is grounded in her life with Ruth and Cheryl, while August’s is bound to the horse he rescued and then lost from view.

Frint’s place in August’s story is therefore both specific and limited. Their friendship is shown through a sequence of concrete acts—moving the horse away from the protest, finding him water, bringing him back to Wandsworth, naming him, and sharing work—followed by an unchosen separation. The later memory gives that short companionship continuing emotional weight, but does not supply a later outcome for Frint. In the account to Ona, the remembered horse also helps August explain himself: his attention to animals belongs to the same personal history as his university crisis, life among the squatters, and eventual conversation with the women. Frint remains present not as a symbol with a fully stated meaning, but as a particular absent companion whom August can still recall in detail.