by Jane Smiley
Blue’s ears went forward. He did not snort or actually move, but I could feel tension enter his body the way it does just before a horse DOES buck or DOES rear. I kicked him a tiny bit with my legs, and he stepped forward, first one step and then two. His steps were small. I pressed him with my legs again, and his steps enlarged a little bit. His ears stayed pricked forward, which was not good. When a horse is relaxed, his ears are relaxed, too, and when he’s paying attention to his job and making a real effort, his ears sort of drop to either side, not limp, but more or less out of service, because he’s more interested in what you, the rider, are asking him to do than the world around him—when you are riding a horse and his ears stay rigidly pricked, that means he is attending to something other than you. I urged him forward again, then asked him to turn in a half circle toward the center of the pen. He did it. We walked across the pen, and I asked him to turn again, along the fence. He did it. He was neither disobedient nor resentful, and we did this walking and turning for a few minutes. However, he did not relax. His ears stayed pricked, and I continued to have the feeling that he was on the watch.
In fact, the feeling got worse. It was like it swelled out of him, up through the saddle blanket and the saddle and into me, and pretty soon, I was looking to see who or what was coming, when I knew that just about the only thing that would or could come would be Rusty. Jefferson, whom Daddy was sitting on outside the pen, wasn’t looking around at all, and neither was Jack, in the gelding pasture, normally the most observant of the horses. Jack was twitching his tail and splashing in the water trough with his nose, sure signs that he thought there was nothing to do and nothing to worry about.
Blue and I continued to walk around the pen, turning this way and that. He relaxed a little. Daddy said, “What do you think?”
I lied. I said, “He’s fine. Let’s go over to the arena.”
Daddy unhooked the latch of the pen from Jefferson’s back and the gate swung open. Blue and I followed him and Jefferson to the arena.
I would never have said that the arena was a frightening place, but now, as we walked through the gate, I saw the straw bale jump that we had never removed after Black George was sold—we had just pushed the bales over into a corner—and I saw the traffic cones Daddy had gotten somewhere so we could practice barrel racing, and I saw the chairs and the table on the other side of the fence that we sometimes sat in. I saw the jump standards Daddy had set along the railing over where a tree sort of overhung the fence and threw them into shadow. I saw some puddles with water in them, and the sunlight rippling on the water as a breeze picked up. I saw birds in trees and in flight. I saw Rusty take off across the hillside. And Blue saw all these things, too. As we went into the arena, he twisted this way and that, not exactly shying, but curving his body away from whatever it was he didn’t understand. I lifted my inside rein, as my favorite trainer, Jem Jarrow, had taught me to do, so that I could control his shoulder (because, as I learned with Ornery George, or Rally, as we renamed him, where the shoulder is, is where the horse is about to be). He didn’t resist this. We walked on.
I made him go past every scary thing, and he did it well enough. In the meantime, Daddy and Jefferson were trotting and then cantering figure eights. Daddy was teaching Jefferson to change his canter lead across the middle—he’d been working on that for about a week, and Jefferson was finally starting to get it. He was good to the left, not so good to the right. Daddy was using one end of the arena for his figure eights, so I went to the other and dismounted. Blue looked at me, so I stroked him along the neck and said, “Everything really WILL be all right, even if I have to get Jem Jarrow to come over and work with you.”
Western reins are usually longer than English reins. Mine were roping reins, which were attached to the bit by leather loops. The end of the rein had a slit, which slipped over a little metal knob inserted into the leather. The idea was that you might need to tie your horse to something when you were out with the cattle, or you might need a longer rein, so you had to be able to detach one side or the other from the bit. So that’s what I did. I detached the left side and stood by Blue’s right shoulder, lifting and drawing the rein until he realized that the pressure on his bit and the left side of his face would go away if he stepped his right hind foot in front of his left hind foot and moved his haunches away from me. I tried this gently at first, because he was a sensitive horse and was paying attention to me, but I had to get a little stronger with him, because it soon became clear that he didn’t know anything about his hind feet. It was like they were coming along with the rest of his body, but he didn’t actually understand that he could operate them independently. It’s funny how many horses don’t know that. So I did what I had done with Rally: I made him step over and step over, first one direction and then the other, until as soon as I lifted the rein, he would soften his spine and begin his shift to the side. It took me about twenty times on each side before I felt that he was ready to try it with me mounted. I reattached the reins.
