Horse Power

by Bonnie Bryant

  Kate was quiet for a time, apparently thinking about her answer. The girls and Chad waited with her.

  “I think,” she began hesitantly, “that having fun is more important than winning. I’ve done a lot of winning, riding champion horses. But I think I’ve forgotten how to have fun. I’ve had more fun watching you the last few days than I had riding for a year!”

  “Even when I ended up dumping an entire glass of water on you in the water race?” Stevie asked.

  “Well, I might make an exception there,” Kate admitted with a grin. “But I had an awful lot of fun watching Carole’s pony circle the target so much in pin-the-tail-on-the-pony that she ended up putting her tail on the Spades’ pony!”

  “At least it was a bull’s-eye,” Carole said.

  “Yeah, that the Spades got credit for,” Chad reminded her.

  “Let’s face it, team,” Lisa said. “Today was not our finest hour as riders.”

  “But that’s what I mean,” Kate said. “Sure, you didn’t do as well as you did yesterday, but you were having fun! You were cracking up the entire time!”

  “Were they all laughing when I fell off Half Dollar trying to reach Veronica’s shadow in shadow tag?” Chad asked.

  “Yeah—but you were laughing, too,” Kate said. “The thing you were all doing—which I had completely forgotten to do—is having fun. Red ribbon, blue ribbon, no ribbon at all. What does it really matter as long as you do your best and laugh a little—or a lot, if you can?”

  “But if you kept winning, why weren’t you having fun?” Carole asked her.

  “Because—and I’ve only just realized it—all I cared about was the winning. When you ride in those shows, you see a lot of the same riders almost every week. You have a lot of common interests with them and they become friends—or at least they should. I got to the point where I couldn’t be friends at all. All I cared about was whether I drew a position right after somebody the judges might think was better than I was, or if one of the other riders might get a muddy smudge on her boot so the judge would mark her down. Or sometimes I’d hope for a rainy day. A lot of the other horses didn’t like competing in the rain.” Kate paused for a minute and the full weight of what she’d said seemed to sink in for herself. She scrunched her nose in distaste. “See what I mean? Now that I think about it, it’s no wonder I wasn’t having any fun.”

  Carole spoke first. “When I read about you and met you, all I could think about was how wonderful it must be to be so good!”

  “For some people, maybe,” Kate said. “But it’s like the better I got, the worse it got. The it was my own attitude.”

  “Maybe the problem isn’t really riding,” Carole said.

  “Oh, yes it is,” Kate corrected her. “Just like I explained.”

  “But don’t you see? It’s not the riding you don’t like—it’s the high-pressure competition. That’s what turned it sour for you.”

  “That’s right,” Stevie piped in, realizing that this was just the chance The Saddle Club needed to convince Kate to start riding again. “If you stop riding, you’re throwing away something you’re really good at. All you really need to do is to stop competing—just ride for fun!”

  “Like ride in the gymkhana tomorrow?” Kate asked, a touch of sarcasm in her voice. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

  “It may be too late for the rest of us, too,” Chad said. The girls looked to him for an explanation. He raised his left arm above the level of the table. “Remember how I fell off my pony in shadow tag? I think I really did something to my wrist.”

  At first, they couldn’t see the problem, but on closer examination, it was very clear that Chad’s whole wrist was terribly swollen. “I can’t bend it much, either,” he said. “It was okay for a while, but I don’t know about tomorrow.”

  Kate reached across the table for Chad’s arm. “I’ve seen an awful lot of bumps and bruises over the years, and this really hurts, doesn’t it?” Chad tried to shrug it off, but he clearly winced when Kate touched it, even gently. “Lisa, go ask at the counter if we can have some ice in a plastic bag. That swelling’s got to come down. It doesn’t look like it’s broken, but it sure is sprained. There’s no way you can ride tomorrow, Chad. Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “I want our team to win, and if I can’t ride, we’ll be disqualified! I can’t do that to you guys!”

