Falco was born in southern France near Avignon in the Alpes-de-haute-Provence. His mother was an Apaloosa, his father a French donkey. Here’s the story of how we met.

It took a year of failing to find a suitable mule before I saw an advert for Falco in a European Facebook group. He’d been taken on at 2 years old by Virginie, a breeder based in Revest-du-Bion near Carpentras in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, half an hour by train from Avignon.

By the time I bought a Eurostar ticket to see Falco I’d met several mules in England and Wales, and grilled their owners. With no registered breeders in the UK, most mules were accidents shunted around, becoming projects if they were lucky enough to end up with the right owner. The ones I’d found for sale had vices I was entirely unequipped to manage: food possessiveness (pass behind that mule while he was eating and you’d get kicked), bicycle phobia, dog-chasing. In an hour-long phone call Virginie told me that Falco had had no socialisation to humans for the first two years of his life, and was timid around people. But he was adaptable, young and fit at 4 and a half years old, and she’d trained him to a pack saddle. On summer weekends he was carrying a picnic in panniers for her and a friend’s teenage son with specific learning needs, into the hills near them. 

The morning after I arrived in Revest-du-Bion Virginie drove us to meet her herd. At 13.2 hands, Falco was dwarfed by a jack donkey of around 16 hands, a mule of around the same height, and two 15 hand mares both with new foals on the market. Then there was Falco, a slip of darkness shining in his late summer coat, with long legs and an avoidant glance. My first task was to learn Virginie’s method of catching him.

I stood back while she approached. Falco turned and trotted off, at which point Virginie shooed him further away with the lead rope, giving him the message that she would be the one to tell him whether he moved or stayed. After a few attempts he stopped running, and stood half-facing her, as if he knew the game had come to a crux. She raised an arm, clicked her fingers and said sharply “Tourne!”- “Turn round!”. Falco’s hind legs shifted and he swung his upper body to face her. She clipped a lead rope onto the neck collar he wore, led him to the field gate and put on his head collar for walking. He watched me. 

Virginie tied Falco to the rail of a round pen; I’d asked to see his feet being picked out. His head was raised, his eyes and ears turned back to keep tabs on my position. He danced against the taut rope, swinging his quarters from side to side and holding them under him like a dog tucking its tail between its legs.

I watched as Virginie got him to lift his front feet. She could hold a hoof, but not for long. It came time to try the hinds. I moved forward and slid a hand down his rear hind leg towards the knee. Before I could reach the cannon he had batted me with the side of his leg. I jumped away clutching my arm and stood waiting for the pain to subside. I was shocked, but he hadn’t really kicked me – if he’d wanted to, I would have felt a hoof and the pain would have been a lot worse. 

Virginie snapped “Pas avec moi!” – “Not with me you don’t!”, and looped a rope across Falco’s forefoot, asking him to lift it again. She was honest about not having worked with his feet over the summer. Already wary, he’d lost further confidence in that time. While Virginie fetched his pack saddle I told myself that if Falco batted me away again during this visit, I couldn’t buy him. But if he tolerated another attempt, I might be able to work with that.

We spent our second day on a four hour walk up to the Crêtes de Lure with a picnic in Falco’s panniers and Virginie’s rescue Boxer dog accompanying us off-lead. I tried sliding a hand down the same hind leg. This time Falco stood quietly in the sun, tired from the walk, and gently tilted his hind hoof off the ground. I didn’t lift it: I wanted to stop before anything went wrong, and I was scared of getting kicked. But it was enough. I could see that he knew what to do – he was mostly unsure of me.

Walking with him I felt a mutual ease in moving through the landscape, and the wilder it became the more relaxed Falco was. I felt the intense sensitivity in this self-willed creature connected to me by a rope in my hand. I sensed his anxiety in the moments when he lost confidence. I knew that state in my own body. I was confronted with a responsibility to help him through those moments, and I assumed the way I could do that was by letting him feel my trust in his resilience. For me to rise to this task I could feel that I’d need to make a similar journey within myself. In the moments when Falco lost confidence, the rope linked energies that could change each other. As I got to know him better I began to feel that my work with him was not to dominate, but to allow the seeing of possibility, and to accompany a being as he found his own way into the space that possibility opened. But halfway up a hill in southern France during our first walk, I only knew that I felt as much control as his tolerance allowed me to feel. Beyond that, I was lost.

Up on the Crêtes de Lure Virginie tethered Falco to a tree and let him graze while she lay on her back in the sun. I walked 15 metres ahead along a ridge of rocky grass towards the edge of a crag. “Il te suit!” – “He’s following you!” Virginie called after me. I looked back and saw Falco had walked to end of his tether and was now pulling against it. I went to untie him. We walked together to the cliff edge and looked over a wooded valley that lay hundreds of feet down, towards the Parc regional du Mercantour. To the southeast, nearly a hundred miles away, was the sea at Nice. 

Two months later in a grey November in the landlocked city of Oxford, I took Falco’s lead rope from the hands of the driver who had transported him across the English Channel. I offered Falco a carrot, a small token of consolation for uprooting him from paradise. He seemed to appreciate it. I brought him hay and sat on the ground nearby while he ate. How could I assure a repatriated mule that this long field bordered by a river on one side and a road on the other, which he would share with a friend’s three rescue horses, would be a safe place for him? That I, a virtual stranger and novice equine owner, would look after him and help him navigate an urban life? I started singing a kind of lullaby as I sat with him each time I brought his hay, to soothe myself as much as him, making up the words. They were about walking together.