Pony Jumpers 3- Triple Bar

by Kate Lattey

  I grumbled to myself as I rolled up my sleeves, turned the hot water taps on and shoved the plug into the bottom of the sink. Steam started to fog the window in front of me that looked out across our sparse garden. The lawn needed mowing, but that was another one of Hayley’s chores, so it wasn’t likely to be done any time soon. I couldn’t even remember the last time she’d actually done it herself, because there seemed to be no shortage of local boys who were willing to do anything to curry favour with her. It was a bit sickening really, but when I complained that she was shirking her responsibilities, Hayley just laughed and told me I was jealous that none of the boys liked me.

  What a lie that was. Aside from Bayard, who did like me and – even better – couldn’t stand her, the local boys were hardly worth writing home about. They were all loud and rude and thought fart jokes were hilarious, and they routinely fell all over themselves when a pretty girl walked by. I wasn’t pretty enough to attract their attention, and none of them attracted mine. No great loss there, as far as I was concerned.

  I poured dishwashing liquid into the water and watched the bubbles form on the surface, wondering if there was any possible way of getting out of riding Misty. Why had I agreed to it again? Maybe next time I’d fall off and break my arm, and be unable to ride at all. The thought was actually somewhat appealing.

  Mum came back into the room and opened our medicine cabinet, muttering to herself. I watched her reflection in the steamed glass as she fussed around, then left the room without even glancing at me. Hayley had always been the high-maintenance child, and Mum was always entering into the dramas she created, while Dad and I stood on the sidelines and watched. I was the dependable one, always where she was supposed to be, too timid to ever rebel.

  So I grabbed a saucepan off the bench, shoved it into the scalding water, and got to work.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I was back at the kitchen table eating scrambled eggs the next morning when Dad came into the house, clomping down the hall in his heavy gumboots. He stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at me.

  “Oh good, you’re up. I need you to ride back up the gully and see if you can find a couple more lambs. We’re two shy of what we thought we had. They’re probably buggered, but it’d help us out if you went and checked anyway.”

  I nodded, and swallowed my mouthful of egg. “Okay. Can Bayard come with me?”

  Dad shook his head. “I need him to help with the drenching now that Luke’s broken his wrist. You’ll be right on your own, won’t you?”

  I nodded, and Dad patted me on the head with his large hand. “That’s my girl. Go right up to Last Post and back down the far side, see if you can find any trace of them,” he instructed me before turning and clomping away again.

  “You could take Misty out,” Mum suggested to me as she passed me a piece of freshly buttered toast. The thought filled me with dread, and I shook my head quickly.

  “No thanks. I don’t want to ride him on my own yet.”

  “He’s perfectly safe,” Mum insisted.

  You ride him then, I wanted to say, but I resisted the temptation. “I’d really rather take Rory. Besides, if I do find one of the lambs and have to bring it back down, she’s much more dependable to carry one.” I shovelled more egg into my mouth, and spoke around it. “I’ll ride Misty later.”

  “As long as you do,” Mum said. She shoved the remaining eggs around the pan a bit more, then looked up the hall towards Hayley’s bedroom with a frown. “I’d better go check on your sister. See if her headache’s eased off any.”

  “Doubt it,” I whispered to Colin, who had snuck inside when Dad came into the house, and was now lying under the table at my feet. I passed him a piece of toast while Mum was out of the room, then finished up my eggs and went to pull my boots on. I added a windbreaker, because despite the sunshine, it still got chilly up on top of the hills, and pulled the door open.

  “Let’s go,” I told my dog, who bounded out of the house ahead of me, tail wagging in happy anticipation of another adventure.

  I leaned forward and let Rory canter on up the side of the hill. She dug her hooves into the soft turf and made her way steadily up, and I smiled and patted her neck. No surprises, with this pony. If I’d been riding Misty, he’d probably have bolted to the top by now, or bucked me off and galloped home. But Rory was dependable and sweet, and I grabbed a hank of her mane and stood up in my stirrups as she made her way to the top of the ridge.

  We’d already found one lamb. Colin had sniffed it out in the marshy ground that followed the edge of the creek, and I’d made no effort to move the corpse. Poor thing had probably fallen into the creek when we’d had that heavy rain a couple of weeks ago. When a sheep was immersed in water, their wool got so heavy that they almost never made it out, unless you found them in time. Sadly for this one, nobody had. It was one of the unfortunate facts of life when you lived on a farm. As Dad always said, where you’ve got livestock, you’ll have dead stock. Unromantic, but true. He wasn’t going to be happy when I told him though, and I dreaded the thought.

  I checked the rest of the ridgeline, but couldn’t find any trace of the other missing lamb, so I let Rory head back down the hill, planning to sweep the scrub at the bottom. Colin jogged ahead of us, his ears pricked up and tail erect. The day was getting warmer, and I unzipped my jacket and shrugged out of it, fastening it to the ties on the front of my saddle as Rory strode on, reins swinging loose on her neck.

