Riding Class (7 page)

Lisa turned and nodded. Even when riders looked as if they were sitting perfectly still on a horse, they weren’t. They had just learned to move in harmony with the horse’s movement.

“Well, that swaying exactly mimics the way your hip and leg muscles move when you walk,” Emily said. “Horseback
riding is the only therapy that moves your muscles in the same coordinated way as walking—and the horse does the moving for you. You don’t have to be able to move at all. Even paralyzed people get better muscle tone and flexibility. Some of the people at Free Rein have to be held on to their horses. Instructors ride double behind them and keep them upright. They don’t hold the reins or anything. Some of them have a doctor’s prescription saying they need to be on a horse for so many hours a week.”

“I didn’t know that,” Lisa said.

Emily moved to the other side of P.C., out of Lisa’s sight. “I’ll tell you about therapeutic riding,” she said, “you tell me about the trails. Where are we going to go?”

The Saddle Club’s descriptions of all the interesting spots in all the trails around Pine Hollow lasted until they were ready to ride. Then came a problem none of them had thought of. Lisa, Carole, Stevie, and Emily led their horses outside the stable, since all of them knew better than to mount in the low-ceilinged aisle. Emily saw Pine Hollow’s small, square mounting block, and her face paled. “Whoops,” she whispered.

The Saddle Club looked and realized exactly what she meant. “Could you use it if we helped you?” Stevie asked. They walked over to it and tried, but Emily couldn’t lift her foot high enough to clear the first step. Stevie and Lisa tried to help her, but the steps weren’t wide enough to
accommodate more than one person at a time, and Stevie and Lisa couldn’t push her up the steps. Carole held all four horses, who were getting nervous.

“What if I gave you a leg up?” Stevie asked. She had often helped boost some of Pine Hollow’s smaller riders into the saddle.

Emily shook her head. “I don’t think you could,” she said. “I can’t jump, I couldn’t help you, and I weigh too much for you to lift me all the way onto P.C.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Stevie assured her.

Just then the girls saw two familiar figures: Red O’Malley, Pine Hollow’s head stable hand, walking out of the stables, and Veronica, the head nuisance, pulling up in her Mercedes.

“Let me,” Red said quietly. He picked Emily up in his arms, lifted her high, and gently set her down on P.C. Emily, her face red, began to fumble with her leg braces. “I’m sorry,” Red said, “I should have asked if you wanted those off first, shouldn’t I?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Emily said. “Thank you very much.” She looked very embarrassed. Stevie undid the second brace and hung both of them on the fence rail. Emily got her feet into the stirrups, and The Saddle Club mounted, too.

As if mounting alone hadn’t been embarrassing enough for Emily, Veronica watched it all open-mouthed through
the window of the Mercedes. She stared at Emily as though Emily were purple and green and riding a donkey. Stevie turned in the saddle and glared back at her while they rode away, but Veronica was talking to her chauffeur by then and didn’t seem to notice.

As soon as they were away from the stable, Emily’s embarrassment vanished. She drew a deep breath of the fresh spring air and looked around appreciatively at the open fields. “We’re going to take the path along the creek,” Lisa informed her. “There’s a rock where we have picnics sometimes, and we want you to see it.”

“Most of the trail is flat, and in many places it’s wide enough that we can ride four abreast,” Carole added. “It’s really a pretty trail. How do you feel so far?”

“Great!” Emily looked totally at ease. The Saddle Club had carefully arranged it so that when they were riding single file, Carole led on Starlight. Emily rode next, then Stevie and Lisa. They didn’t want P.C. to feel that he had to compete with too many horses, and Starlight was a steady leader. When they rode side by side, they were sure to keep Emily in the middle.

The first spring wildflowers were starting to bloom. The air blew softly through the leafless branches and the short, newly greening grass. It was, Stevie decided, as nice as any trail ride she had ever been on. Part of the joy was being able to share it with Emily.

“Does P.C. feel nervous at all?” she asked. “He looks great.”

“Placid and Calm,” Emily said, laughing. “He’s P.C.”

