A Summer Without Horses (8 page)

That was when I figured out that Max was worried about the kinds of things I might do if I got bored. Naturally, it was in his best interest (and mine) to keep me busy.

“Come on with me now, Stevie, and meet the kids you’ll be working with.”

I followed him into the locker area. There was a whole group of cute little kids. They were chattering away, but stopped talking the second Max and I walked in. They looked at me curiously. I looked back at them curiously.

“Riders, I want you to meet my newest assistant, Stevie Lake.” I got a kick out of that. “Stevie is one of my fine young advanced riders.” I got an even bigger kick out of that. Max doesn’t use a word like “fine” easily. “However, she’s had an accident that makes it impossible for her to ride, at least for a while. So, while she’s ground-bound,
she’s going to help me and you. Listen to everything she says about horses, and you’ll learn a lot.”

At Pine Hollow, we’re all expected to share our knowledge with everybody. Experienced riders are assigned to help those less experienced learn everything from tacking up to flying changes, so there was nothing new about being told to teach this group. What was new was the way they looked at me. With an introduction like that from Max, they gazed at me as if I were the smartest person in the whole world and would make their riding lessons the most fun they’d ever had. That was the biggest kick of all and I’ll tell you what went through my mind when all of the kids looked at me. I thought:
I know more than they do.

I suppose that sounds goofy, but the fact is, I’m a very competitive person. My boyfriend, Phil Marsten, is always telling me this. I knew some of the kids there, like May Grover, Jackie, and Amie. They were all in Horse Wise, our Pony Club. Naturally, they weren’t the ones who needed the most help from me. I was working with the six-year-olds, the real new riders. They were totally cute.

There was one little girl named Leslie who I especially liked. Her mother had gotten her all new riding clothes—big enough to grow into. She was so cute you can’t believe it. And she needed a lot of help. There were others, too. Max asked me to help Leslie, plus Natalie, Reuben, Mark, and Jessica. It only took us about forty-five minutes to get all their ponies saddled up and another ten to get them into the saddles and I’ve got to say, I loved every
minute of it. The kids listened to everything I had to say and they learned. They really learned. Do you have any idea how wonderful it is to be able to share something as neat as riding with beginners? They weren’t tall enough to put the saddles on the ponies’ backs and they weren’t strong enough to tighten the girths, but they wanted to know how to do it and they listened very hard. I liked that. Being the only girl with three brothers, it’s sometimes hard for me to get listened to.

My group was just supposed to walk their ponies in circles and Max had me work with them in the indoor ring while he worked on more advanced things with the older kids. Once they’d walked around the ring six or seven times, I could tell they were eager to get onto something else. I knew Max would kill me if I let them trot, but there are a lot of things you can do at a walk so I started them on it.

For one thing, there’s the jump position, also known as three-point position. It’s called that because the rider is supposedly only in contact with the horse at three points—the ball of each foot touches a stirrup and the hands touch the horse’s neck. It’s really sort of standing up just a little bit from the saddle and it’s a position you use a lot as part of other things—like posting, jumping, and sometimes cantering.

So, I got them all riding in three-point. When Max came into the ring and saw what I’d done, he was really pleased. The kids were thrilled at having learned something
new and exciting and he was delighted that they were all doing it so well. Naturally, being Max, he had a lot of ideas on how to improve it.

“Reuben, put your heels down. You, too, Jessica. And, Natalie, you’re too straight up. Lean forward a little bit. No, keep your back straight. Better. Yes! Mark, you should be looking straight ahead. Leslie, nice job. You’ve got it right!”

Then he turned to me. “You don’t need me here anymore, do you?”

And that was just about the biggest compliment Max has ever given me!

As soon as Max left us, I decided I should teach the kids a game. We started playing a sort of Simon Says—only of course, I called it “Stevie Says.” I couldn’t do any complicated things with them, but I did have them stop, reverse directions, pat their ponies, rise to three-point—things like that. They thought it was fun and it also reminded them that they’d really learned some things their very first day in the saddle.

