GOING FOR SILVER IN THE COPPER CANYON

Suture material was laid out, vials of local anaesthetic, sterile swabs and antiseptic ready and waiting. Wendy, a fellow vet, prepared herself for surgery. But this was no cat or dog asleep on an operating table that awaited her; this was a hand attached to Emmet the Irishman, resting on a bar table with an infected cut that refused to heal. Emmet had started his holiday in fine style by walking into a glass door at Chihuahua Airport. We were in the back of the back of beyond in Mexico; a place with no phone and no electricity, a day's travelling from civilisation. Emmet winced and screwed his eyelids up as Wendy injected local into the raw edges of his wound. Behind us the fireplace blazed and crackled and at the table beside us three visiting nuns looked across with undisguised interest as they sipped their margaritas. Emmet went pale green.

Wendy, Emmet and I were in the Copper Canyon, northern Mexico, to do a ride billed as the greatest adventure ride in the Americas. We were a little sceptical about this claim, as it came from the mouth of Doug, our guide for the trip. Doug, a well rounded Yankee in his fifties, liked to paint vivid pictures of the dangers we were about to encounter in this lawless wild west: scorpions in our boots, rattlesnakes on the path, mules throwing their riders off cliffs, and murdering Indians. "Which one of you girls is going to be my wife?" Doug asked us within minutes of our first meeting. As he was neither Wendy's nor my idea of a desirable mate, we kept conspicuously quiet. "What I mean is, up in them mountains, if we're drinking in a bar, you women will have to belong to me and Emmet. Otherwise the local men will cause trouble. When they get a drink or two in 'em, they think they're irresistible!" "F**in gob***te!" Emmet whispered to us with feeling when Doug wasn't listening.

I threw a spanner in the works by managing to catch typhoid or amoeba or something equally nasty in Cuba. I had to spend a morning on intravenous fluids and was given a whole pharmacy of antibiotics by an excellent local gastroenterologist at Cuatemoc, the nearest town of any size. Thus fortified Wendy, Doug and I braved a 7 hour drive over the most bumpy road imaginable to his ranch.

I was a little disappointed the next day when I finally got to see the horses. They were small shaggy beasts, not the handsome Barb crosses I had been led to expect. Doug sighed as he told us the troubles he had getting his wranglers to look after the horses properly. They were very stubborn, he said, and clung to many old wives tales concerning the care of horses. His old Tarahumara Indian wrangler, Pedro, insisted on putting just 4 nails into each horseshoe. Unsurprisingly the shoes would come off on regular basis and he would have to hammer them on again. When Doug was watching, he would put more nails in and suddenly the shoes stayed on. But the message didn't sink in; as soon as Doug went away, the four nail technique reappeared. "But didn't you notice that the other shoes stayed on!" Doug yelled in frustration."Maybe," Pedro shrugged his shoulders noncommittally. "And won't you please feed the mares more when they have foals!" Doug begged his wranglers. "Why bother?" asked Jose, one of the other wranglers. "Because I don't want them to get so skinny when they're nursing," replied Doug. "But mares with foals always end up skinny," Jose insisted.

I was abandoned to convalesce at the ranch while Wendy, Emmett, Doug, and Jose rode off into the land of rattlesnakes and blood feuds with Machito the pack mule. Speaking Spanish was a Godsend as I was the only guest that week and none of the staff spoke any English. They looked after me very well and I ate meals in the kitchen with them. By the end of the week I had made several new friends and got heartily sick of refried beans and corn tortillas. I avoided meat after seeing the freezer's temperamental power supply, but I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the appalling standards of hygiene in the kitchen.

The doctor told me he had been treating a local woman for six months for a Salmonella infection. She was continuously on antibiotics yet she remained infected. One day he visited the house and observed the old mother wiping the kitchen benches with a used pair of underpants.

There was simply no concept of basic hygiene. These villages are so remote they have little medical care and women were dying in childbirth. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I discovered the barbarity of the local animal doctoring. Castration with anaesthetics? Just tie them down and rip them out!

