In addition to the smooth coat and strong muscles, I’ve always loved feeling my horse’s breathing. As mentioned, their breath is sweet smelling. If the horse is at rest, listening to the breath coming through the nostrils (they don’t breathe through their mouths) is rather soothing.
Put your arms around their barrel and you can feel their deep breaths. After a few seconds, you’ll find your breathing rate matches theirs. It’s very relaxing.
Alan Strang
Can anybody describe what it feels like to caress a horse?
Actually, it made my foot hurt. I don’t remember if it was standing on the left or the right foot, but it hurt.
No, they’re not basically horses in anatomy. If you want to have even the tiniest bit of credibility, learn about unicorns. They’re not even in the horse FAMILY. They’d probably be more closely related to some sort of antelope, goat, or even cow, than a horse, if they existed. Unicorns traditionally are smaller than horses, have cloven hooves, a tufted tail, and sometimes goatlike beards.
The idea of being healed by touching the unicorn is a good one. The unicorn’s horn is supposed to be proof against poison.
Lynn, I appreciate your intent. That said, I know more than a little about unicorns and alicorns and dajja and re’em and moneceres, oftimes thought to be avatars of Christ, empowered to act against poison, sometimes thought of in more, ah, sensual fashions, famously written of by the Greek physician Ctesias, occasionally thought to be related to rhinocerous and narwhals. (There, do I have any credibility now?) But if try to include every known permutation of these myths in one short story, I’d drive myself batty. (Well, battier.) Since part of the point of the scene is to be, well, physical, I needed specific imagery to draw on, which was my point in opening this thread and Saturday’s horse ride.
Anyway–I’ve decided the unicorns in my story will be basically horses, because horses have connotations of nobility and majesty that cows, antelopes, and goats lack. It’s a work of fiction, after all.
But if it makes you feel better, the character in question comments that unicorns in early myth were not strictly equines.
Actually the little girl isn’t healed by the unicorn as such; she has some destructive illusions dispelled. She thinks her lack of virginity makes her impure and unacceptable to God, when, in fact, the God of this universe doesn’t give a damn about thinks like that.
You all have made me miss being around horses! I rode all the time as a horse-crazy girl, but my contact with them for the last several years has been limited to the occasional downtown carriage ride, or going to the track (where you don’t get to touch them AT ALL, but you can smell them! Mmmm).
Anyway, I used to tuck carrots in my purse when I worked downtown to give to the carriage horses. They (I imagined) were always happy to see me coming.
Lovely idea, but wouldn’t that said pill be, well, drugs?