Stevie knew she meant that. When it came to horses, Carole could be just as stubborn and determined as Stevie was—maybe even more so.
“Okay, then in the meantime, I’m going to be very busy with this gymkhana. I’ve never been in one. Have you?” Stevie asked.
“Oh, sure. We had one at the last base Dad was stationed at. It was fun. We had a rope race where you had to hold a rope with your partner and go around the poles. Then in another race, you had to hold an egg on a spoon.”
“Oh, those are the ordinary kinds of races Mrs. Reg told me about,” Stevie said. “I’m trying to do something a little different—I want this to be the best! That’s why I want to borrow the Laser Tag. And, you know what I found that I think will be perfect, but I’m just not exactly sure how? A Hula-Hoop! Say, your dad has all kinds of fifties stuff. Do you think he has a Hula-Hoop somewhere?”
“I’ll ask him,” Carole said without enthusiasm. “But I don’t remember seeing anything like that. Oh, he’s at the door now. Gotta go. I want to tell him about the foal.”
“Don’t forget to ask about the Hula-Hoop, huh?” Stevie reminded her.
“Uh, sure,” Carole said, but she didn’t sound sure, and that irritated Stevie. “Bye.”
Stevie stared at her phone for a while after she’d hung up. It had been a peculiarly unsatisfying phone call from her best friend. Well, one of her best friends. She picked up the phone to call Lisa.
A FEW BLOCKS away, Lisa was grinning with pride. She leaned back, lifting the front legs of her chair off the floor. She held a sheaf of papers filled with her tidy handwriting in front of her. The job was almost complete now. She only had to type the rules on her mother’s computer and she’d be able to make as many copies as she needed.
She had decided to make five rules for each section of the rule book. The rule book itself began with the statement of purpose. That had taken her the most time. It read: “The purpose of The Saddle Club is to increase the knowledge and enjoyment of horseback riding for its members.” For a while, she’d thought of just putting, “The purpose of The Saddle Club is threefold: horses, horses, and horses,” but that seemed silly. Anyway, once she knew what her purpose was, the rules were easy.
Regular meetings would be held once a week, on Thursdays from three to five o’clock. Members had to come to meetings, but if they couldn’t, they could miss up to one a month. If they missed any more, they’d have to pay fines of one dollar per missed meeting. If they missed three in a row, they could be voted out by other members. If they were late to meetings, they’d be fined twenty-five cents for each quarter hour they were late. Meetings would follow the standard Rules of Order.
Officers would be elected by the members. There would be a president, vice president, and secretary-treasurer.
Lisa figured Carole would be the president because she was the best rider. Stevie would be the vice president because she was the next-best rider and she was too disorganized to be the secretary-treasurer. Lisa herself would be the secretary-treasurer.
There were eight more pages of rules, including sections on projects, new members, and dues, all neatly detailing every aspect of The Saddle Club. Lisa had spent a lot of time on the section on projects, since one of the things members had to do was to help others in the Club. After all, the Club had been formed when she and Carole had pitched in to help Stevie with her math project for school.
She was very proud of what she’d done. She was sure Carole and Stevie would be, too. In fact, she was about to call one of them when the phone rang. It was Stevie calling her.
“Oh, I was just going to call you,” Lisa said.
“I wanted to tell you what Max said to me,” Stevie explained. “He wants me to plan a gymkhana for every afternoon of the three-day event next month. Can you believe it?”
“What’s a gymkhana?” Lisa asked. Stevie explained about the games and races she was working on.
“Oh, like relay races, huh? I know a neat race you can do carrying an egg in a spoon. I bet that would be fun on a horse.”
“That’s the oldest race in the book,” Stevie said. “I want to come up with some new things. This time it’s going to be more fun than ever. That’s why Max asked me to do it. See, he knows he can count on me to be outrageous.”
“I guess that’s true,” Lisa agreed, but she really didn’t see anything wrong with carrying an egg in a spoon. It certainly wouldn’t be easy on a horse. “Well, I’ve been busy, too,” Lisa said, trying to change the subject to one more to her liking. “I’ve been working on a Saddle Club project.”