When I was better, Mario, the other wrangler, and I did several day rides around the ranch. This was not in the canyon proper, but the scenery was awe-inspiring. Above us towered twisted rock formations, hillsides covered by fir trees and many species of oak: yellow grasses peered through cracks in the plates of rock that covered the ground. The air was sparkling and clear with a nip in the air that warned of winter to come. My horse was sweet natured and very easy to ride, and more sure-footed than a mountain goat. We clambered down steep paths full of boulders and with huge steps cut out of rock. Each time I thought that the trail could not get any more difficult and it did, but my horse did not bat an eyelid. Born in the mountains and with hoofs of cast iron. We rode to some hidden caves and Mario brushed aside dust to reveal a human skull and leg bones. We rode to the nearby village of Cerocahui, a sleepy sunkissed collection of mud houses, prickly pear cactus fences and satellite dishes. We followed the course of a dormant river past fields of corn, apple groves, grazing cattle and little cottages.

Before Doug left we arranged that I would meet him, Wendy and Emmett on their last night on the trail in the village of Naranjo, and we would return together. Before I left I pressed Ana, Doug's wife, to let me take a tent and a thermarest and some food. "You don't need any of that, Doug is carrying all of it," she replied. I insisted on taking a thermarest but could not be bothered to argue over the rest of it so on a sunny chilly morning Mario and I set out with Ana's son Hugo and the three farm dogs. After a beautiful day's ride past Tarahumara homesteads and a hair-raising descent down a path cut out of a vertical cliff face, we arrived at the tiny village of Naranjo near the bottom of the canyon. Soon Emmett, Wendy and Doug arrived, tired and dirty but wearing broad smiles and dark suntans. The horses were in surprisingly good condition considering they had just covered seventy horizontal miles and four vertical ones. Doug was very pleased to see us until he discovered that we hadn't brought any food. "You brought three dogs and no food?" I explained that Ana assured me he had enough food. "How stupid can my wife be - I've just been on the road for seven days, and she doesn't think I want fresh food?" He ranted and raved for the rest of the evening.

Wendy told me later on that the ride had been amazing and exhausting. But that the biggest challenge had been getting Doug to look after the horses properly. He never brushed the horses and he put the saddles on too far back, which caused girth galls. He tightened the back girth too tight. Wendy insisted on brushing and resaddling her horse each day. She took the horses' pulses at regular intervals to make sure they were not over exerting. She bullied Doug into finding them corn every night.

"The last straw was after we had been riding for 8 hours, we tied the horses up and went into a restaurant. Doug sat down to order and I exploded. I told him that we were not going to eat before we gave those horses a drink of water at least. He must have felt stupid because he got up and sorted the horses out before he came back for dinner." Wendy was fuming. "Is it really so difficult to grasp that if you ride your horses all day they need hard food?" "It's hardly rocket science," was Emmett's contribution.

We had a relaxed, cheerful ride back home to the ranch. I was exuberant and excited to be finally riding on the trail with my friends, and Wendy and Emmet were dreaming of hot showers, open fires and real beds. Late afternoon sunlight striped the tables in the bar as we sat down to welcoming margaritas at Doug's ranch. Doug sat at the table next to us, talking to three nuns who had come to visit him. We prepared a basic suture kit and set about cleaning up and restitching Emmet's wounded hand.

Next morning we hopped into the old pickup and bounced to the train station in Bauhichivo on the bumpiest road in Mexico for the very last time. Jose the wrangler came with us. "So what do you think of Wendy's ideas about horse care?" I asked Jose. Jose thought for a moment, shrugged his shoulders and politely murmured "Quien sabe. Who knows…"

By Tania Krupitza BVSc MRCVS
Horse riding holidays can be booked through Unicorn Trails, a company run by Wendy Hofstee. As you can see all rides are vetted for suitability first!