Now you're able to ride when you like, not just on wet Tuesday mornings but those coveted weekend days too. If you're boarding your horse, you'll no doubt have your own little area in the tack room for your tack trunk, your saddle, bridle and halter and feed and water buckets. Having a niche in the tack room feels very much like initiation to a very special club, especially if you've visited for a long time but never really hung up your hard hat.
New topics will begin to dominate your conversation: Coggins tests, farrier bills, vet bills, feed bills, tack repair bills, worming schedules, lack of money, various vitamin efficiencies, bit capabilities, to-drop-nose-band-or-not-to-drop-nose-band.
Your non-riding friends will start using words to describe you like: "obsessive", "one-track-mind", and "boring."
Having a new horse, joyous as it is, is expensive. Four new shoes range anywhere from $30 to $65 a pop and they need them every six weeks. It's wise not to think of this in terms of compact disks, Ralph Lauren blouses or even groceries. You should only treat yourself so well that you lay out fifty bucks every month and a half for a pair of new shoes.
If your newly beloved should have a persistent cough, walk funny, scratch himself, or simply look a little listless, a visit from the vet will probably run around $25 to see your horse (although if you can find someone else out at your barn who needs to see the vet too, you can usually split this), and then anything else--medications or special tests--will be on top of that.
You'll find yourself riding differently, better, than you did on other people's horses. You'll tend to sit more correctly, more self-consciously (at least initially) on your own horse. His gaits will become as familiar to you as your own. His habits as endearing and as natural as if all horses had them. Your first horse is special. In some ways, he'll become an extension of you, your riding style, your personality. People out at the stable will likely know you as "Buttercup's owner" rather than the other way around.
Sometimes you can even believe there's love involved. There probably will be on your side of things. But your horse probably won't love you. Not like a dog does. More, probably, like a favorite geranium. Most times, your horse (in all its benign glory) will see you merely as the Keeper of the Carrots.
When I say good-bye to my darling, reliable horse at the gate after our ride, he usually sniffs me aggressively for any remnant, forgotten carrot or bit of apple and then, either turns away slowly in disgust or stands staring at me, carefully blinking his huge, baleful eyes as if to say: "Well, bugger off then."
One of the big pleasures of owning your own horse is bringing your friends out to ride and/or pet him on the nose. That proud moment when you bring them with you to the gate of the pasture and the herd is dotted before you in little clumps, grazing peacefully as if posing for National Geographic covers.
The pastoral scene usually is extraordinary in itself. There are a lot fewer ex-farm kids than there used to be, so most of your friends will probably be quite impressed with all of this.
My horse, Traveler, has what I feel is an exceptional talent, in that he lifts his head and looks at me when I come to the gate and call his name. It not only gives me great pleasure that he knows my voice and his name, but helps me pick him out by his raising his mostly white face in a field of several similar stocky chestnuts.
My friends, anticipating, I suppose, Traveler rushing over at my call, perhaps flinging on his own halter and managing the gate by himself, seem disappointed by this trick.
"That's it? He lifts his head?"
"He knows his name! He knows me!"
"Hey, he's eating grass! Wow! Did you teach him that?"
"Look, forget it. I never promised you Trigger."
This is also a wonderful opportunity for your non-horse riding friends to see you in a more elevated role for a change. Especially if they're a little timid around these big animals (and there are few non-horse types who are not), it's a good feeling to be the one reassuring and unafraid.
This is also a very good opportunity to be instructive--even bossy--with people you are typically passive with, like boyfriends: "I said heels DOWN! Don't hold the reins so short, this mouth has to last him awhile. Well, squeeze harder then....SQUEEEEEZE!"
After being the greenest rider in the pasture with eight-year old kids riding figure-eights around you with no hands, it's a nice confidence boost to be the one with superior knowledge.
"Don't stand behind the horse, Annie. He might accidentally crap on you."
