32. Steeds and palfreys

Toying with the fantasy of riding Gus, I’ve been thinking how lucky I was to ride horses over the years.

A Nutmeg lookalike

I still fondly remember Nutmeg, the pudgy roan mare assigned to me during a weeklong New Forest horse camp (only affordable thanks to my dad’s American salary in the somewhat penurious England of the late 1960s).  And I still remember when we all switched horses for one lesson, and the lot I drew was General, a crotchety old bay who bucked me off so hard that my eventual return to Earth knocked (a) the wind out of me, (b) my glasses entirely off my face, and (c) my riding crop deep into the woods where it was never found again.  Being 10 years old, I bounced right back unhurt.  But I was grateful to reunite with sweet little Nutmeg for the rest of the week.  

In my late twenties, I took a liking to Junior, a quarterhorse that I rode for a busy friend.  Junior was nice but prone to youthful indiscretions.  Once, on a suddenly frosty morning in the autumn, he got, as they say, the wind under his tail, and he bolted with me.  The plan was a moderate canter, but he tore off at a dead gallop.  It was easy enough to ride, but the footing was rutted and tussocky, so I feared for our lives and limbs.  All my rein-pulling (and involuntary bellowing of “whoa!” into the roaring wind) was in vain; he never set a foot wrong, and he stopped only after some 100 yards, where a big hedge blocked his way.  


One summer day, as we were schooling in a sandy arena, I felt Junior’s knees wobble and bend under me, and before I knew it he was lying down, preparatory to a nice roll.  I guess the saddle was hot and itchy, so a back-scratch seemed in order.  Somehow I jumped off and hauled him to his feet.

A few weeks later, riding along a rural road, we passed a cow pasture.  Now, the very job and vocation of quarterhorses is to work cows, but Junior, we hereby learned, suffered from a phobia of cows, even behind fences.  When several cows lumbered toward the fence, his reaction was panicky whirling, which skidded his hind feet into a steep, slippery roadside ditch, which made him stand upright so suddenly that he was falling over backward.  With me on him.  Wearing, for impact protection, a cloth baseball cap. 

As my consciousness glided into emergency slow-motion, I realized that his rearing up was tipping me backward, and I knew that my pulling on his head would only worsen his tipping.  So I made a distinct effort to drop the reins and grab onto his mane — all for nought, because he fell anyway.  I was deposited smack on the tarmac, where, waiting for him to follow, I improved the time by hoping that I would escape being crushed or kicked to death and also by accepting that I had no say in the matter.  In a half-second, Junior crashed onto the tarmac too, landing mere inches to the side of me.  Like all horses down, he found the destination more disconcerting than the trip, so he instantly jumped to his feet.  It was in his scramble to stand up that I sustained my only real injury:  one thrashing hoof struck me just under the collar-bone.

Junior and I were both providentially OK.  My back and butt were bruised but unbroken.  To check on my hoofbeat injury, I looked inside my T-shirt and noticed that its interior surface had a circle of whitish powder adhering to it.  What the . . . ?  I climbed back into the (scratched and scuffed, and borrowed) saddle, and we rode home to lie down with a few ice packs.  Unshirted and inspecting my shoulder-front more closely in a mirror, I could almost read the brand name of the horse-shoe impressed pinkly into my flesh.  And then I tumbled (ahem!) to the T-shirt mystery’s answer:  a crescent of my skin cells had been ground into the inside of the fabric by the clomp and twist of Junior’s hoof.

After that little brush with death, I never, ever, ever rode a horse again without a proper helmet.

Lacey

When I moved to Saratoga, I put an ad in a local dressage newsletter, offering exercise for a horse whose owner was too busy to provide enough.  That’s how I met Lacey, a red-chestnut mare with a sprinkling of white polka-dots evenly distributed over her body.  (These, it turns out, were not signs of Appaloosa heritage but the leftover follicle damage from a bad case of hives or other skin allergy years earlier.)  Sociable, vigilant, and savvy, Lacey was the alpha mare in any herd.  More than once, geldings broke or jumped fences to get to her when she was in heat.  And she welcomed them.

When feeling her oats and needing to blow off steam, Lacey would snort and trumpet like an elephant.  On those days, we knew not to ride until after longeing her, and she always took the opportunity to rocket around at top speed, bucking and farting like a bronco.  Lacey had a taste for donuts and danishes, and she was cushy enough to ride bareback.  She was game for anything, and games were what her owner and I loved to play with her, especially after she was retired from riding.  Using her strong cow-herding instincts, she especially enjoyed chasing us: she would pin her ears and snake out her neck toward our escaping derrieres — just as Gus chases the beachball with a predatory twinkle in his eye.

As a noble mount, Gus is plenty strong enough to carry me on his back, but he’s so short that, as Barbara suggests, I might need to strap roller-skates to my feet.  Which reminds me of another horse tale, again from England.  Among the lesson horses for hire at my muddy, neighborhood stables was a minuscule Shetland pony.  Marybell was no taller than a very tall dog, but she was very much fatter, probably because she loved to be hand-fed fruit-flavored ice lollies and we kids loved to indulge her.  After business hours, when the staff rode and ponied the horses in small groups out to their turnout field for the night, one particularly lanky stablehand would always straddle Marybell, fold his legs up in front of him, and ride her off to pasture.

My guess about Gus is that he’d freak the hell out if I sat on him, and before I could dismount he’d eject me with extreme prejudice.  I’m too old for that nonsense.