Riding Class (9 page)

“No,” said Stevie. The other three looked at her. “No, Lisa, not right away. We’re not going to go back to Pine Hollow and say, ‘Max, Veronica was mean to Emily, so she’s going to ride in the handy.’ Think about how that will sound.”

Lisa grimaced. “You’re right,” she said. “Max won’t really understand. He’ll think we’re just—”

“Whining,” Stevie concluded. “Going off half-cocked. Remember, I’ve got a lifetime’s experience dealing with three brothers and sibling warfare. What we need to do is work on our own until we’re all the way ready. Then we’ll tell Max.”

“I’ll wait to tell my mother, too,” Emily said, agreeing with Stevie. “She’s not as into revenge as my father is.”

S
TEVIE
’
S PARENTS WERE
lawyers, so they had conference calling on their home phone. Stevie used it later that night to call the rest of The Saddle Club and Emily all at once.

“Time to talk strategy,” Stevie said. “Let’s think about what Max said we’d need to do at the stations on the trail. Then we can think about how to teach P.C.”

“He said he wasn’t going to tell us exactly what the stations were,” Emily said.

“Yes.” Lisa thought hard. “But Max is fair, and he wants us to listen to him, so what he says is usually important. He gives out a lot of hints. The stations probably won’t be exactly like what he said, but if we know how to do what he said, we should be in good shape.”

“P.C. really felt comfortable on the trail,” Emily offered.

“He looked comfortable,” Carole agreed.

“Practically Comatose,” continued Emily. The Saddle Club laughed.

“If you come over on Friday, we can practice creek crossings,” Carole said. “But he didn’t seem spooked by being near the stream today.”

“He wasn’t. I don’t think that walking backward or forward through any kind of obstacle is going to bother him, either. We do a lot of that at Free Rein already, and he’s used to having all kinds of crazy stuff around him. I mean, there’s even a basketball hoop in the arena. It’s the jumping that’s worrying me.”

“Can you hold your two-point position at a trot?” Carole asked. Stevie snorted. Sometimes Carole already sounded like a riding instructor.

“Yeah, if I grab mane,” Emily said. “Remember? I did it in the ring when you were watching me. That’s how P.C. and I warm up.”

“Then you’ll be able to jump okay,” Carole assured her. “It’s only going to be a single fence, and the hardest part about jumping is putting all the fences in a course together. Plus, whatever you might jump has to be small enough for the little kids to clear it easily on their ponies, and P.C.’s a pretty good-sized horse. He’ll probably even be able to step over the fence. All we’ll have to do is teach him to get to the other side.”

“We can do that,” Emily said. “He learns fast.”

“How about opening a gate?” Stevie asked.

“Will I be allowed to use my crop?”

“Sure,” Stevie said. “I use mine when I open a gate from horseback. It isn’t hard. I’ll show you.”

“Sounds great.”

“Uh-oh,” Lisa said.

“What?” asked the other three at once.

“I just remembered something else Max said. He said he might make us dismount and remount our horses.”

There was a moment of dead silence as each girl remembered Red lifting Emily onto P.C. that morning.

“That’s a stupid test,” Stevie said angrily.

“No, it isn’t,” Carole replied. “I’m not trying to argue with you, Stevie, but it’s in the horse show rule book as one of the tests judges can ask even very young riders. Every rider ought to know how to get on and off her horse properly. It’s a fair test.”

“But I can’t do it,” Emily said. “Not without a ramp.”

The sadness in her voice made Lisa’s heart sink. “Maybe Max won’t ask that one,” she suggested.

“If he does I’ll be disqualified,” Emily said.

“Wait!” Stevie cut in suddenly. “I’ve got an idea!”

“I
T
’
S THE GIRLS
from Pine Hollow!” Ms. Payne sounded delighted to see them. “I talked to Max over the weekend—he told me you call yourselves The Saddle Club. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Stevie said, speaking for all of them. “We told Emily we’d help her work on a few things with P.C. But we’d like to help out with the other lesson first, if that’s okay.”