"No, you hold the reins like this, Jack." ("Gosh, it looks so easy when you do it.") "Look, why don't you come out more often? In fact, why don't you come to dinner tonight? Hell, want to get married?"
On the other hand, it's incredible how just being around horses can transform the nicest people. Friends who haven't ridden since they were led around in a circle on a comatose Corgi at a playmate's birthday party will begin trying to convince you that they can be entrusted with a whole horse o a trail ride.
You may have just spent the last eighteen months working to get your legs under you and your hands quiet through hour after hour of lesson and practice, but your friends are going to want to just hop on and go.
And when you know they're inexperienced, in spite of their entreaties and huge lies, you can, nonetheless, sternly prop them up on "Old Butter" to plod painfully, repentantly around the ring while you watch diligently on the sidelines, tap-snapping your crop against your reproof-proof rubber boots. (Anybody that green doesn't deserve to have any fun!)
But when the sly little darlings sit you down and flatly lie to you... "Susan, I didn't want to say anything before for fear of stealing your thunder, but, well, I have ridden in the Grand National. Just once, but it was an exhilarating experience. Trust me! I've ridden all my life, I grew up with horses!" ...there is nothing you can do but suspect the worst and pray for the best. Because if you believe them and they haven't got the newspaper clippings to back up their story, you had better have a sizable nest egg tucked away. Because their parents or spouses, or perhaps both, are going to be talking to you very soon in language sprinkled with cozy terms like: "criminal neglect" and "manslaughter". And your rebuttal, appropriately enough, will sound something like: "But, but, but..."
The now-all-growed-up step-sister of one of my dearest friends once convinced me that she exercised race horses quite regularly somewhere up in Canada. After making a minor to-do about how small Traveler was, and fat and poky, I was almost embarrassed to hand over the reins. He flipped her off at a dead run within three minutes of her settling into the saddle.
And it was absolutely my fault.
Another friend, who said he'd ridden for years--even had his own pony as a child--took a nose-dive off my somnolent beast into a blessedly sandy riding ring after assuring me his girth was plenty snug, thank you.
But for the most part, having your own horse means knowing what you're doing when your interested-but-not-too-adept non-riding friends do not. And it usually translates into confidence-boosting and private kudos. Because it wasn't easy getting to this point. And you should feel good about what it took to get you where you are. Your non-riding friends don't want to pretend they ride like Roy Rogers. They want to pretend they're you.
Equal to the pleasure of being treated like you're George Morris by your non-riding friends is the pleasure of riding with your horse-owning friends, of being a part of the group, the mounted clique.
You're Little Joe in the opening sequence of "Bonanza", all of you riding out, shoulder-to-shoulder, your horses obedient and eager beneath you, and all of you ready and prepared to rescue small children from burning ranch houses, lasso the black hats and basically keep the pasture free of tyranny and oppression.
Riding with your well-insured and skilled riding friends is a great feeling and one that tends to spur a very special kinship.
There is an intimacy between friends who cheat death together from time to time. When during the course of a casual hack, I turn to my friend, Deborah and
say: "Want to gallop to the top of the ridge?" or, even more terrifying: "Want to race?" when she agrees (and she always does), it is a bond between us that is much closer than sharing Kroger's Two-For-One coupons or teaming up for a merciless doubles game.
During that moment when we agree to do this almost-dangerous thing, it feels like what soldiers must feel toward each other before a battle. A tiny part of us is saying: "want to gamble on our lives, together? Want to risk big time bone breakage?"
Owning your own horse means other things too. It means coming out to ride when, incredibly enough, you don't feel like it. It means imposing on your friends (those who ride) to look after your little dear while you're out of town or sick with the flu. If your horse is pasture-boarded, it means tramping out to the barn where you board your horse--and it's likely that it will not be conveniently located to where you live--on cold, snowy, messy nights to feed him.
Owning your own horse means making financial decisions where the horse always wins. To wear your hair in a post-perm scraggle one more month or pay the vet who cleared up Prince's eye infection last month? The horse always wins. As he should.
