Emma and the Cutting Horse (6 page)

“I thought I was making some progress with
her, but I guess not,” Emma observed.

Two weeks went by before Emma’s father called
the trainer to see how things were going.

“He said she’s the hardest-headed horse he’s
ever dealt with,” Emma’s father reported at supper that night. “He
hasn’t even gotten on her yet, says she’s not ready. He keeps her
in a stall with a low ceiling and every single time he goes in to
put a halter on her, she throws her head up in the air and cracks
it on the ceiling. I asked him if he thought she was stupid, and he
said no, he just thinks she’s hardheaded and hates being forced to
do something she doesn’t want to do. We paid for a month of
training, so I guess we should let him have his month with her and
see if he can change her attitude.”

Emma’s parents owned a small cattle ranch,
but they both had to work, her dad at the sheriff’s office and her
mom in the pediatrics unit at the hospital, to make ends meet. They
raised a few quarter horses, trained them for ranch work, and then
sold them to add a bit of extra income. Emma knew they didn’t have
extra money for outside trainers and that they had hoped Miss
Dellfene would make a profit for them. Now, it didn’t look likely.
Emma stopped asking her father about the mare because she knew he
was worried about losing money on her. He was too honest to
misrepresent her to a prospective buyer. Even with her impeccable
bloodlines, it would be hard to find a buyer for her if she
couldn’t be caught or ridden safely.

* * *

On a Saturday afternoon after the month of
training had passed, Emma and her parents traveled to the trainer’s
place to check on Miss Dellfene’s progress. When they arrived, they
saw the mare standing in the shade with a saddle on her back, tied
to the side of an empty trailer. An unpainted gray barn leaned a
bit off center next to a large outdoor arena with weathered wooden
fences. Gary, the trainer, strolled over with a friendly smile. His
straw hat was slowly taking on the color of dust and appeared to
have been trampled beneath the feet of many horses.

“I keep your mare tied up almost all the time
when I’m not riding her,” he told them. “I bring her all her feed
and water and hold it for her while she eats and drinks. That way
she associates my approach with something she likes. I’ve been
riding her twice a day for short periods, and she’s doing better.
Watch, and I’ll show you what I mean.”

He slipped a bridle over Miss Dellfene’s
halter, tightened the cinch and led her into the arena. She
flinched when he stepped on, but didn’t try to buck or walk away
until he signaled for her to move out. He walked her slowly around
the arena, changing directions often and stopped her by pulling on
the reins very lightly and saying “Whoa!” Then he clucked to her
and squeezed her into a trot. In the far corner of the arena she
began pulling on the bit and shaking her head. She got her head
down low and began some half-hearted crow hopping. Gary pulled her
around in a tight circle. Then he straightened her out and squeezed
her into a trot again. After another round or two, he brought her
to a halt beside Emma’s dad.

“I’m not loping her yet. I don’t want her to
get out of control. Before you go, I want to show you one more
thing. He rode her toward the center of the arena and then reined
her sharply to the left, leaning in the saddle and squeezing her
with his right leg. The mare sat back on her haunches and pivoted
around with a graceful sweep of her front legs. Gary patted her on
the neck and walked her back to the fence.

“Wow! That was amazing for a half-broke
horse!” Emma’s dad told him.

“Half-broke is right,” Gary chuckled. “She
has incredible natural balance, even without much training, but
there’s still some buck in her. I’d really like to work with her
for two more weeks. By then I think I should be able to tell you
more about what she can do.”

Emma’s dad gazed at the mare thoughtfully for
a minute.

“Okay,” he said. “Two more weeks.”

* * *

At school Emma did her best to avoid Candi
Haynes and her followers. When she had to pass them in the hall she
heard derisive laughter and an occasional whinny. If teachers were
patrolling the hallway, the girls limited their harassment to
pointing at Emma and snickering under their breaths. Her
embarrassment grew with each encounter, and she constantly checked
the hallway ahead, ducking into the bathroom or an open classroom
when she spotted Candi between classes.