“Is there one?” Stevie asked.
“Well, there’s our new set of rules and regulations,” Lisa said proudly. She waited for Stevie to be impressed, but she was soon disappointed.
“You mean like rules for the games I’m making up?” Stevie asked.
“No, rules for the Club,” Lisa went on. “You know how frustrated we always are when we have a meeting and then it’s over and we haven’t really accomplished anything? Now we can accomplish things. Wait’ll you see—”
“Rules aren’t my strong point,” Stevie told Lisa.
“Well, you just don’t like the dumb rules they have at school and the strict ones Max makes up. These are good rules. They’re just absolutely going to make The Saddle Club. Now, finally, we’re going to be a real club.”
“We weren’t already a real club?” Stevie wondered.
“Not really. At least, not until now. Wait till you see,” Lisa said again.
“And wait’ll you see what wonderful and outrageous games I come up with!”
“See you Monday,” Lisa told her.
“Right,” Stevie said.
Lisa wasn’t awfully surprised that Stevie was lukewarm about her project. She’d see, though, Lisa was sure, how much better and more fun it would be to have a club that really was a club. It just wasn’t the sort of thing Stevie would be excited about right away. She didn’t think much of rules. But Carole, on the other hand, would be excited about it all.
“OH, DAD, YOU can’t imagine how wonderful it was!” Carole cooed from the couch in the living room.
“I think I can, honey,” Colonel Hanson told his daughter. He peered around the corner at her from the kitchen. “Birth is probably the most exciting thing in the world.”
“I was right next to Judy the whole time, too,” Carole continued. “I watched her examine the mare and the filly. The little baby kept trying to nip at her hands. I think she was looking for more milk!”
Carole was practically exploding with excitment and wanted to share every detail with her father. Stevie certainly hadn’t been a satisfactory audience—too involved with her games. A gymkhana would be fun, to be sure, but it wasn’t in the same league as a newborn foal.
The phone rang. Carole dashed into the kitchen. Maybe it was about Delilah, she thought. She picked up the receiver from just beneath her father’s hand. He stepped back, amused.
“Oh, it’s you, Lisa,” Carole said, disappointment in her voice.
Of course Carole had been about to call Lisa and tell her about the foal, but before she could even get into it, Lisa began telling her about rules and The Saddle Club. Carole’s mind was so focused on the newborn foal that she really couldn’t make much sense of Lisa’s excitement. It seemed an awful lot like Stevie and the gymkhana. It was clear to Carole that this was no time to try to talk to Lisa about the foal. It would be better to tell her father the rest of the story.
“Gee, Lisa, that sounds great,” Carole said, mustering all the sincerity she could find for whatever Lisa was talking about. “But I’m kind of busy with my dad now. Mind if we talk about this on Monday?”
Quickly, the phone conversation ended. For a moment Carole paused to wonder what Lisa had been talking about. Rules? The Club didn’t have any rules. Right then, it didn’t really matter to Carole anyway. All she could think about was the foal.
THE THING ABOUT being mad at Stevie and Carole was that
Lisa couldn’t be mad at them while they were at class. They all had too much fun together when they were riding.
As soon as the three of them were on their horses on Monday morning, all the irritations from Friday were gone. It was a new week, a fresh start.
All twelve of the stable’s summer-camp students were in the class, which took place in the outdoor ring. The ring, at the back of the stable, was really a large rectangle, sixty by eighty meters. Max stood in the center and barked orders at his eager students.
“Today, we’re going to try something a little different,” Max began. “I’m thinking of starting a drill team. This isn’t exactly a tryout, but I want to see how well each of you can follow the orders and control your horse. Both of those are extremely important for drill work.”
