This month Ste-Anne’s, in conjunction with nearby Valley View Stables, inaugurates a quite extraordinary equine program called “Horse-2-Heart.” Over the course of one, two or three days, guests, essentially, will be able to learn about themselves and horses in a wonderful animal experience that, on the one hand, is about riding but, on the other, about communication between fellow species.

I say “fellow” because, of course, the relationship between horses and humans is atavistic. With horses humans learned to roam farther, hunt better (sadly, make warfare better), and generally expanded their realm of influence quite fantastically—across whole continents, in the case of Genghis Khan, for instance.

For this reason, the horse occupies a special place not just in the annals of our survival, and various civilizations, but in our collective imagination and its sundry expressions.

Because of our intimate relationship with horses, the magnificent animal has been a feature of our dreams, and the stories we tell. It has been a feature of the art we have made since time immemorial, from cave paintings of Peche-Marle, in France, through the vases of the Ancient Greeks to the paintings of Charles Stubbs and, today, the American photographer Roberto Dutesco’s massive gelatin prints of his “Wild Horses of Sable Island” exhibition I saw hanging in a New York SoHo gallery recently—Sable Island, you’ll remember, is the Canadian nature reserve just south of Halifax, ever more threatened by the ravages of oil and gas exploration. (See http://www.dutescoart.com/gallery/sablehorses/index.html for some examples, if you wish.)

There is, subsequently, a massive literature about horses, from the English writer Anna Sewell’s only novel, Black Beauty, published in 1871, through fascinating but more contemporary works such as Wounded, by the American winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Fiction, Percival Everett. The horse is a central character in the eponymous short story of the extremely talented Vancouver writer Timothy Taylor’s collection, Silent Cruise. And a scene with horses is one of the most gut-wrenching in the late Canadian writer Timothy Findley’s famous (and probably best) The Wars, an elegant novel about man’s inhumanity to man set in the trenches of the ‘Great’ War in Europe. (I’ve always hated that qualifier—who in their right mind thinks any war is ‘Great’? The tragedy of it’s being not, is what drives Findley’s book.)

And there is a bevy of best-selling books and popular film—usually about racehorses, where human’s relationship with horses lends itself to a very Hollywood plot of contest and competition—and other memorable and much-loved texts like Nicholas Evans’ hugely popular The Horse Whisperer, later made into a feature film by Robert Redford.

So books about horses were a shoo-in for May’s Book-of-the-Month Club meet at Ste-Anne’s (don’t be confused by the June 1^st date!). I’m sure our teatime conversation will touch on these books, but the book I’ve decided to build our talk around is a lesser known Canadian one called Horse: How the Horse has shaped Civilization, published in paperback by Knopf Canada, by the congenial and imaginative writer, J. Edward (Ted) Chamberlin. (Ted and I were on the bestseller lists together for a while, numbers 2 and 3, outdone by another book about inter-special relationships, John Grogan’s Marley and Me, but what could we do about that?!)

Ted is a thoughtful writer, whose detailed and sometimes nearly encyclopedic understanding of his subjects is balanced by an anecdotal approach that makes his style quite personable. He has written very illuminatingly about the influence of Canada’s aboriginals on our seemingly modern and commercial frame of mind (in If This is Your Land, then Where are your Stories?) and brings the same moving passion to Horse: How the Horse has Shaped Civilization, a short and quite fascinating book that is clearly a labour of love.

And you, I imagine, shall have your own favorites. Come share their titles or your reminisces of scenes from them—and remember, it’s not necessary to have read anything to enjoy the hour.

See you June 1^st, I hope, and in the meantime, enjoy the spring and Ste Anne’s wonderful grounds.