“You’d think I had said something nasty about
her mama from the way she’s tormenting me,” Emma told Hannah.
“She’s starting to make me feel like I’ve got an extra eye in the
middle of my forehead or something. It makes me mad that she won’t
leave me alone.”

“I know what you mean,” Hannah said. “She
sure doesn’t know when to quit.”

“What do you think I should do?” Emma
asked.

“I don’t know. Once she starts to get under
somebody’s skin, it seems like nothing can stop her.”

In the cafeteria, Candi made a point of
passing by the table where Emma was sitting.

“Howdy there, Hillbilly,” she sang out loudly
as she ambled past.

Emma stared angrily after her. She had a
sudden urge to rip the hair bow out of Candi’s perfect, blond hair
and smear food on her designer clothes. She needed to come up with
a plan to put an end to all this very public harassment.

* * *

Mrs. Killen, Emma’s algebra teacher, was
leaning against Emma’s locker after school a few days later.

“What’s going on with this, Emma?” she asked,
moving away to show another sketch of a horse’s butt taped to
Emma’s locker door. A big pile of brown manure rested between the
horse’s hind legs with EMMA scrawled across it.

Emma reached behind Mrs. Killen and ripped
the drawing off her locker door.

“It’s...it’s just some kids teasing me,” Emma
stammered.

“This doesn’t seem like a friendly kind of
teasing,” Mrs. Killen said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve thought for
several weeks now that something was bothering you. Do you want to
tell me about it?”

Emma was horrified to discover that her eyes
were brimming with tears. A single stray spilled over and slid down
the side of her nose. She remembered the photographs of Mrs.
Killen’s children decorating her desk, a son and daughter now
mostly grown. It would be so easy to tell Mrs. Killen about Candi.
A teacher with a daughter would understand. But, for some reason,
the words refused to form in her mouth.

“I’ve got to go,” Emma blurted, brushing the
tear away. “I’ll miss my bus.”

“Wait right here just a moment,” Mrs. Killen
said, hurrying into her classroom. She returned in a moment with a
yellow hall pass. Emma’s name was on it and it was signed but not
dated. She pushed it into Emma’s hand.

“I’m off fifth period, and I’m nearly always
in my classroom alone grading papers. The teasing may reach a point
where you can’t tolerate it anymore. You shouldn’t have to tolerate
it at all. It makes me furious when this kind of bullying goes on
in school. Fill out the pass and come to see me. I’d really like to
help, and no one needs to know that you talked to me.”

Emma nodded, but words were still stuck
behind a huge lump in her throat.

“Now scoot, before you miss your bus.”

Emma took out that yellow pass and looked at
it many times over the next few days, but could never quite work up
the courage to use it.

* * *

At the end of two weeks, Gary called and
spoke to Emma’s dad on the phone.

“He said he wants us to come and watch the
mare work again,” Emma’s dad explained. “Then he has someone who
wants to talk to us about her.”

“If someone wants to buy her, are you going
to sell?” Emma asked on the way to Gary’s the following Saturday
morning.

“We haven’t decided yet,” her dad replied.
“We need to see how she’s doing first; and, of course, how much
they offer is a big factor, too. We have quite a bit of money
invested in her already what with feed and training.”

When they pulled up at the trainer’s barn,
Miss Dellfene was in her usual place, tied to the trailer. Gary and
a lanky man in a cowboy hat were standing nearby looking at her and
talking. Emma thought the little mare looked better than she had
before. Her coat was clean and shining, and her mane was freshly
trimmed. She had gained some weight, but she looked strong rather
than fat.

“This is John Brown,” Gary said waving in the
direction of the man standing near Miss Dellfene. “John trains a
few horses just down the road from here, and he’s watched your mare
work a couple of times.” John nodded to them but kept his
distance.

Then Gary saddled the mare and got on her
next to the trailer. He rode her across the gravel to the arena
gate, leaned over, unlatched it, and pushed it open. The mare
walked calmly through and turned beside the gate so that Gary could
reach down and latch it from the inside. Emma watched in surprised
silence.

