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little_details2025-01-21 02:08 pm
alnaperera) wrote in little_details2025-01-21 02:08 pm
Question about horses
I am writing a sort of fantasy adventure thing and it involves horses. I have no experience with them whatsoever, so I have a few questions.
1) would a horse be okay with a trip that's ~15km, roughly 100m drop but with minor ups and downs and a pretty low grade throughout (say a maximum of ten degrees for very short stretches, sustained is more like one degree)? How long will this take? What about the return trip?
2) how would they react to this being at 2 in the morning? One horse is the rider's best friend pretty much, the other horse has never met the rider before but assume it's a nice horse. The second rider is also very experienced, just not with this horse.
3) how will the react to a bicycle being a part of the party?
Editing to add a bit more context.
The party consists of the following:
1. Horse A and character A, both used to each other (in town, around town, exploring hills, committing crime together).
2. Horse B and character B. Horse B is my biggest variable because they will appear for just this trip, that's it. Generally used for riding around farms and getting to nearby cities and stuff, I don't imagine this horse being one of those big farm horses. Character B is from a culture that is very horse based and has been riding since she feasibly could, mostly training with war horses.
3. Character C and bicycle. Character C has no riding experience whatsoever and needs to arrive at the destination in reasonable shape, hence the bicycle.
The trip happens early in the morning what would be the rough equivalent of northern hemisphere early March, temperatures would be in low single digits C and warming up slowly to low double digits.
The roads are reasonably well lit for established cultural reasons.
Character A and Character B can both see in the dark much better than the average person.
They also need to start the return trip almost immediately afterwards, though they can reasonably get some rest about 2 kilometers in.
1) would a horse be okay with a trip that's ~15km, roughly 100m drop but with minor ups and downs and a pretty low grade throughout (say a maximum of ten degrees for very short stretches, sustained is more like one degree)? How long will this take? What about the return trip?
2) how would they react to this being at 2 in the morning? One horse is the rider's best friend pretty much, the other horse has never met the rider before but assume it's a nice horse. The second rider is also very experienced, just not with this horse.
3) how will the react to a bicycle being a part of the party?
Editing to add a bit more context.
The party consists of the following:
1. Horse A and character A, both used to each other (in town, around town, exploring hills, committing crime together).
2. Horse B and character B. Horse B is my biggest variable because they will appear for just this trip, that's it. Generally used for riding around farms and getting to nearby cities and stuff, I don't imagine this horse being one of those big farm horses. Character B is from a culture that is very horse based and has been riding since she feasibly could, mostly training with war horses.
3. Character C and bicycle. Character C has no riding experience whatsoever and needs to arrive at the destination in reasonable shape, hence the bicycle.
The trip happens early in the morning what would be the rough equivalent of northern hemisphere early March, temperatures would be in low single digits C and warming up slowly to low double digits.
The roads are reasonably well lit for established cultural reasons.
Character A and Character B can both see in the dark much better than the average person.
They also need to start the return trip almost immediately afterwards, though they can reasonably get some rest about 2 kilometers in.
no subject
Some additional info from my personal experience: We used to have two horses that were moderately trained: dressage, jumping, lots of riding out into the fields for one or two hours per round. They got exercise almost every day and knew us very well.
The longest trip I did with my horse was a round trip where we visited someone several villages over and then rode back in a curve. That was something between 10 - 12 km. We did that in somewhere between 3 to 4 hours, lots of walk, but several instances of trot or canter as well, if the path was nice.
Our horses liked to trot or even canter light slopes uphill, it was good training for them. Trotting or cantering downhill is more dangerous and hard on the horses forelegs so it shouldn't be done for too long. If the road was quite steep downhill, we sometimes even dismounted and lead them for a bit as it was easier for the horses to balance only their weight. So for your story you should likely establish that the horses are well trained, quite calm and collected and not too easily spooked. Some horses are more sure-footed than others (mine was great at it, the one I'm currently riding is as well - but one horse I rode a few years ago tended to stumble over his own feet a lot... not a good trail horse!).
Horses + the dark: It's possible, especially if there's lots of trust and at least some light because of a bright moon or similar. But most horses won't like it. We usually never rode in the dark, because the horses spooked far more easily and we ourselves couldn't see that well either... Once, I completely misjudged how early the sun set in November *coughs* and was still at a training session in a different village. I rode home while it was getting dark and halfway home the sun had set and I was still out in the fields. My horse tended to spook a lot, she was quite high-strung. But surprisingly, she behaved exceptionally well, didn't spook once, was alert but not nervous, and we got home without any problems. But that was her quite special character - many other horses would have reacted differently, especially without other horses.