And then there was mounting. When I lifted my foot to put it in the stirrup, he turned his head and bent his body away from me. He had been fine when I mounted from the fence, so I realized that maybe his previous owner had never mounted him from the ground. And furthermore, he was suspicious of everything new. I led him around a couple of times to relax him, then started again. The first two times he still gave me that what-in-the-world-are-you-doing look, but then he must have put two and two, or one and one, together and decided that I was mounting. No big deal.
I worked on lifting and drawing his head and neck from both directions, and after a little bit, he put one and one together again and began to step his right hind in front of his left, and then his left hind in front of his right. I remembered again what a useful exercise this was, because Blue seemed at least a little more relaxed after we had done it. When we walked out along the rail again, his steps were bigger and his hind end swung back and forth a little more. The fact is, you want your horse’s back end to swagger a little bit, because you want his hips to be nice and loose, and Blue managed to do that.
But because he did relax some, I could feel all the more when something made him tense up. It was like everything he saw (or heard, since he tensed when some crows started having an argument and squawking like mad), the tension rippled through him. I would then move his hind end over, back and forth, two or three times, because the tension rippled through, and then got stuck, and I had to move him over in order to let it flow away. When Daddy said we’d been at it for an hour, I could hardly believe it.
It was Happy who broke my arm.
Back in December, when it was time for the calves at the Jordan ranch, across the fence from us, to be branded, the foreman, Mr. Louis, called Daddy and asked if he was available to help, because two of his regular hands were working in Oregon for the winter. Daddy had sold Mr. Louis maybe his own favorite horse ever, a beautiful golden buckskin named Lester, a month or so before Mr. Louis called him. I always thought that for once in his life Daddy regretted selling a horse, and that maybe his usual motto—it’s never too soon to sell a horse—did not really apply to Lester. But Daddy didn’t say anything about it. He went to the branding for two days, and he rode one of the ranch horses—Happy wasn’t well trained enough by that time to go.
After the branding, Daddy talked to Mr. Louis from time to time, and as the winter progressed, we climbed the hillside every so often to have a look at the blue Brahmas that had broken through the fence and come down the hill in the fall. They never broke through the fence again, and as they got bigger they got more beautiful and less cute, but they continued to be blue. I guess Mr. Louis told Daddy that he thought they weren’t much use compared to regular old Angus and Herefords, and a lot of trouble to boot, but when Daddy reported this at the supper table, Mom said, “They are beautiful and unusual, and if I ever met a ranch manager who didn’t think his owner was nuts, I can’t remember when that was.”
Daddy laughed and nodd
ed, then he said, “But they are more active than the standard breeds, so even though they aren’t bothering us any, maybe they’re causing trouble elsewhere on the ranch.”
The ranch was some six thousand acres, so there were plenty of places on it for the Brahmas to cause trouble.
After supper the night I first rode Blue, the phone rang, and as soon as Daddy picked it up, he started smiling, which meant that the person on the other end of the line was not any of our relatives. He said, “Sounds good. We will do that. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
We were invited to come on Saturday to help gather the cattle—not just the Brahmas, but the Angus, too, and drive them from the chewed-over pastures to the greener one. There were about two hundred head, plus the ten Brahmas, and after the work was done, there was going to be a barbecue. We were all invited—Mom was going to ride Lincoln, I would ride Happy, and Daddy would ride Lester. I guess Mr. Louis had about three horses that he used, including Lester, and he had only bought Lester because he couldn’t resist, not because he needed a horse.
