WARNING: This is highly sentimental, and may cause profestations of disgust to those who dislike such things. It has also been recommended by the Surgeon General that people who hate Old Yeller should take heavy precautions in reading this.

A few weeks ago, I chanced upon a news article about this poor horse who had to be killed after it horribly wrecked its foot being raced. I'm intimately familiar with why horses are put out of their misery when there is no other option to save the noble creatures.

When I was pretty little, my dad (who has lots of...interesting...methods to raise his children) decided that in order to learn responsibility, we each had to take care of a pet or adopt an animal and it was our job to look after them. My other siblings found pretty pedestrian pets to take care of and while I'm not saying my sister's efforts to get her cat to stop peeing on our tatami weren't epic and tale worthy, I had a harder time finding something. I didn't really want to take care of any animals, as I wanted to be able to do my own thing whenever I could and not get blamed for some other independent entity. I was the last person to pick an animal or pet to take care of. You're smart and you already know what type of animal it was.

Well, nearby where we lived (in Northern Japan, just south of the northernmost island Hokkaido) was very near one of the only places that had some rather vast sweeps of land without anything in them. Keep in mind this is Japan, so there's almost always either mountain or modern development making sure there's little of anything remotely resembling a plain, if you don't count ricefields. And while I don't consider myself a country type of guy, I had an hour and a half train ride back and forth to school each day and lived way out near one of these open fields. There was a ranch nearby, and the owner of the place (I think he owned apple orchards, there were tons nearby) kept a lot of horses. He used to let them go around the field and the fence, and I always liked watching them run around and making horse noises and such. That area is extremely snowy most of the year and the horses made such a fabulous contrast to the white landscapes. About a year before my dad came up with his bizarre little character teaching exercise in parenting a new young horse came to live at that ranch by way of a sale of the offspring of someone's else pregnant horse and several of them had gotten too big to keep.

So one day, I was walking past this ranch and decided to watch the horses for a little while. This newer horse, with a silky brown color and a perfect white diamond started skitting around me closer. It didn't really come up, but it looked like it wanted to meet me. I just smiled and made the best horse sound I could at, and it apparently liked that and whinnied and trotted away to its friends. Later that day, while coming back home I decided to take some apples (I wouldn't say steal, there would be plenty just lying around and looking good enough to eat if you were a bit adventurous and I'm sure they tossed them and besides every other kid did it too) and I brought an extra one for the horse to see if it liked apples.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I got my finger, the one right next to the first on the left of your right hand, usually known as the second longest one, chomped a bit by the horse and got so angry that I stomped around and frightened the poor guy a bit and he stepped on my foot. Usually they say if a horse with horseshoes does that, you can kiss your foot goodbye and I've always wondered how I came to be so lucky (besides being swollen for a few days, nothing really happened to it). Needless to say, after an experience like that, I was endeared to the horse and I asked my dad if we could buy it and that could be my animal. We didn't have any place to keep a horse, so it worked out that we paid for the ranch owner to keep the horse and feed it in exchange for a key so I could see him every time. The ranch owner wasn't exactly the twinkly eyed grandpa horse owner either, he was a pretty ratty, mean little excuse of a man and didn't give ANY of his horses names. (Come to think of it, because children don't think of these details and I've never asked before, I haven't the slightest idea why the guy had horses in the first place.) So I named my horse Kyosuke and began to take care of it.

And if you've ever taken care of a horse or even once had to clean up after their...mess, or had to clean up a stall, you will definitely believe me when I tell you I thought I must have been crazy to choose this horse and it tooks me a while to grow to like the animal. Sooner or later, I started asking for lessons on how to ride and while at first I couldn't ride Kyosuke, soon, I had enough to be able to ride with supervision and let me tell you, if you've never ridden a horse through a snowfield while its snowing on a crisp clear day, or never even ridden a horse at all, well, that's a pity. I started taking care of Kyosuke when I was seven and the ripe old age of 10 taught me via a nasty huge bump on my forehead not to try gallop a horse bareback throw a forest. (Though I've often trotted or gone at a slower place without the proper equipment on a horse. Its liberating to the horse and the rider, but damn hard to get it to do stuff with your legs, but then again, after a while there's just a kind of trust and intuition between the horse and the rider that works.)

Kyosuke was one of those horses who tended to act up at the most curious times, but in a way that told you that he was an animal with a personality and couldn't be so completely dominated by a human presence. He also had a very funny snicker that I'm positive he used to agree with me when we had good long talks. There's something very indescribable about a relationship between to living things that aren't of the same species, can't even speak the same way, and yet feel like they know each other. When I think back I can almost still feel Kyosuke's strong muscles carrying me places (and of course, the feeling that you'll never be able to sit again the first time you ride). Plus, a horse you can ride holds immense conversational possibilities when you don't want any criticism and you'd like a sympathetic ear! Or you just babbling, which I might add, goes along well wandering around on a horse.