  Lisa returned with the bag of ice and they wrapped it around Chad’s arm with a bandanna Carole found in her back pocket. It was probably too late to reduce the swelling, at least right away, but it did help numb it so it didn’t hurt so much.

  “Well, that’s that,” Carole said. “It wasn’t your fault, Chad, it could have happened to any of us, but we might as well just give Veronica and the Diamonds the blue ribbon first thing tomorrow.”

  “I’m not so sure about that!” Stevie said, her eyes suddenly bright.

  “You look like you’re up to something,” Carole said, suspicious.

  “Oh, I am,” Stevie agreed. “We all know there’s no way Chad can ride tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t do something like help with the setups at the final races, does it?”

  “Great idea,” Kate said. “Red and I have been running around like crazy. We could use an extra hand—no pun intended.”

  “That’s not what I had in mind,” Stevie said. “Look, our deal with Max was that we three could be on the same gymkhana team if, and only if, we took the stable’s newest rider. But if the stable’s newest rider isn’t Chad, we’d still have to take that person on our team, even if maybe that rider actually had just a little bit of experience.”

  “Or a whole lot of experience?” Carole asked, seeing the light.

  “But who else is there besides Chad?” Lisa asked.

  “How about Kate Devine?” Stevie said.

  When a great big grin crossed Kate’s face, The Saddle Club girls knew they’d achieved both of their goals. They had found a way to maybe still win the blue ribbon, and, best of all, they’d found a way to get Kate to start riding again.

  “Here’s to tomorrow!” Lisa announced, raising a gooey spoonful of sundae in a toast.

  “To victory!” Carole chimed in. Everybody joined the toast.

  MAX WAS HARD to convince. At first, he wanted to disqualify the team, but when Stevie pointed out how unfair that would be, especially since they’d been the ones to make up all the games and the rules, he finally relented.

  “But Kate’s a championship rider,” he reminded them.

  “What does championship riding have to do with gymkhanas?” Carole protested. “She never got a silver cup for popping balloons—”

  “Riding skills matter a lot in a gymkhana, almost as much as on a cross-country course,” he said, and the girls knew it was true.

  “Okay, so give us a handicap,” Kate said.

  “Right, our old handicap was Chad—so we can handle anything!” Stevie told him, grinning.

  Max wrinkled his eyebrows in thought. Finally, he nodded. “Okay, you’ve got a deal. I’ll handicap you so nobody can say I wasn’t fair. Your handicap is that your start/finish line is ten feet behind everybody else’s. That will do it for the three relay races scheduled for today. The first game is horseback musical chairs. For that, you all ride without stirrups, which will make it harder to get on and off the ponies.”

  “Boy, you sure know how to give a team a handicap!” Stevie complained.

  “Yes, I do,” Max said, grinning, obviously proud of his solution. “Think you can beat the odds?”

  For a moment, all four girls were trying to imagine how much harder the races would be for them, but then they realized that, in a very real way, it didn’t matter. They wanted to be in the gymkhana to have fun, and if they could win with their handicaps, great, but if not, they’d still enjoy trying.

  “Just watch us!” Carole said. “The Clubs will come out on top, no matter how the races end.”

  LISA DIDN’T HAVE
Carole’s confidence of their success, but she knew that the main part was that they would have fun that afternoon. In the meantine, the final portion of the adult competition was wonderful to watch.

  The first day, the dressage, had been a test of manners and form. The second day was an endurance test for the horse and rider, and included a cross-country race, filled with jumps, hills, water, and other types of obstacles. It had been wild and fun to watch the horses and riders manage the course. The third and final day was a test of the horse’s fitness working on a small jumping course in the ring, which had to be completed in a specific amount of time. Horses weren’t judged for form (though good form made for good jumps), but they were marked down for refusing jumps or knocking them down, or not finishing the course within the allotted time.

  The girls watched closely, enjoying the event immensely.

  “Can you do this?” Lisa whispered to Kate.

  She nodded in response. “Yes, but see how intense the riders are? Did you notice the way that last rider took her time getting her horse back out of the ring? She was hanging around trying to make the next rider nervous. I used to do that kind of thing. If that’s what I have to do to win, I don’t want to do it anymore at all.”