They took a winding path through the woods until they got to the edge of the river. There was a wide, smooth place there, and Carole tentatively suggested that they try a trot. Emily agreed wholeheartedly. P.C. pulled ahead, steady and quiet.

“Good boy,” she said to him, pulling him up where the trail began to narrow again.

“I saw you use your crop on him when we started trotting,” Carole said. “I use mine to get Starlight’s attention when he’s ignoring me, but I know P.C. wasn’t ignoring you. Do you use it for a different reason?”

Emily nodded. “You might have noticed me using it when I was riding at Free Rein, too,” she said. “I always do. I sit comfortably in the saddle, but I really can’t use my legs the way you guys do. I can hold them still, but I can’t signal my horse with them—not very well, anyway. So I use my crop, not to punish P.C, but to tell him what to do.” She laughed. “I call my crop my third leg,” she said. “It works better than my other two.”

“That’s really neat,” Carole said. She was always interested in horse training. “Did P.C. understand that when you got him, or did you train him yourself?”

“Neither. My parents and I looked for a very well trained, quiet, happily obedient horse, and then we had him trained some more so that he would be good for me. The farrier who comes to Free Rein trains horses on the side, and he rode P.C. and got him used to being signaled with a crop instead of leg commands. Then the instructors at Free Rein put him through the training program they have for all the therapeutic horses—getting him used to the mounting ramp, getting him used to being whacked by my crutches—”

“Getting him used to girls falling between his legs …,” Stevie supplied, grinning.

“Exactly. It only took him a few months to learn everything. He’s so good.”

“He doesn’t mind that you don’t use your legs?” Carole asked. Carole had always thought of her legs as her most important aid. She couldn’t imagine not being able to use them when she rode.

“No, he doesn’t seem to,” Emily said. “We knew it could be done. I know a girl—well, she’s almost a grown-up now,—but she rides regular dressage and she only has one leg. She had cancer and they had to amputate the other. And there was another dressage rider from Denmark, back in the 1950s, named Lis Hartel. She got polio and was permanently paralyzed from both knees down. Then she won two
individual silver medals at the Olympics. She’s the reason the whole therapeutic riding movement eventually began.”

“Olympic dressage?” Carole knew she sounded incredulous, but she couldn’t help it. “Two silver medals and she couldn’t even feel her feet?”

“Cool, isn’t it?” Emily said. “I read that the gold-medal winner had to help her stand on the podium.”

“Is that why you like dressage?” Lisa asked.

“I like it for all sorts of reasons,” Emily answered. “I like the way it looks, and I like the way it feels. I like the way you have to really understand horses in order to do it well. And, yeah, I figure if Lis can do it, so can I.”

They rode for nearly an hour before turning back. When they reached a wide part on the trail, Emily suggested a canter. The Saddle Club was happy to agree. All of their horses were behaving well and they deserved a little chance to move out.

When they got back to Pine Hollow, they saw Red lingering near the gate of the outdoor arena. Since he was usually very busy on Saturdays, The Saddle Club guessed that he was waiting to help Emily dismount. They were right. Red carefully lifted her down, helped her fasten her braces, and handed her her crutches before shyly going back to his work.

“He’s really sweet, isn’t he?” Emily asked them as they watched Red disappear into the stable. “All the same, I
wish I didn’t need his help.” The Saddle Club nodded understandingly.

They led their horses into the stable. Veronica was grooming Danny in the aisle. It amazed The Saddle Club to think that she had been working on him for as long as they had been riding, because Veronica was better known for neglecting her horses than fussing over them, but apparently that’s just what Veronica had been doing. She’d pulled Danny’s mane and neatened his tail, and she’d cleaned him from the tips of his freshly trimmed ears to the edges of his polished hooves.

Stevie felt disgusted. How could any of them beat Veronica and her megahorse when Veronica was trying this hard to win? No matter what Max’s competition was going to be like—and Stevie was very eager to hear the details—Veronica looked like a shoo-in. The rest of them might be competing for second place.

“Pretty is as pretty does,” Carole hissed in Stevie’s ear. Startled, Stevie turned to Carole and smiled at the look of understanding on her friend’s face. She knew Carole was right. But Danny performed well, too.