The money and the time are balanced almost evenly with the love and the mental therapy of owning a horse. After an eight-hour day of city pressures, bosses, traffic jams and untidy air, a lung-cleansing canter in a very green pasture can do wonders for your mental health.
Even the act of changing from hosiery and pumps to denims and muckers can begin the smoothing of the lines across your brow, the softening of tensed muscles. Because no matter what sort of day you've had, no matter who was ugly to you, looked sharply at you in the hall, cursed you in the left turn signal lane, when you walk out to the pasture with that carrot, or to your horse's stall, you know hard-core reality will go into suspension--neatly, sweetly and for however long you're there.
Owning your very own horse--even at age thirty-five--lends a certain believability to the idea that you can recapture the delights and dreams of your girlhood.
And that's a lot to get for $700.
Chapter Ten
Loving the less-than-sound horse.
(Can it be done?)
The day is sunny. The air is crisp. The ground is firm but not hard. Your horse's eye is bright, his coat glossy. It's going to be a great hack.
You bound up into his newly buffed and polished saddle and gently urge him forward into a walk. After a few minutes, you're heading toward the trail and all is right with the equine world.
You ask for a trot. He gives it--with an extra bounce of the head every time his front right foot hits the ground. He is, as they say, 'off'. Lame. Not walking good.
Lameness is only one of the many things that can go wrong with your horse's health, but it's probably the worst; the one thing, besides death, that can effectively prevent your riding, day after day, month after month.
There is an old saying among horsy types: "A horse without sound feet is no horse at all."
Lousy, but true.
When I bought Traveler, he came complete with a foot abscess that he'd had for nearly nine months. Although this particular affliction didn't interfere with our rides, it did involve foot packing and endless soaking in Epsom salts, which would terminate only after he'd kicked over the bucket in which he was soaking at least two times per session.
His feet were hideously long, having not been trimmed in months, and this affected his soundness. A nice, trimmed hoof lets the horse stand upright and solid. Sloppy, long feet can cause tendons to strain, even change the angle of the foot, adding extra stress to the animal's legs. Too, Traveler had been shod irregularly--usually due to the previous owner's lack of consistent cash. The result of this was that Traveler's feet were weak, his hoofs chipped and misshapen.
A proper schedule of trimming and shoeing, combined with pads for extra support and leverage where he needed it--in short, lots of money--would put Traveler right again. It would take a year, but at the end of that time, his feet would have their natural balance and angle restored.
What did affect our rides and was not immediately correctable, however, was chronic lameness. Day after day, throughout the last part of our first summer together, Traveler was simply 'off'. At a trot, at a walk. He limped. Badly.
The vet, having ruled out navicular during the pre-sale vetting, prescribed butte and lots of it. There was no change. The vet upped the dose to two grams a day. Nothing. Traveler hobbled.
You can dab antiseptic on cuts, put droplets in eyes, force-feed medicinal concoctions for just about anything else, but lameness is simply, frustratingly, there.
I soaked Traveler's feet, wrapped his legs, spread lineament, tried different pads and shoes--wedgies, stacked and flat--I exercised him lightly to go gently on the feet, I over-exercised him and put him on a diet to help take some weight off the feet, I didn't exercise him and kept him calm in a sparsely-grassed paddock, which, at $5 a day, meant the sound of money shusshing down the tack room toilet.
And still he limped.
The joys of riding were going up in vet bills, boarding bills and mail-order medical catalogue remedies. And at the end of it, I was the proud owner of a very sweet, albeit un-ridable, pasture pet. I felt anger at the vet who'd vetted him, anger at friends who suggested I might want to cut my losses and give him to a charity organization (the horse, not the vet), anger at the girl who'd owned him before, and anger at the poor beast himself.
But, most of all, I was angry at myself for buying him, for not accepting that I just threw seven hundred dollars onto the proverbial compost heap, for letting my heart rule my buying strategy and for still loving the aggravating creature in spite of it all.