  “I can understand that,” Lisa told her. “But I’m glad you’ve decided to ride with us today.”

  “So am I,” Kate said, and smiled at her.

  AT EXACTLY FOUR o’clock, the final day of the gymkhana began. Max explained to the crowd what had happened to Chad the day before. The girls were only a little annoyed when Chad insisted on stepping into the center of the ring to show everybody that his arm was in a sling. Anybody who cared to could see that while he was standing off to the side next to Red.

  “That’s just like Chad,” Stevie said philosophically. Lisa was pleased to see that Stevie seemed resigned to letting Chad be Chad. After all, even though he wasn’t the boy of her dreams, he had cared enough to compete as well as he could, even though he wasn’t very good. There was something to be said for that.

  When Max finished his explanation of the handicap system for the Clubs, the girls removed the stirrups from their ponies’ saddles. Lisa winked at Stevie as she did so, remembering, now without any anger, her first day at Pine Hollow, when Stevie had saddled her horse without stirrups as a joke. Lisa hadn’t thought it was very funny then. Today, with a pony, it was going to be a little funny—she hoped. With some difficulty, she mounted Penny.

  All sixteen of the riders got in a circle around the chairs in the ring and the music began.

  The ponies trotted to the music. At the second it stopped, each rider dismounted quickly and ran for a chair. The game was exactly the same as the old birthday-party standby, except that they were on ponyback as they circled.

  All of the Clubs got chairs for the first four rounds. In fact, they discovered that Max’s handicap for them on this race was no handicap at all. They just slid out of their saddles—even more quickly than their opponents. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Veronica had grabbed a chair and pulled it away from Lisa before she could sit on it, they’d have won. Since nobody called a foul on Veronica, and the Clubs were in no mood to make a fuss about anything, they let the Diamonds take first place, and satisfied themselves with second.

  The second race was called charades. Each rider rode to the far end of the ring, dismounted, then pulled a piece of paper with a movie title on it out of a hat. She then had to do a charade of the title. As soon as her teammates guessed the title, the rider remounted and returned to the starting line and the second rider began.

  It was wild. The Clubs had no trouble with Star Wars and The Karate Kid—Lisa pretended to shoot at stars, and Stevie did two karate kicks—but Kate had a terrible time getting them to say National Velvet, until she began patting the soft black velvet of her riding hat. Carole got them to come up with High Noon quickly by pointing to her watch and then to the sky, so they ended up in second place. The good news was that the Diamonds got totally stuck on Black Beauty and came in third, so the Clubs were now tied for the day with their serious competition.

  The third race was a balloon-popping race, and in this one, being an extra ten feet behind the start/finish line really was a handicap. Each rider got a stick with a tack on the end of it. They were to ride to the far end of the ring and pop one balloon each on a target board. Each of the Clubs did it perfectly, but so did a lot of the other riders, and the fact that the Clubs had to ride farther made them come in third. They would have been last except that one of the Spades’ ponies got spooked by the long stick and wouldn’t behave. That was something for the Clubs to be grateful for.

  When the final race began, the score stood at Hearts, six; Spades, seven; Clubs, eight; and Diamonds, nine. That meant that it was actually possible for any team but the Hearts to win. The last race was the egg race and it was the toughest race of all—especially for the Clubs.

  Stevie recalled all the smashed hard-boiled eggs their practices had cost them. It was small consolation that the team member who had been the worst at it was Chad. None of them was very good. She’d just had fun ragging Chad about his mistakes. Also, this was a race in which their ten-foot handicap was really going to matter, since it meant they’d have to balance a raw egg on a spoon for ten more feet than any of the other riders.