Anyway, when I was eleven, I woke up early to take care of Kyosuke and found him trashing around in his stall. Apparently, the tremendously large and fierce snowstorm the night before had frightened him a lot and he had broken his leg tried to kick or get out of his stall. By the time we found somebody who was qualified to do something for Kyosuke, nothing he did worked. I've heard this is a tremendously popular way for horses to injure themselves if a stall isn't built well, but I don't actually know if thats true or mine was a rare case. Horses are more frightening when they are frightened than any animal I've ever seen. I'd rather not elaborate too much on this part, but suffice to say I at least had four good years with Kyosuke and will always remember that wonderful animal. It is kind of funny how you can chuckle about serious things like that years after the fact when the memory is more soaked in warmth than any amount of pain, but I remember three weeks after he died, my dad found for me a movie I had always wanted to see but never did to cheer me up. It was The Neverending Story and I don't blame you for laughing if the thought of what my dad had to deal with after that scene in the marsh brings up Bill Cosby esque images of child rearing. Needless to say I was not cheered up.
So what does this have to do with videogames? Simple. Years later, in 1998, The Ocarina of Time was released. I remember booting up the game on my N64 and watching Link gallop across Hyrule in that serene, sublimely beautiful opening that makes a real case for restraint against cinematic power in an intro. I recall that I instantly had the thought that it was like Link was riding Kyosuke and when you went to horse heaven, you got to be a famous extra in such wonderful things like videogames. Kyosuke looks like Epona, right down to the color of the skin and the markings. Its pretty scary, but I think its because they are the same type of horse though I'm at a loss for what that type is called in English. It gave me great memories of Kyosuke and felt just like I was riding him again, giving me the same great feeling of synergy with a world around me.

What also resembled Kyosuke is the way Link finds him as a child and then gets him again one day as an adult. I remember that my first objective in the future Hyrule, to get back Epona. While it wasn't seven years, I knew Kyosuke for four and he was a pretty young horse, though not a baby when I met him and he grew up along me, so this part was remarkably, again like Kyosuke. I was so pissed at that ranch owner for doing that to Epona and was determined to free him the first minute I could and would not go on with the rest of the game until I did. Its an absolutely amazing coincidence that the ranch owner was an ugly, mean slob like the one in real life too. The sense of exhilaration and happiness as the adult Epona flew over the fence in the Hyrule field cannot be expressed in words. It was just such an exciting and elated moment for me. Perhaps it was also due to the fact that I was much older, and I could analyze things like this, but I realized that I'd had a lot of doubts and fears built up over exactly whose fault it was that Kyosuke's stall and that night did him in like that. I'm not sure how long horses can live, but I know I wanted it to be a lot more and I always really resented how crappily the owner treated his horses and the fact that I was a kid who just got to take care of one of them. I've wondered if I could have done more to horse proof that stall soooo many times and if I was too ignorant and how I should have scrubbed him down more often and such. But then, playing Zelda kind of taught me that there's often little one can do about some of life's crueler twists that it takes and that nobody deserves the blame for something like that, especially when their intentions were always good, it just happens. Because just as Link couldn't do anything for Hyrule or Epona in those seven years he was trapped in his sleep to save the future, there wasn't much I could do to predict the effects of snowstorms on a horse that hadn't exactly shown a predilection towards frenzy before.

Of course I didn't have this epiphany right then and there. It came a few days later while I was galloping over Hyrule Field just for the heck of it. A lot of people got really addicted to the fishing game in Ocarina, and I don't blame them. But for me, it was all Epona and I would spend perhaps more time just soaking in the sunsets and nights and sunrises of riding him than perhaps any other side activity in Zelda. While I was riding I thought these above mentioned things about Kyosuke and it came to me that that's why I had been so elated and ecstatic to save Epona and why it had felt so important to me. It was like being able to save Kyosuke and in that way Zelda had given me a feeling I could never get in real life. By like a certain mirror in a popular children's book, I couldn't really pretend Epona was Kyosuke. However, with this indescribably happy feeling, the type of emotion you get when you feel that everything for once just clicked into the right spot in your world, I used our stereo system to record me on a tape riding around Hyrule without enemy noises. It took forever, and it was kind of hard to omit them, but the differing music and the ambient noises, like the wolves howling and the river water streaming, the birds chirping with the rise of the music again in the morning made it onto a tape. That night, I put headphones on and listened to the tape on repeat until I dozed off to sleep.

And I dreamt nice dreams about what Kyosuke was doing in horse heaven.


-Shou Suzuki
EMail foxspiritshadow