We were in the living room when Daddy told us about this. I was reading Tom Sawyer (Tom continued to be completely unsupervised—I wondered what Danny had thought about it) and Mom was feeding Spooky with a doll’s baby bottle. Even in a few days, Spooky had changed and gotten bigger. His head was no longer as rounded over the top, which made it look as though his ears had moved higher. His tail had grown, too—it didn’t look quite so much like a nail. He also made meows, or almost meows—more like “miaaas.” Mom had gone from feeding him four times a day to three times, and she no longer had to stroke his belly after she fed him, because he was getting more active. Part of the reason I was reading in the living room was because it was fun to watch Spooky come out of his box and play around for a few minutes after his supper. Rusty liked to watch, too—when she could not see through the front door, she would stand on her hind legs and stare through one of the windows.
Mom finished with the bottle and said, “I think I’ll leave him with some soft food on Saturday. I could be gone for five hours.” She carried him across to the hallway and set him in the litter box, then petted him rather firmly down his back and sides. He sniffed the litter and walked around in it, and then finally squatted and did something. Mom said, “Good, good boy, Spooky.” Then she deposited him in the middle of the living room floor. I put down my book and knelt in front of him. He saw me and came bouncing in my direction with his ears up and his tail high. It made me laugh. I put my forefinger on the rug in front of him and moved it around. This made Spooky jump up and down. Then I moved my finger toward him, and he jumped on it.
“Precocious!” exclaimed Daddy. “He’ll be a ratter in a week.”
“Poor Spooky,” said Mom. “Out to the barn with you.”
“Every cat prefers the barn,” said Daddy. “Lucky to have a barn.”
We didn’t argue. The only cats I had ever known were the barn cats, and the only one that even came close enough to exchange a meow was Doozy. I said, “Well, at least when Spooky is living in the barn, maybe he’ll come over and let me pet him once in a while.” I moved my finger again, and Spooky jumped out of the way. Mom tossed me a toy she had made, an empty spool from her sewing box with thread tied through the center. I pulled it and as it rolled toward me, Spooky stared at it and then pounced on it and picked it up and flopped over on his back. Then he fought with the spool and got tangled in the thread for about ten seconds, until it broke. Then he bit the spool quite viciously for a moment. We all laughed. Mom got up to do the dishes and Daddy went back to his reading. Just then, Spooky sat, totally quiet, and looked me in the face.
This look probably lasted a few seconds, but for a kitten, that was a long time. I looked right back at him without thinking about it at first. It was only when Spooky lay down and rolled over on his back and looked across the room that it struck me that he had done something odd. That night, I went to sleep thinking about all sorts of things—Blue, and Jack, and the fact that it looked as though Barbie Goldman was going to take a riding lesson from me on Saturday morning at nine—Daddy had loved the idea, especially when Mrs. Goldman called and said that she wondered if $2.50 per lesson might be a fair payment.
But I woke up lying on my back, with the three-quarter moon in the window and the image in my mind (left over from a dream?) of Spooky the kitten staring at me. It seemed much bigger and longer than what really happened, and it sort of gave me the creeps.
Saddle Pommel with Horn
Saddle Cantle
Chapter 6
SINCE LINCOLN WAS GOING OVER TO THE JORDAN RANCH THAT afternoon, I thought for a long time about whether to put Barbie on Jefferson, who was quiet, but big, or Foxy, who was a little less quiet, but hardly more than a pony, and so maybe not so scary. I decided to imagine that I was Jem Jarrow and make up my mind that way. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I went and got Foxy out of the mare pasture and brought her to the pen, where I worked her to the left and to the right, where I got her to move over in both directions, and where I had her step back about six different times, because Jem always said that if you ask a horse to step back and he does so willingly, then he’s feeling obedient and cooperative—horses in the wild don’t like to step backward. As for me, I was feeling pretty good, because I had ridden Blue the evening before, and he had seemed to relax, and I had already worked Jack, and he had been a good boy. When Barbie was finished (forty-five minutes, if she would take that much the first time), then I would get on Happy, whom I liked because she was smart and comfortable to ride, and later we would head to the “roundup.” All we had to do was get on our horses and turn left out the gate and ride about a quarter mile down the road.
