A Mother's Journey
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 15: First Lesson
~ Emmie ~
The horse’s name was Tashe, which Suki told her meant something close to the color of dawn — a pale gold mare with a dark mane and the large, considering eyes of an animal that had formed opinions about people and was taking her time forming one about Emmie.
Emmie stood beside her in the cold morning air and let herself be smelled, which Five Crows had indicated with a gesture was the correct first step. Not touching yet. Just being present. Just allowing the horse to gather whatever information horses gathered when they stood with their large soft noses near a new person’s shoulder and breathed.
“She decides for herself,” Five Crows said. In English, which he was doing more often now — not frequently, but occasionally, the single English sentence appearing in the middle of a Cayuse conversation like a stone in a stream, deliberate and precisely placed.
“Does she like me?” Emmie asked.
He looked at the horse. “She is still deciding.”
From his position on the top rail of the enclosure fence, wrapped in his blanket like a very small, very opinionated elder, Kanti offered a commentary that Emmie didn’t catch but that made Five Crows’ mouth move slightly at one corner.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“He says Tashe likes everyone,” Five Crows said. “He says you should not feel special.”
Emmie looked at her son. Her son looked back with serene impartiality. She turned back to the horse.
“Thank you, Kanti,” she said.
He accepted this graciously.
Tashe made her decision in the form of a warm, heavy exhale against Emmie’s shoulder that was apparently favorable, because Five Crows said a word that meant something like good and moved to the horse’s side and showed her how to check the horse’s back and legs before riding — running the hands along the spine, feeling the joints, learning what normal felt like so that not-normal was legible. He did it with the same economy he brought to everything, each motion precise and purposeful, nothing wasted.
She watched his hands. She was learning to watch his hands the way she had learned to watch the grandmother’s hands — not the surface of the motion but the intention beneath it, the understanding that moved through the fingers.
“Now you,” he said.
She did it. Imperfectly — she wasn’t sure what she was feeling for, wasn’t sure what normal felt like well enough to identify its absence — but she did it, and he watched, and when she finished he said one word and demonstrated the part she had missed, the way the knee joint required a particular angle of approach to assess correctly, and she did it again and he said the word that meant better.
Better was his primary teaching word. Not good, not right — better. As though the whole of learning was simply an ongoing process of approaching something you never quite arrived at, and the approach was the thing, and better was always available if you were paying attention.
She was paying attention.
Mounting took longer than she had expected and was less dignified than she had hoped. She had a general sense of the mechanics of it from watching — the grip, the swing, the weight distribution — but between the general sense and the execution lived a considerable gap, which she discovered on the first attempt when her momentum carried her too far and she had to grab the mane to avoid going over the other side entirely.
Kanti made a sound from the fence.
She looked at him. He had his hand over his mouth with the elaborate innocence of someone who had definitely not just laughed.
“I saw that,” she told him.
He looked at the sky.
She looked at Five Crows, bracing for — she wasn’t sure what. Impatience. Judgment. Some version of the expression she had seen on men’s faces when women did things incorrectly in their presence.
His face held none of those things. He simply waited, with the same quality of waiting she had come to recognize as characteristic of him — not impatient, not indifferent, simply present and ready for whatever came next. He adjusted her grip on the mane and showed her where her weight needed to go and stepped back.
She tried again.
This time she made it. Not gracefully — she landed with more weight than was ideal and Tashe shifted slightly beneath her with what Emmie chose to interpret as tolerance rather than objection — but she was on the horse, upright, both legs where they were supposed to be.
Kanti applauded from the fence. Briefly, three small claps, with the air of someone acknowledging a reasonable effort.
“Thank you,” she said to him gravely.
He nodded. He felt this was appropriate.
Five Crows moved to stand at Tashe’s head and walked them forward — just walking at first, just the basic fact of the horse moving beneath her and her body learning what moving on a horse felt like, the particular rolling shift of it, the way you had to follow rather than brace against, the way resistance made everything worse and surrender made everything possible.
She was tense for the first few minutes. She could feel herself being tense, could feel the brace in her hips and her shoulders, and she understood intellectually that the tension was working against her but understanding a thing and releasing it were separated by a distance that took time to cross.
Five Crows said one word. She didn’t know it.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
He thought for a moment, searching for the English. “Melt,” he said finally. “Like snow. In the sun.”
She thought about snow in the sun. She thought about the way it gave up its holding, degree by degree, becoming something else without ceasing to be itself. She let that happen in her hips first, then her shoulders, and felt Tashe’s movement come up through her differently — not as something to resist but as something to move with, a conversation between her weight and the horse’s motion, each informing the other.
“Better,” Five Crows said.
She felt it. She felt the better, the way the whole thing changed when she stopped fighting it, and the feeling of it was so immediate and complete that she said, without deciding to, “Oh.”
He heard it. She saw something in his face respond to it — that brief, almost-imperceptible movement she was learning to watch for, the thing that happened in his expression when something surprised him favorably, there and gone before it fully arrived.
They worked for an hour. He was a precise teacher — not harsh, not effusive, simply exact. He saw what was wrong before she felt it and named it in time for her to correct it, and his timing was so consistently right that she began to trust it, began to make the correction when he named the thing rather than needing to feel it first. This was a different kind of learning than she was accustomed to. It required a surrender of a particular kind — the surrender of her own judgment to someone else’s, temporarily, in the faith that their seeing was more accurate than hers.
She trusted his seeing. She had trusted it since the woodpile, since the timber, since the hand at her elbow that arrived before she finished falling. His seeing was reliable. She had the evidence.
Kanti fell asleep on the fence somewhere in the second half of the lesson, his blanket wrapped around him, his cheek on his folded arms, as trusting in his sleep as he was in everything else. Five Crows noticed before she did and without breaking the lesson’s rhythm moved to the fence and resettled the blanket more securely around the sleeping child, tucking it at the edges with the same precise, unhurried care he brought to everything.
She watched him do it and felt something move through her that she had been not-examining for two weeks and was not going to examine now either, here on the horse in the cold, but that was undeniably present and undeniably growing and undeniably not going away regardless of how carefully she was not examining it.
He came back to where she was and looked up at her on the horse and said something in Cayuse.
“I didn’t catch all of that,” she said.
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