“She seems much more relaxed.” Emma’s dad
said.

Gary walked and trotted her using a very
loose rein. Then he loped her slowly across the arena and brought
her to a sliding stop. He spun her to the right and back to the
left, then lifted the reins and backed her up. Emma noticed that
John Brown was leaning on the fence, watching intently. She
wondered why he seemed so interested in a hardheaded little mare
with crooked knees.

Gary rode over to the fence next to Emma and
her parents.

“Once she started coming my way, she made a
lot of progress,” he told them. “She has a tremendous amount of
balance and athletic ability, but she also has something else...I
guess you could call it toughness. I told John about her, and he
came over to watch her work. John is a cutting horse trainer and
he’s looking for a two-year-old to train for the 1977 National
Cutting Horse Association Futurity next year. After he watched one
of her training sessions he asked me if he could talk to you when
you came to see her work.”

John walked toward them as Gary talked. He
was a tall, thin, wiry-looking man who fit Emma’s mental picture of
what a cowboy should look like and had an exaggerated Texas drawl
that expanded his words into extra syllables.

“I think yer mare has a lot a talent and
might make a helluva cutting horse,” he told them, casting an
apologetic glance at Emma and her mother when he realized the cuss
word had slipped out. “She sure oughta have the ability with a
grandsire like Poco Dell.”

“Explain to me about the Futurity,” Emma’s
dad said. “I don’t know very much about cutting horses.”

“Well,” John began, “the Futurity is the
world championship fer three-year-old cutting horses. It’s a
competition held by the National Cutting Horse Association or NCHA.
They hold it every December in Ft. Worth. The prize money is good,
but the recognition is a whole lot better. Horses that do well sell
fer a lotta money. She has a long way to go and it’s less than a
year away, but she has more natural ability than any other horse
I’ve looked at this year.”

“How much would all this cost?” Emma’s mother
inquired. “Isn’t the NCHA Futurity a rich man’s game?”

“It can be,” John replied, “but if she keeps
doing well for another month, I’ll train her for half my usual
fee.”

“Why would you be willing to do that?” she
asked.

“Because I’ve won lots of cutting
competitions, but I’ve never won the NCHA Futurity,” John answered.
A grin spread across his craggy face. “This ain’t an entirely
unselfish idea. I need a good horse that can get the job done to
boost my reputation as a trainer, too.”

Emma’s parents looked at each other
thoughtfully.

Finally her father said, “We’ll have to think
about it for a few days. If you want, I can call you with our
decision. We don’t have a lot of money to play around with. Can you
get us some figures by then?”

“Yep,” John replied.

Chapter
Six

Emma could barely sit still in the truck on
the way home.

“World Championship,” she said reverently.
“One of
our
horses at the World Championship! That is
unbelievably, incredibly, astonishingly cool!”

“Don’t start imagining yourself in the
winner’s circle yet,” her father advised. “I’m sure there will be
lots of reasons why we can’t do this.”

Emma read everything she could find in her
horse books and magazines about cutting horses and the NCHA
Futurity. Then she searched the school library for more
information. She learned that there would be over three hundred
horses there from all over the United States and some from other
countries. The Futurity was held in Ft. Worth, which was only a
little over a hundred miles away. The books explained that cutting
horse competitions began when bored cowboys would compete to see
which horse could cut a single cow out of a herd and keep it
separated from the others the longest, and that horses with certain
ancestors seemed to have a special knack for it called “cow
sense.”

Emma’s father was on the phone when she went
into the kitchen for a glass of water one evening, and she heard
him mention John Brown. When he hung up he recounted the
conversation.

“That was Bill Johnson. We went to school
together. He breeds cutting horses, and he tells me that John Brown
has a lot of talent with horses. If he thinks Miss Dellfene has the
potential to go to the Futurity, he’s probably right. That’s
encouraging. I hate to put too much faith in a man we just
met.”

Emma lay awake for hours that night imagining
what it would be like to go to an event like the NCHA Futurity and
watch your own horse compete. Could such a hardheaded little mare
turn out to be a champion?