I was having fun
and
I was standing up. I even forgot about how much my injury hurt, until I tried to perch on the fence. I must have made a terrible face and I know I made a noise because everybody turned to look at me.

It’s not easy explaining a bruised coccyx to a group of six-year-olds, but they were really nice and knew that it hurt me a lot. Leslie told me she knew a good doctor if I wanted one. She meant her father. Isn’t that
cute
?

By the end of the day, I was exhausted. But it was a good kind of tired. I felt as though I’d accomplished a lot and that’s a wonderful feeling. I walked home (no bike, of course) and as I went, every one of the kids passed me and waved.

“See you tomorrow!” they all called out.

I couldn’t wait for morning to come.

T
HE
FIRST
THING
I heard when I walked into the stable the next morning was Leslie saying, “Oh, Red!” and then giggling. That was even before I got to the ring. It seemed that Red O’Malley was teaching the group I’d thought of as “my” kids and it seemed that they’d already become “his” kids. I was about to offer to take over when Mrs. Reg called me into her office and explained that Red was too busy with the class to muck out the stalls today so she thought it would be a good idea for me to fill my idle hours with a pitchfork and a lot of manure.

I was on my third stall when Red and the kids arrived back in the stable.

“Oh, Red, that was so funny!” said Jessica.

“Yeah, you should have been there, Stevie!” said Natalie.

“Red’s a
wonderful
teacher!” Leslie said. I could swear she sighed while she said it, too.

Like I cared!

Red helped all of the kids untack the ponies. They did it one by one, traveling in a pack. All the while that this was going on, I was mucking out Nickel’s stall. That meant I was delivering loads of manure into a bucket, carrying it out to a pile, scraping the floor of the stall, lugging fresh straw and spreading it out in the stall. And then the minute Red brought Nickel into the stall, he produced a fresh load of manure. I know horses do that all the time and it doesn’t mean anything at all, but at the time, it seemed like a perfect comment on the worth of all my work.

I was about to throw down the pitchfork when Max arrived.

“Red,” he said. “I need you to ride out to the woods. Some riders reported that there was a coyote by the quarry. Can you head out there to see if there are any signs of it?”

“But Max, I’m about to demonstrate grooming techniques for this group.”

“Stevie can do that just as well as you can,” Max said, “and she can’t ride out to the quarry. Right, Stevie?”

“Right, Max,” I said. I was only too happy to put down the pitchfork (instead of throwing it down) and I was flattered that Max recognized my skills as a groom. Actually,
they are legendary. I’m known throughout Pine Hollow as the best hoof picker in the place!

Red tacked up Diablo and headed for the woods. I cross-tied Penny in the stable aisle and pulled the hoof pick out of my pocket.

“The first thing you do when you begin grooming is to pick dirt and stones out of the horse’s hooves.” I held up the hoof pick. “I begin with the front feet, like this—” I showed them how you pat the horse above the leg and then you run your hand down his leg so he isn’t surprised by the touch of your hand.

“It reassures them,” I said.

“That’s not the way Red did it when Reuben’s horse was having a problem in class,” said Natalie.

“Yeah, wasn’t he funny?” Mark commented.

Leslie actually giggled, thinking back on whatever it was that Red had done.

“I wasn’t there,” I said. “I don’t know why he did it differently, but this is the way
I
do it.”

That doesn’t sound very nice, I know, but I was annoyed. I followed my routine and picked the pony’s hooves. Then I started the grooming.

There’s a lot you can talk about while you’re grooming a horse or a pony. You can talk about why it’s good for the horse. You can talk about why they like it. You can talk about why you do all the things in a certain order, or you can talk about how often you do it or why you start at the horse’s head and work backward or why sometimes the
horses need reassurance and why sometimes they just stand still and love every second of it. There’s plenty to say and I didn’t say any of it. I just talked about Merlin.