“Sounds great, girls.” Ms. Payne smiled warmly. “I’m glad you’re here. Why don’t you help the same riders you helped last week?”

They went into the stable. Emily wasn’t there yet, but
Carole paused to pat P.C. before she looked for Joshua and the volunteers helping him. Joshua rode a different horse this week, but he hadn’t changed. He didn’t look at Carole, not even when she spoke to him, and he didn’t make a sound. He did a thorough job of grooming his horse, however, and he put on the saddle without help. Carole watched him a little sadly. She wondered if they would ever know whether he liked riding. She wondered if Joshua even knew.

T
OBY WAS HAVING
trouble counting. “How many hocks?” Tom asked him as Lisa joined them in the stall. This was a hard question, Lisa realized, because it meant that Toby had to understand what hocks were as well as be able to count them.

“Three,” Toby guessed. Lisa knew it was a guess, because horses were symmetrical—all their parts came in pairs. They didn’t have three of anything.

“Show me a hock, Toby,” Tom suggested. Toby correctly pointed to the bottom part of the horse’s leg, what Lisa might have described as an ankle before she started riding. “Good! How many hocks?”

“Five,” said Toby.

“Four,” Lisa stage-whispered.

“Four,” agreed Tom. “Let’s count them together, Toby: one, two, three, four.”

“Four.”

“Okay, Toby, here’s an even harder one. How many hairs on the horse?”

Toby looked at Lisa, a big grin on his face. “About a bazillion,” Lisa whispered.

“About a bazillion!”

“H
ELLO
, C
LAIRE
,” S
TEVIE
said as she came up to the little girl. “It’s me, Stevie.”

Claire turned her face in the direction of Stevie’s voice. “Who’s Stevie?” she asked.

“I helped you last week.” Stevie tried not to feel disappointed. She’d only met Claire once, after all.

“Stevie’s my friend,” called out a voice Stevie knew.

“Oh, hi, Emily!” Claire knew Emily’s voice, too. “What’s P.C. stand for today?”

“Politically Correct,” Emily answered, grinning at Stevie.

Claire frowned. “What’s that mean?”

“Never mind,” Emily said.

C
AROLE CONTINUED TO WATCH
Joshua throughout the lesson. Once, just once, she thought she saw the expression on his face change—he didn’t smile, but for an instant he looked lighthearted. Carole was glad.

Claire trotted without being afraid, and Toby correctly
counted the number of strides his horse took on the short side of the arena. It was a very good lesson.

E
MILY HAD FULLY
tacked P.C. by the time the lesson was finished. Lisa held P.C. near the ramp while she mounted, and Stevie and Carole pulled some ground poles and used them to outline an L-shaped pattern in the center of the ring. Emily warmed P.C. up at a trot and a canter. Then she asked P.C. to walk through the L. He did it happily.

Emily halted him and asked him to walk backward through the L. This was harder: Most horses don’t like to back up, because it makes them nervous not to be able to see where they are going. P.C. listened to Emily carefully and backed through the L obediently. The Saddle Club was especially impressed with the way he swung his hindquarters over when Emily tapped them with her crop.

“When I tap him high on the hip, it means ‘over,’ ” Emily explained. “When I do a sort of fluttery thing behind my leg, that means ‘trot,’ and a firmer tap behind my leg means ‘canter.’ ”

“Let’s try a more complicated figure,” Carole suggested. She set up a sort of open cross. Emily rode P.C. into the middle, and from there they could go in any one of three directions. P.C. had to listen to Emily instead of choosing a route on his own. Again, he did very well, walking both backward and forward.

Emily patted him and let him trot around the ring a few times to reward him for concentrating so hard on the patterns. Meanwhile, The Saddle Club used a pair of small stepladders to create jump standards in the center of the ring.

“Walk him through the standards first,” Carole told Emily. “See if they bother him.”

They didn’t. Next, Carole set a pole on the ground between the standards. P.C. stepped over it solemnly. “We do a lot of work over poles,” Emily told them. “He knows to walk over them, and he doesn’t get nervous.”

