The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater

seemed to sail on the Sahara sand. They had horses.
    I first fell in love with horses near the end of that trip, right before I’d found the ladybugs, so the two are entwined in my mind—
miraculous
and
equine.
    The bedouins’ horses were unlike those we have here in overfed, glossy America, where even our beasts gleam as though they’ve stepped from a Clairol commercial, their coats blow-dried and scented. The bedouin horses were predominantly tired, and when you touched their hides you felt matted fur. Flies sizzled in their eyes, covering the rims and lids. The bedouins offered tourists’ children the chance to ride, for a shekel or two. In fact, if I’m remembering correctly, something like two shekels got you a camel ride; one shekel, a plain old pony. I wanted the camel, and we had the money, but on that particular day, the camel was tied up, quite literally, to a post, and for some reason out of commission. Thus I got my first ever horseback ride by default.
    We waited, my mother, siblings, father and I, we waited for my turn by the flapping bedouin tents. The wind was roaring. Army planes flew in formation overhead. They flew wing to wing, made mischief with the clouds, darting in and out. Somewhere someone was singing, the sound so slender it could barely be heard. To the side of the tent clusters, a bedouin woman was washing fabric in a bucket and then smacking the drenched garments on stone. Why was she smacking the stone? Why did the planes fly above? Why do the clouds stay up but the branches fall down? Nothing seemed sure except a certain singular fact—the balance beam we’re always on.
    And there we waited for the bedouin to bring me the paid-for pony, my parents, my siblings, myself standing sun-struck in the desert, so still, we were, as though made mute by the intensity of the Sahara light, the heat, the white tents pinned to posts in the sand but nevertheless sagging and flapping in the wind while the woman fished bolt after bolt of bright cloth from a bucket, pulling from a seemingly endless source, like a magician coaxing handkerchiefs from his hat; the fabric kept coming. She kept wringing, as did my mother in our washroom at home, wringing the dirt from my soiled shirts, furious that it was there, wringing hanks of my hair, furious that they were there; wringing her two hands after one more fight with my father, furious that he was here, all of us kids gone mute, blinded by the bright light from the ice landscaping their marriage.
    Where oh where was my horse? We waited by the white tents. I heard a tinny little tune but could not see its source. I felt a familiar leaden deadness smack in the center of myself. My breath rasped, in and out. Where oh where was my horse?
    And then from behind the bedouin tent came a piercing cry, a continuous whinny that kept reaching its crescendo only to shatter the ceiling of sound and go higher still; some rage this horse had; I heard before I saw. And when the bedouin finally approached, he was not leading the horse so much as dragging him, the animal sitting back hard on all four heels. His equine legs were ramrod straight, his nostrils flaring. The horse was drenched in sweat, so wet the beast looked oiled, unreal, and when he came up close he let out a second kind of sound, a high pitched plea it seemed, a long, up-spiraling whinny of a cry, and from all four corners of the desert the answers bounded back.
    And then, only moments later, the Sahara settled into silence again. “Ma neesh nah?” the bedouin asked, tapping on the monstrous saddle, but I’d changed my mind; no thanks. This was a horse who’d woken up on the wrong side of the stable, clearly, his eye rolling loose in his huge head. “Ma neesh nah?” the bedouin said again. “Lo,” I replied, Hebrew for “no.” But then the washing woman—she’d been watching the whole time I think—now she stopped her smacking and came over to me, her hands dripping, and in my memory my parents and