Emily politely asked Veronica to move Danny to one side, so that she could get past with P.C. Veronica did so, but grudgingly. “Be careful!” she shrieked, as Emily’s crutch missed Danny’s hoof by an inch. “You’re scaring my horse!”

Emily pressed her lips together and kept moving. The Saddle Club could see that Emily hadn’t scared Danny at all. In fact, the only thing that appeared to make him nervous was Veronica’s screeching.

“What are you doing letting someone like that come here?” Veronica said next, talking loudly to The Saddle Club with both hands on her hips. “What’d you do, put her on a pony and walk her around the back paddock? Really! I thought that the whole purpose of that other place was so that people like her wouldn’t have to come here!”

The Saddle Club was appalled. They had always known Veronica was a jerk, but now she seemed to be taking her jerkiness to a new low. Even discounting what she was saying, she was talking about Emily as if Emily couldn’t hear.

Emily looked over her shoulder. “Isn’t it amazing,” she said in the same loud, rude tone that Veronica had used, “how some people can have a whole lot of money and still have absolutely no class at all?” Like Veronica, she spoke directly to The Saddle Club, as if Veronica weren’t standing right there. Emily winked.

Taking their cue from Emily, The Saddle Club marched their horses past Danny without saying a word to Veronica. When they got to the other end of the aisle, Stevie congratulated
Emily. “You knew exactly how to deal with her,” she said. “I’m glad you figured her out so quickly.”

“There’s a moron in every crowd,” Emily said. “Unfortunately, I’m used to it.”

“Unfortunately,” Lisa agreed, “we’re used to Veronica. Come on! Let’s have lunch!”

T
HE
S
ADDLE
C
LUB
and Emily had a pleasant lunch on the hillside behind the stables. Samson and some of the other horses played in the pasture below. “This is so nice,” said Emily, stretching out on the grass. “I wish we had this much space at Free Rein. I’d love to ride outdoors all the time.”

“Me too,” Lisa said. “I’m grateful for the indoor arena when the weather is bad, but I’d much rather be outside.”

“When I’m jumping indoors,” Stevie confided, “I always feel like I’m going to hit my head on the ceiling!”

The others laughed. “The ceiling must be forty feet
above your head!” Carole teased her. “You couldn’t hit it if you grew wings!”

“I know,” Stevie said, grinning apologetically, “but that’s how I always feel.”

T
HEY MADE A POINT
of getting back to Max’s office early so that Emily could find a seat in a chair instead of having to sit on the floor for the Horse Wise meeting. The room became crowded early. Most of the riders chattered excitedly about Max’s surprise, and he didn’t disappoint them.

Toot-to-da-doo!
Max blew on a hunting horn as he came in the door.
Toot-to-da-doo!
He strode to the front of the room and unrolled a small paper banner. It read in black marker:
THE FIRST ANNUAL MAX REGNERY JUNIOR HANDY HUNTER TRAIL COMPETITION
! The riders read it in silence. Then Lisa raised her hand.

“I understand ‘First Annual Max Regnery,’ ” she said. “That’s obvious. Same with ‘Trail’ and ‘Competition.’ And I understand ‘Junior,’ that’s any rider under eighteen. A ‘Hunter’ is a horse that jumps low fences with good style, the way a foxhunting horse should. But what’s a ‘handy’?”

Max grinned. “Anyone have a guess?” he asked.

Carole thought hard. “A horse that’s really listening to its rider is said to be
in hand
,” she said. “Is that sort of what it means?”

Max nodded. “That’s right. Handy hunter classes aren’t
seen very often in horse shows these days, but they used to be quite popular. They usually involved a course of fences, like a regular hunter course, but with some special instructions—for example, sometimes you had to trot over a fence instead of ride it at a canter, or halt and back up a few strides before continuing. Then there would be special obstacles, too—you might have to open a gate from horseback, ride through it, and close it again. You might have to ride your horse through water or over a bridge. The emphasis was on a horse that obeyed his rider at all times, under any circumstance, the way a true hunter should.”