It was about this time that Traveler developed a startling loss of appetite. Startling because the phrase "eats like a horse" was not developed for nothing. A horse that loses interest in his food is a sick horse.
Fortunately, Traveler shook off this particular malady about the time he began his bout with excessive urination. Although worrisome to the new owner and, of course, socially awkward on trail rides, this particular peccadillo wasn't the dangerous symptom of something worse that I'd feared. Within weeks, he was back on schedule, taking in and giving out the normal amounts, with no hint as to what the month long deluge had been about.
There are any number of things that can make your horse sick or become unsound. If you ride him hard on the weekend and then ignore him until the next weekend, chances are he'll be sore and achy, much as you would be if you overdid it once a week. If, on the other hand, he's exercised thoroughly during the week and then allowed to loll around his stable for the weekend with his feeding schedule intact, he's a good candidate for azoturia or "Monday morning" sickness. (This is exactly as it sounds, overdo it on the weekend and you'll feel like cow doodle on Monday.)
Colic is another digestive disorder that attacks horses and it's usually pretty serious. Because of their unique one-way esophagus, horses aren't able to vomit. What goes down, stays down. This makes overeating for a horse a potentially fatal vice. Colic kills more horses than any other aliment, so it's wise to read up on the symptoms, keep your feed bin locked and to contact your vet as soon as you suspect it.
Horses also get colds--with runny noses, red eyes, a cough, and general listlessness. Skip the chicken soup and call the vet.
But mostly, taking care of your horse will involve the odd eye infection, barb-wire run-in (here's where your scab-pulling skills will be called into use) and girth sores (be sure to carefully clean the belly and sides before you cinch up your girth, it just takes a few grains of dirt trapped in a soon-sweaty girth to turn into a raging sore. And although this isn't usually life-threatening, it can put your riding schedule on hold--or at least in the bareback mode--for a few days or even a week.
But when it's something more serious like Swamp Fever2 (which brings up another important rule: try to avoid boarding your horse near a nuclear-test site or a swamp), or lameness, it's hard to maintain your original level of
equine enthusiasm.
In Traveler's case, his right ankle was injected with a hyuronic fluid made to simulate the fluid that should have been surrounding the inner workings of his hoof bones and wasn't. After six weeks and many cold hosings of his ankle, the shot kicked in and Traveler, with the help of full front pads, was scampering, cantering and jumping about his pasture like a two-year old. The shot's effectiveness usually ranges from about three months to a year and costs around $100.
That is, if it works at all. There are no guarantees. On the other hand, ask his owner the next time she returns from an invigorating canter through the woods if she thinks the monetary risk was worth it.
Chapter Eleven
Shying, bolting, balking, and other
interesting behavior to beware of on horseback
Tacking up for a little hack alone or with friends is never a matter-of-fact thing, regardless of how it may appear to the untrained eye. Someone is climbing onto a horse (read: a creature that nearly has a mind and certainly has a mind of its own) to go into a field or pasture or the woods (read: lots of uneven terrain, perhaps even other animals (cows, mice, foxes, stray dogs)). The result is a lot more ‘anything can happen’ than when you bop down to the local bagel shop in your trusty Toyota.
That’s because horses do odd things, unpredictable things. They shy at dust motes. They balk at trails they’ve been down a thousand times. They run when you don’t want them to run. They don’t stop when you absolutely want them to.
One sunny morning, a group of us got together for a trial ride to one of the neighboring farms. There were at least three green riders in the group so it wouldn’t be a fast ride, just a pleasant, quiet hack over and back. There would be a brief warm up period of about fifteen minutes when we would all just trot our horses but the rules of game are such that you must announce to all when you’re going to trot and if that’s okay with all. It was understood that no one would canter unless they first asked or detached themselves from the group and did it so that it would not incite the rest of the horses to join in. This is especially important when you have green riders in your group but is just good trail manners even with experienced riders.
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