Chapter 2906: New Journey (12)

"I know — given our present conditions, only the Mongolian horse is to be had. But suppose other horses were available, and the choosing of mounts for the dragoons fell to you — how would you choose?"

Within minutes the class had split into two camps. One held that for dragoons the Mongolian horse was "good enough." The other held that dragoons, being a many-purpose arm, deserved a certain quality of mount — given the means, something like the Bhimthadi, with a shoulder height around 1.4 meters.

That breed came out of India; the Senate had imported small lots of them through the two East India companies, chiefly for testing and for breeding stock. The Cavalry Training Squadron kept a number of the culls from the breeding program as training horses — also to accustom the soldiers to taller animals.

The other camp held the view voiced a moment before: since dragoons were "mounted infantry," the horse supplied nothing but the means of movement, and the Mongolian horse was quite enough — the Ming and the Qing both rode the Mongolian horse as their cavalry's mainstay, after all, and those same horses did in fact carry "armored, charging" riders, which argued there was stamina in them.

"Very well, then — we will take this question as the assignment for the day." Yang Ning glanced at the wall clock. "Discuss it in your groups, draw up a report, and at the next session each group will send up a representative to present its views."

"Class dismissed."

Class over, Yang Ning returned to his office. He was tired, but the exhilaration of the lecture had not yet drained away. He checked his figure in the mirror by the door, dropped into the rattan chair, and began leafing through the stud report Nick had brought over not long before.

The Senate's horse administration had begun in earnest only after Nick reached Jeju Island. All told it was not yet six or seven years — next to nothing measured against a nation's span of horse-breeding. Japan's modern horse industry had begun with the French army horses brought in after the Meiji Restoration, and it had taken some forty years — from there to 1905, when Japanese cavalry stood squarely against Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, an old and established power of the saddle — to raise the full chain of breeding, multiplication, schooling, and use, and to produce a serviceable army horse. For the Senate to erect a finished system in under ten years was plainly impossible. But horse administration is a thing no amount of hurrying speeds: a horse grows no faster for your impatience. All Nick and Yang Ning could do was set out on the right road from the first step, then hold to it, and let time pile up the results.

Fortunately, the Joseon dynasty had left the Senate a ranch on Jeju — run down, but with numbers in it. On taking office Nick had collected and counted every horse on the island, official and private alike, and arrived at the figure of twenty-one thousand. Of those, some six to seven hundred serviceable horses of fitting age could be drawn each year.

The quality, though, ran generally poor, for Jeju's native stock was a pony standing under a meter. Under Yuan rule of the island, a hundred and fifty Mongolian horses had been brought in to better the breed, so that today's Jeju horse was in truth a degenerate Mongolian. By Nick's tally: stallions averaged 120 centimeters at the shoulder, the shortest barely over a meter, the tallest no more than one meter thirty — a good cut below even the modern Mongolian horse's average.

As to causes — beyond the breed's inborn poverty — the chief lay in careless breeding: gelding done slackly, inferior stallions covering mares at will; too great a share of aged horses; feed scarce, work excessive, and a high rate of barren mares.

So through his first years the island's total head count fell steadily — for the first thing Nick did to the herds was a great culling. Every aged horse in the herd went. For this the light industry department had put up dedicated food-processing and leather plants on Jeju.

Then came the sorting of the age-fit horses: save the stallions standing above one meter thirty; geld every other male; mares below one meter twenty went onto the cull list as well. The culled horses were parceled out for work to the army, to agriculture, and to transport, or shipped to the mainland for sale. Those with no working value left went to slaughter at the food plant.

These two strokes were heavy ones, and together they pared the island's horses by about nine thousand at a stroke. They dented the breeding numbers of the years that followed, too, indirectly — but Nick judged the price worth paying.

His resources were thin, and could not be squandered on inferior animals with little breeding worth.

With the cull done, he drew up the ranch's registers anew. The old Joseon "horse files" for government stock were chaos itself — files without horses, horses without files, brands that matched no number. Private horses had been tallied as so many head, stallion or mare, old or young, and there the record ended. With his apprentices and the trainee soldiers he rebuilt a file for every single horse: origin, age, sex, color, markings, work record, history of illness, coverings. Every new foal was branded with a number within three days of birth and entered in the books.

Next came improvements in the craft of keeping horses.

The local horses had never been shod, and their hooves wore ruinously. He brought horseshoes and farriers out from Lingao on purpose, and shod every working horse. That one measure alone stretched a horse's years of service by at least two.