“Every horse needs to be groomed. Every horse, that is, except Merlin.”

“Who’s Merlin?” Leslie asked. That was all the cue I needed.

“
What’s
Merlin is a better question. Nobody’s really sure whether he exists or not.”

“Isn’t Merlin King Arthur’s magician?” asked Natalie.

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe he’s something more, too. I mean I don’t really know. Red told me not to say anything about Merlin to you. He didn’t think you’d be interested. He’s probably right.” I know that wasn’t fair to Red, but he’d been stealing my thunder and I just couldn’t resist.

Before I said that, Reuben and Mark had been talking about how Penny swished her tail to get rid of flies. They stopped talking about Penny when I started talking about Merlin. Jessica had been gazing over to the refrigerator where her bag lunch was. She stopped gazing at that and started gazing at me. I just had to go on. Besides, not only am I the best hoof-picker at Pine Hollow, I’m hands down the best tall tale teller. I was just getting warmed up.

“Tell us more!” Leslie said. If I’d needed any more prodding, that was it. I told them more.

“If Merlin exists—and like I said, nobody’s really sure about that—he lives in the forest.”

“
This
forest?” Leslie asked, pointing out the window to the woods beyond the fields of Pine Hollow.

“Maybe,” I said. “
If
he exists. Anyway, according to legend …”
Legend
is a word you should always use when you’re telling a whopper like the one I was about to tell. It makes people think this story has been passed down from generation to generation and so it’s
got
to be true. “… Merlin was brought to Willow Creek by the old woman who lived in the house on Garrett Road. You know that big old house on the hill?” That’s another thing about tall tales. They work best if you tie them into something that everybody knows. This house was abandoned years ago and is about as creepy as a house gets. “They say the old woman was a witch—I don’t know about that—only instead of riding around on her broomstick, she rode Merlin. That’s how people knew when she was about to cast a spell—they could hear the steady clip-clop of his hooves!”

“The witch rode a horse?” Natalie asked. Her eyes were wide.

“Yes, a horse,” I went on eagerly, “but not just any horse—a magical horse.”

“What kind of spells did she cast?” Reuben asked.

“The
bad
kind,” I said. “They say that all her spells had to do with horses. She loved Merlin so much and had so much fun riding him that she couldn’t stand the idea that anybody else could have that kind of fun. One man had a young horse he really loved. She cast a spell that made
that young horse suddenly become a very old horse. The colt died of old age by the time he was three! Another time, there was a woman who loved to ride her horse at a canter. The woman cast a spell that made her get seasick so she couldn’t stand the rocking gait of a canter anymore.” “Really?”

“That’s what they say.” I shrugged. “Everything she did made it impossible for people to ride.”

“Like making somebody get a bruise on the place where they sit?” Leslie asked.

I hadn’t even thought about that. I mean it. It hadn’t occurred to me, but it was a really good idea.

“Maybe,” I said.

“So what happened to the witch’s horse?” Mark asked.

“Well,” I replied. “Nobody’s quite sure. According to the story that’s told around town, there was one little girl who used to bring carrots to Merlin when he was in the paddock in back of the old woman’s house. Merlin seemed to like her and the old woman couldn’t stand that. It was bad enough that a horse made the little girl happy, but it was ten times worse that the horse was Merlin.

“One night, the woman climbed onto Merlin’s back. She always rode bareback. It was Halloween, see, and the woman knew that the little girl would be going out in her costume and she was ready to cast her spell. She waited until the girl came to her house. She waited until the
little girl got up to the door, and then the witch and Merlin rode like the wind—right up to the little girl. The woman swooped down, picked up the little girl, and took her to the woods. The little girl was terrified and whenever she asked the old woman what she was going to do, the old woman just said, ‘Don’t worry, little girl. You’ll be fine. You just won’t ever be able to ride a horse again in your whole life!’ Then she cackled with glee.”