They added poles on either side of the stepladder standards so that P.C. had to walk over several of them. While he went through them, Emily held herself in her two-point position. After P.C. had walked through the poles several times, Stevie and Lisa stuck one end of each of two poles through the first rungs of the stepladders. The other ends of the poles lay on the ground. They formed a very flat X shape. The middle of the X was only a few inches off the ground.

“This is called a cross rail,” Lisa explained. Emily walked P.C. over the low center part. It didn’t seem to bother him.

“Good boy!” Emily said. She stroked his neck. P.C. tossed his head. Stevie thought he looked proud of himself.

Carole removed the ground poles before and after the tiny jump and had P.C. step only over the jump. Then she
threw her red ski jacket over the jump to make it look different and told Emily to walk P.C. over that.

“What if he steps on your coat?” Emily asked.

“It won’t be the first time a horse has stepped on that coat,” Stevie assured her on Carole’s behalf. “I’ve seen her do the same thing for Starlight.”

Carole pretended to be offended. “Starlight would never step on a jump!” she said. “He’s much too surefooted.”

P.C. didn’t step on Carole’s coat, either. He did snort a little and roll his eyes at it, but Emily pressed him forward calmly, and in the end P.C. went over the coat and rails willingly.

“That’s enough jumping practice for now,” Carole finally said. “We don’t want P.C. to get tired, and we’ve got a lot yet to do.” She glanced over at Stevie, who was humming to herself. Carole thought Stevie’s plan might work, but she wasn’t as convinced of it as Stevie and Emily seemed to be.

“We should try opening the gate first,” Emily suggested. “From what you told me, that might be hard for me to do, so I need to start practicing.”

To open a gate while on horseback, a rider first had to ride her horse alongside and very close to the gate, so that the gate’s latch was near the rider’s leg. The rider reached down and unlatched the gate; then, holding on to the gate,
the rider asked the horse to move forward, pushing the gate open at the same time. Then the rider asked the horse to pivot so that the horse would be facing the other direction but his forelegs would still be in the same place. The rider asked the horse to walk forward while pushing the gate closed, and finally she moved the horse’s side against the gate in order to reach down and latch it.

It was a tricky maneuver and could be very difficult if the horse wasn’t patient or didn’t want to walk forward into the gate. When The Saddle Club went on trail rides, they all practiced opening gates, but more often one of them just hopped off her horse and held the gate open for the others. Out West on Kate Devine’s ranch all of the horses were steady gate-openers. Belle was pretty good at it, and Carole could do it on Starlight, but Lisa still struggled when she tried it with Prancer. Lisa often thought that Prancer would rather jump the gate than wait for Lisa to open it.

Stevie explained the gate-opening to Emily in detail, then explained it again step by step while Emily and P.C. tried it with the arena gate. As Emily suspected, it was harder for her than for P.C. P.C. waited patiently while Emily fumbled with the latch, and he didn’t flinch when Emily lost her grip and the gate hit his chest.

“I’m sorry, P.C.,” Emily muttered. She tried again. After
several attempts she managed to walk him through the open gateway, but she couldn’t pivot him while still holding the gate. She needed one hand to use her crop to ask P.C. to turn, and she needed the other hand to hold her reins. She didn’t have a hand left to hang on to the gate.

“I need three arms,” she said, shaking her head at The Saddle Club.

“What if you held on to the very end of the reins, and held your crop in the same hand?” Lisa suggested. “You could use your crop without pulling on P.C.’s mouth.”

Carole objected. “If he decides to run off, she’ll have no control holding her reins like that.”

“If he decides to run off while I’m hanging on to a stupid gate, I’m history anyway,” Emily said. “I’m just barely keeping my balance as it is. Anyway, I can’t use my crop. I need to use it behind my inside leg, to get him to pivot away from it, and I need to hold the gate with that hand. I can’t hold the gate with my outside hand.”

“You’re going to have to,” said Stevie, after studying the problem. “Either that or use your inside leg to get him to move.”