Horses on Jeju had always foraged free in the open — fat and sleek in summer and autumn when the grass ran rich — while in winter and spring the hay thrown them was short in quantity and there was no grain to speak of; the herds fell away in condition, many horses dropped dead in the cold months, and in-foal mares often slipped their young. Nick built a feeding system. At first he could only draw barley and buckwheat from the Jeju warehouses — and since Jeju's own grain was never plentiful, what Feng Zongze could spare for horses was limited. Nick nagged, wore, and coaxed until he had won a yearly quota of several hundred shi of barley and buckwheat. He asked the Agriculture Commission to send men to improve the mountain pastures, and organized hands of his own to plant alfalfa and other fine forages, cutting in summer and autumn, sun-drying, and laying up stores.

Rations were set by the horse's use, age, and the season — a different scale for each. Grain, roughage, mineral supplements: everything on the record, everything in figures. Rule of thumb had been converted into data.

He raised a veterinary and epidemic-prevention system: two veterinarians transferred from Lingao, a dozen-odd apprentices trained up locally, charged with the horses' daily care and the keeping-off of disease. Spring and autumn, every horse on the island was given a full examination. He even opened a dedicated medicinal field, growing and preparing the drugs for treating horse ailments.

But these were only the foundations. The true core of the work was the betterment of the breed.

He threw great labor into building stables, and the best stallions and broodmares chosen out of the herds were stabled and kept apart.

Stabling not only eased controlled breeding; it raised the mares' rate of conception sharply, cut the miscarriages, and lifted foal survival besides.

Though the whole herd could not be stabled overnight, he did put in force the separate grazing of stallion bands and mare bands, against casual covering; only in the breeding season were the bands brought together. Inefficient, and no friend to the improvement of the stock — but his fine breeding animals were few as yet, and this was how the herd's numbers were held up.

In his three years at Lingao, Nick had already bred a number of improved horses using Tieling draft stallions and English Thoroughbred racehorses. But they were too few, and had been kept all along at the Mopanling ranch. Once in Jeju he turned the matter over and over and resolved to transfer that improved breeding stock to the island — the sea passage carried its risks, but left at Lingao they could serve no purpose.

The first shipment of stallions arrived early in 1633: five head — two first-cross Tieling draft and Mongolian, two Thoroughbred and Mongolian crosses, one straight first-generation Tieling draft. All stood above 138 centimeters, a full head above the local horses.

With stallions in hand, Nick set about spreading artificial insemination — a technique already brought to ripeness at Lingao: by natural covering, one stallion could serve at most forty or fifty mares in a year; by artificial insemination, better than two hundred. In the spring of 1633, with the seed of those five stallions he settled one hundred twenty selected local mares in foal — a conception rate of sixty-five percent, a good deal above natural covering.

Over the six years, seven hundred improved foals had been born in all. Grown to three years, the next generation of stallions and broodmares could be chosen from among them.

The report carried the breeding figures for these years, and Yang Ning turned page after page, watching the numbers climb: under eighty the first year, one hundred-ten-odd the second, one hundred-forty-odd the third... by last year, past two hundred. Nine hundred-odd improved foals born over the six years, all told. Reckoning half of them colts, that made better than four hundred fifty males — of which those reaching the height standard and of good form were kept whole as stallions, and the rest gelded for work. The horses now serving in the Artillery and Transport Training Squadron and the Cavalry Training Squadron counted among them these "first-generation improved horses."

Under scientific breeding and scientific keeping the head count was climbing back year by year — still short of the old twenty-one thousand, but Yang Ning knew the horse's breeding cycle could not be argued with: eleven months carried in the womb, and a foal not fit for work until three years old. The Senate imported several hundred Mongolian horses from Liaodong each year, and took delivery of breeding stock from India, Europe, and the Middle East through the two East India companies — still, by and large, a long road lay between here and twenty thousand. But once the pool of quality stallions and mares reached a certain order of magnitude, the pace of multiplication would climb geometrically.

And the work of quickly breeding a fine riding horse was already under way. The Jeju native, small as it was, carried one virtue: dense bone, deep endurance, thrift on coarse feed, hardy adaptability — qualities forged in hard country over centuries. Following the example of the old time-line's Korean horsemen, who had crossed Thoroughbreds with Jeju ponies to raise the "RDA riding horse," Nick was at the same work now: joining the foreign horse's frame, power, and speed to the native's toughness and adaptability, to breed a seventeenth-century RDA riding horse — a mount standing one meter forty at the shoulder which, once fixed, would make a first-rate riding animal.

(End of chapter)