Lisa’s heart sank. She was sure she didn’t have the knowledge or experience to be able to do this at all. She’d seen drill teams doing their exercises. In fact, she’d seen an exhibition of it on television not long ago. It had looked just about impossible, considering the skill needed for such precision, but it also had looked wonderful. Lisa’s fear was so mixed up with her excitement that she wasn’t sure which she should be feeling. She looked over at Stevie and Carole, paired together on the other side of the ring. The looks on their faces answered the question for her: She should be excited.
“Listen up!” Max called. “I want a single line, evenly spaced. Get your horses trotting and maintain a trot throughout this exercise.”
Usually Max didn’t use a riding crop when he was teaching, but today he was strutting around, slapping the riding crop against his leg and the palm of his hand. He looked very stern. It made Lisa more nervous than usual.
“Up! Down! Up! Down! Pay attention, now, Lisa. You know how to post better than that!” Max yelled as they all started trotting.
So even when Max was looking like a movie director, he was still paying attention to every single mistake Lisa could make. Her heart sank. If she couldn’t keep up with his instructions, she’d never make the drill team!
“Heels down!” Lisa pushed down on her heels as hard as possible. “Much better now, Betsy,” Max continued. “But you must remember to keep your heels down.” Lisa realized that she was getting so paranoid that she assumed Max was always criticizing her. “Look at Lisa, Betsy,” he said. “She’s got her heels way down. You want yours like that, too.” Lisa smiled to herself.
Quickly, however, she found that sitting properly on her horse, with her heels down, wasn’t going to be her only problem. The real trick of this exercise was to keep her horse at a dead-even pace—and aligned with all the other horses. If one horse speeded up, its rider had to slow it down, or everyone else had to speed up. The most important thing was unison.
“Now, down to a walk,” Max said. Lisa reined in on Pepper. He seemed only too happy to walk. She patted his neck, rewarding him for keeping up his trot so nicely. “We’ll try this once at a walk, and then we’ll be back trotting,” Max said. Then he described how they were to walk their horses in a figure eight across the center of the ring, alternating sides at the crossing point in the middle of the eight. If they messed up and let more than one horse pass at a time, the figure would be uneven.
Lisa was sure she’d be the one to mess it up. That made her all the more determined to do it right.
She was following Betsy Cavanaugh, who still wasn’t sitting properly on her horse, Barq. He could tell it, too, and was giving her trouble, breaking gait and sort of sidling off course.
“Look straight ahead, Betsy,” Max said. Betsy turned her head and focused on her lane with determination. In response, her horse got back where she wanted him. But Lisa was still worried; if Betsy lost her concentration, it could make Lisa mess up as well.
And, of course, it happened. When Betsy got to the cross in the eight, she was so busy looking to her right to see if the other horse was coming that Barq, confused by her different signals, came to a sudden halt. Two horses went past him before she could get him back into gear and across the middle of the eight.
Lisa wasted no time in making up her mind. She urged Pepper in front of the next horse—Comanche, with Stevie on board—and hurried across after Betsy. Lisa’s maneuver left Stevie groaning at her, since she was all ready to go across the path, but it kept the figure eight in balance, with six horses on each half.
“Nice work, Lisa,” Max said. “When one person makes a mistake, everybody else has to correct it.”
Did she hear it right? Max was actually praising her!
“Sorry, Lisa,” Betsy called over her shoulder. “I’m just having a terrible time with Barq today—or else it’s me. I don’t know.”
Lisa knew. It had clearly been Betsy’s fault, but since Max had lavished her with praise, she didn’t want to be mean to Betsy. “No problem, Betsy,” Lisa said magnanimously. “Horses have bad days, too, just like people.”
“Nice work,” Max said to the entire class at the end of the lesson. “If you all enjoyed that, we can do more of it. Who thought it was fun?”
Lisa glanced around at her classmates. Most of them looked sort of frustrated and tired. It was true that it had been a tough lesson. Max had shouted a lot—and not just at Betsy. Still, it had been fun for Lisa, and very satisfying when she’d succeeded. Lisa put her hand up.