Foxy behaved herself fairly well, and just to be sure she understood her job, I went up to her and took her face between my hands and I said, “Foxy, you be a very good girl today and you will get three extra carrots.” Then I moved my hands up and down, making Foxy nod “Okay.”
Then I saw Mrs. Goldman’s car at the gate. Barbie got out; Mrs. Goldman rolled down her window, said something, and drove off. Barbie turned and waved to me, then climbed the gate and trotted over. She was wearing new jeans, some oxfords I had never seen before, and a UCLA sweatshirt. She looked nice. I thought it was a shame to smash down her hair with the hard hat, but I took her in the barn and handed it to her. She put it on. It fit. That was lucky.
I pointed to the saddle. Barbie said, “I know, I carry it like this. My dad watches Gunsmoke.” She picked up the saddle, propped the cantle on her hip, made her legs bow, and swaggered toward the pen. I walked behind her with the bridle. When we got to the pen, she hawked, bent to the right, and spat. When I laughed, she looked at me as if she couldn’t imagine what I was laughing at. I could see right then that my biggest challenge was going to be keeping a straight face.
I had tied Foxy to an upright in the pen, and she gave Barbie a look. Barbie gave her a look, too, then said, “You know, I prepared for my lesson by reading a book.”
“What book?”
“The Black Stallion and Flame.”
“I never read that one.” I showed her how to lift the saddle onto Foxy’s back, a little up past her withers, then slide it backward. Foxy twitched her tail. She didn’t like to be saddled, but she was good after that.
“The Black is in a plane crash and ends up on Flame’s island, and just when they are going to fight to the death over the mares, Alec brings a rabid bat who is foaming at the mouth to the island, and then the two stallions kill it and are friends forever afterward.” She said this with a straight face while adjusting the saddle blanket under the saddle.
I said, “That sounds exciting.”
She said, “It reminded me of Two Gentlemen of Verona.”
“What’s that?”
“A Shakespeare play.”
“You’ve read that?”
She looked at me over Foxy’s back. “No.”
We both laughed.
She said, “At least there wasn’t an earthquake, where the ground opened up and the Black had to take Alec’s shirt between his teeth and pull him out of the flames.”
I said, “Maybe that’s in one of the other ones. I’ve only read The Black Stallion and The Island Stallion. I like those.”
We got Foxy cinched up, and then I showed Barbie how to put on the bridle. Then they were standing there, and I thought, What next? The fact was, I had been riding horses since before I could remember, so I had never had a lesson about how to sit on one. I decided to put this part off. I said, “First, you need to know how to lead her.” I took Foxy’s reins, just below the bit, in my right hand, with the other end in my left. I stepped out, and Foxy stepped along beside me. We walked about halfway around the pen, and Barbie walked with me. I stopped and turned to Barbie. I said, “Barbara!” I held up the reins where she could see them.
“What!”
“Never wrap the reins or a rope or anything at all that is attached to a horse around your hand or your foot—”
“Or your neck. I can see that.”
“Good.”
She took the reins and led Foxy around, turning this way and that. She said, “It’s like heeling a dog.”
And it was. She started and stopped a time or two, and Foxy stayed right with her. When they were finished, Barbie patted Foxy on the neck and said, “That was a good girl.”
There are people who never think to praise a horse or thank one, any more than they would pat their car after parking it, but Barbie wasn’t one of them.
I taught her to mount from the ground (checking the girth first) and to sit with her feet in the stirrups and her heels down, and to relax her shoulders and look where she wanted to go, and to hold the reins in one hand, with her hand just in front of the horn, and the reins flowing under her thumb and out over her palm, and I taught her to bang her lower legs lightly against Foxy’s sides, just enough to ask for a walk, and I taught her to walk forward, and not let Foxy wander around. I taught her to let her hips move with the horse’s hips and that if she felt insecure, she could hold the horn of the saddle. I taught her to count the beats of Foxy’s front feet and feel the rhythm of her steps. When Daddy came out of the house and said, “Your mom called, Barbara, and I told her you’re about ready,” I couldn’t believe we had gone ten minutes over the scheduled time and I hadn’t even gotten her to trot.