  Mrs. Reg released her bandanna. At the instant it hit the ground, Lisa was off! She nudged Penny into a gallop and dashed to the far end of the arena. Holding Penny still with her legs, she balanced a raw egg on a tablespoon, which she held in her right hand. As soon as she was sure she had it securely, she nudged Penny gently. It wouldn’t do at all to have Penny spurt as she turned, because that would unbalance the egg. Penny took her signal instantly. And spurted. Splat. The egg landed on the turf, a slimy yellow-and-white mess. Lisa returned to the egg bucket to get a replacement. Once it was in the spoon, she barely touched Penny’s belly, and the pony began walking. Much better. A trot would be no good at all—unless she could teach the egg to post! By using alternate leg aids, which meant touching her calves to alternating sides of Penny’s stomach as the pony walked, Lisa got her to extend her walk and therefore cover more ground in less time. It took a long time, but it took a lot less time than returning for a third egg.

  Happily, she handed the spoon over to Stevie. Her job was to return the egg to the bucket and then hand over the empty spoon to Carole. The final leg of the race would have Kate returning the last egg to the bucket.

  Lisa was feeling proud of herself when she gave the egg to Stevie. She’d made it with only one broken egg. Not bad, she thought, until she saw that two of the other teams were well on their way to finishing their second legs in the time it had taken her to complete one!

  At least Stevie did her job smoothly. It would have been more than she could have stood to do badly on the race she’d given her brother such a hard time about. The only trouble she had was that when she put the egg back into the bucket, it broke, smearing gooey white and yolk over the other eggs there. At first, Stevie thought this was bad news, but then she realized it might, just might, make the other eggs a little sticky. And if the other eggs were a little sticky, they might stay on the spoons a little better.

  She reversed Nickel’s direction and raced him back to their finish line, practically slamming the spoon into Carole’s hand. Breathing hard from excitement and hard riding, she looked around. The Hearts’ third rider had left at about the same time Carole had. The Diamonds were a split second behind—and they didn’t have to ride as far as Carole and Kate did, but Carole and Kate were the best riders in the ring. Would it make the difference? Would the slimy eggs help or hurt?

  The second question was the first one answered. The eggs were so gooey that Carole could hardly hold one in her fingers, much less get it onto the spoon! After three tries, she finally succeeded. Carole turned Quarter around, holding the spoon firmly in her hand. She got him into a walk, the pace all the riders had discovered was by far the safe
st, and then, answering Stevie’s question about whether being a good rider would make a difference, Carole brought Quarter into a trot. She leaned forward in what was called jump position, letting her knees flex with the pony’s movement. As a result, her upper body was almost motionless—and so was the egg!

  She slowed Quarter down just enough to hand the spoon and egg to Kate and then joined Lisa and Stevie in their wild cheering. All of the teams were now on their final legs and all of them were close. The Diamonds had caught up with the Hearts, and Veronica was riding her very best. She’d seen Carole’s trick about using jump position and did it herself, as did Kate. Kate and Veronica were practically neck and neck.

  Then, the Clubs heard what they thought might be the most wonderful sound in the world. It was the sound of a raw egg hitting turf and breaking, smashing, oozing, and gooing. It was the sound of Veronica diAngelo’s egg. That meant Veronica had to take an egg from the bucket and start all over again on her leg of the race.

  Kate slid her egg into the bucket, turned Half Dollar around, and galloped to the finish line, grinning like she’d just won the Kentucky Derby!

  The Clubs shouted and screamed with joy. They’d come in first in the final race, guaranteeing them the blue ribbon for the day, and the overall blue ribbon for the gymkhana, since they’d won two out of three days.

  It wasn’t easy hugging one another while they were sitting on ponies, but they managed somehow. And somehow Chad managed to get in on the yelling and cheering, even though he couldn’t do much hugging with his arm in a sling.

  Victory was sweet.

  IT WASN’T HARD to talk Stevie’s parents into letting the team come over to her house for a celebration pool party for the first-place gymkhana team. The Lakes agreed to let them order pizza, and once they’d settled on all the things they wanted on it (everything but anchovies, one half with no mushrooms, the other half with no green peppers), they changed into bathing suits and sat on towels around the backyard pool. When they were relaxed, gratefully sipping ice-cold glasses of lemonade and iced tea, they began to talk about Subject Number One: horses.