To her surprise, only two other hands went up—Stevie’s and Carole’s. For a second, Lisa thought Max was trying to hide a smile. Then he spoke. “Okay, if you three enjoyed it, then I think it would be a good idea for you to work on drills. We’ll have additional classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at three. Now, pair up, walk your horses around the circle until they’ve cooled down, then break for lunch. At two o’clock this afternoon, we’re going to work on grooming, so put your horses in their stalls for now, untack them, and give them fresh water and hay. Dis-missed!!”
“Wasn’t that just great?” Stevie asked Carole as the two of them led their horses to their stalls. “I mean, it’s like almost a perfect combination of the things I enjoy about riding—equitation and dressage. The only thing missing is jumping and, I guess, cross-country, and racing, and uh, well, check that. What I enjoy about riding is everything! Drill work included.”
“It’s neat,” Carole agreed. “Since I lived on Marine Corps bases for ten years, I’ve seen an awful lot of drill work—mostly on foot, you know, like parades. This is really the first time I’ve gotten to do it, unless you count the time my Girl Scout troop marched in the Marine Corps Birthday Parade a couple of years ago.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly the same thing,” Stevie said, laughing.
“Me neither.” Carole grinned. “It’s much more fun on horseback. And I just knew when Max asked who had liked it that it would be the three of us.”
“Yeah, I’m glad about that,” Stevie agreed. “After all, we are The Saddle Club.”
“You going to have lunch now?” Carole asked.
“No, I forgot my sandwich. It doesn’t matter, though. I’ve got something I have to work on as soon as I untack Comanche.”
“If you’re in such a rush, I’ll untack him for you,” Carole offered.
“Would you?”
“Sure I would,” Carole told her, reaching for the reins. Gladly, Stevie relinquished them.
“See you later,” she said, dashing off to the tack room.
Carole really didn’t mind at all. She’d rather spend time with horses than doing almost anything. Besides, it would make the time pass faster until Judy came to check Delilah for the day.
LATER, LISA FOUND Carole sitting on a knoll by the paddock where Delilah was being kept until she foaled. It was next to her foaling stall, in sight of the office so she could be watched all the time. Carole was eating her sandwich and drinking her soda, but one hundred percent of her attention was on Delilah.
“How’s she doing?” Lisa asked as she sat down beside her friend.
“Judy says she’s doing just fine. You always have to be
concerned about a mare with her first foal, but Judy says Delilah seems to be a good mother. She eats her special mash and she’s resting a lot. Judy says it should be just fine.”
“She seems to be kind of listless,” Lisa said, observing how slowly Delilah walked.
“That’s just because she’s gotten so big now that it’s almost hard for her to walk. But Judy says she’ll be back in good shape within a few weeks after the birth. She’ll be running in the paddock with her foal and that’ll slim her right down again. She’ll be her old self in no time. Isn’t that amazing?”
For a second, Lisa wondered if she was really talking to Carole—or to Judy. Then she remembered why she particularly wanted to see Carole.
“I have your set of rules,” Lisa told her. She had spent hours over the weekend working on her mother’s computer, inputting everything in a Word document. Her mother had helped her, and when they’d finally printed it all out, it was beautiful—as pretty as a term paper, Lisa thought.
“What rules?” Carole asked.
“The Saddle Club rules,” Lisa said, containing her impatience. “Remember, I told you about them Friday when I called? I know you were busy, but I’m sure I told you about all this work I’d done so we could have a real club. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” Carole said vaguely, taking the papers from Lisa’s hand. “I’ll read them later, okay?”
“Okay,” Lisa agreed. “And we’ll have a meeting on Thursday afternoon after class, at TD’s, to make any changes you guys want. Then we can ratify them. That means make them official.”
“Thursday,” Carole echoed. “Okay. Look at the way she’s eating now.” Lisa realized Carole was talking about Delilah again. “It’s like she’s hungry all the time. And Judy says that’s good. She needs fresh hay and fresh water constantly. I’m going to muck out her stall before Judy gets here. Oh, how I love doing things for that horse!”
Horse Sense Page 3