  It was nice to be riding alone, but it got a bit boring after a while without anyone to talk to. My mind began to wander, and I wondered what it would be like if Hayley and I had been born the other way around. What if I was the older sister, and she was the younger one? Then it would be Rory being handed down to Hayley, not Misty to me. But I couldn’t imagine Hayley having much fun on my quiet, sensible pony. Maybe if there was no Hayley, and we had a younger sister instead. I’d have liked a younger sister. Jonty Fisher, who was in my year at school, had three little sisters, and he was always complaining about them. But then, he was a boy. It was probably in his DNA to find them annoying.

  Back before Hayley had decided she was too good to go to Pony Club anymore, we’d seen quite a lot of Jonty. Riding his ugly black pony Taniwha, always with a grin on his face and talking practically non-stop to anyone who would listen, zooming up and down the bending poles at lightning speed. He’d been a familiar sight at the local gymkhanas, riding hard and beating everyone – even Hayley, much to her disgust.

  But things had changed in the past few years. Hayley and I had moved on to bigger ponies and more prestigious shows, and Jonty had long since outgrown little Taniwha. He’d kept him around for his sisters to ride, but none of them seemed very keen, so Tani spent most of his days grazing around the old cottage that Jonty’s family rented from my parents.

  We called it the cottage, but it was little more than a shack. It had been built years ago for the farm manager that had lived on the place when my grandfather had to go fight in the war, and rumour had it that Pop hadn’t thought much of the man, so had put up the most basic accommodation possible. Devoid of charm, character and insulation, it was an eyesore that Dad had been talking about pulling down for years, until the Fishers had asked if they could move in. Jonty’s dad was one of hundreds of workers who’d struggled to make a living after the meat works in town had closed down four years ago, and he’d come to Dad last Christmas practically begging to be able to put a roof over his family’s head – even one as shabby as the cottage. They’d lost their house in town because they couldn’t pay the rent, and because it was Christmas, Dad couldn’t bring himself to say no. It was only supposed to be temporary, but they’d fixed the place up a bit, and planted vegetables and settled themselves in, so had Dad shrugged and left them to it. Mum complained about it, because they didn’t pay rent, but Dad said it didn’t cost us anything to have them there either, and would she rather they were starving on the streets? Despite that, I didn’t reckon that Dad liked Nath
an Fisher much, although I could never put my finger on exactly why.

  Rory and I reached a fork in the trail, and I turned her uphill. When they’d first moved in, Jonty had been excited to live on a farm, but he quickly made a nuisance of himself, strutting around like he owned the place and constantly getting in the way. After we’d come home to find him galloping Misty around the paddock bareback one day, Dad had told him to clear off and keep out of our way. Jonty had done as he was told, but whenever Hayley and I rode past the farm cottage he’d come out and pester us for a ride on one of our ponies. Hayley thought it was funny, and used to ride slowly until he reached our side, then go galloping off and leave Jonty standing on the side of the road, but I just changed my riding routes so that I never rode past the cottage anymore. Sometimes Jonty tried to talk to me at school, but I pretended not to see or hear him. I knew it wasn’t very nice of me, but I found his intense energy levels and constant stream of chatter exhausting to be around.

  The trail widened, then narrowed again, and I dug my knees into the saddle as Rory scrambled up the steepest part of the track. We crested the hill and I reined her in, feeling her sides bellow in and out beneath me as she caught her breath. This was the highest point on our farm, which we called Last Post, because it was where Pop’s ashes had been scattered after he died. From here, you had a 360 degree view of the farm, rolling out in all directions. The road was a winding grey ribbon, the sheep speckled the green grass, and on a clear day like this, you could see right out to the ocean.

  Rory’s dark mane lifted in the breeze, and I shivered, debating putting my jacket back on before deciding to get just carry on moving. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and took a photo, tugging Rory’s head up first and framing her black-rimmed ears and blowing mane in the bottom half of the screen. I set it as my screen background so that I could look at it when I was stuck at school, or in town shopping, or sitting in the truck at a horse show. Whenever I was somewhere else that I didn’t want to be, I could close my mind to everything else and bring myself back here.

  Rory tugged at the reins, wanting to eat again if she wasn’t allowed to move off, so I shoved my phone back into my pocket and clicked my tongue, directing her over to the Totara cross that Dad had carved for his father and halting next to it. I liked to bring Pop something whenever I came up here, a little memento from the farm that I thought he’d like. An early daffodil, a scrap of wool at shearing time, a cicada shell still clinging to a shard of macrocarpa bark. I dug my fingers into my pocket and pulled out a smooth, flat stone. I’d found it down at the river last week, and it was perfect for skimming. I knew Pop would like it. He’d taught me to skim stones when I was small, and it was the first thing I’d ever done that I was better at than my sister. She’d tried, failed, and given up, but I’d picked it up easily. I set the stone down on the top of the cross for him.

  “I miss you, Pop.” The wind swirled around us, then died away completely. For a moment it was completely still and warm, and I knew he was still there, watching over me. I let the feeling sink in and his spirit wrap all around me, until the wind picked up again and I rode on down the hill.

  I allowed Rory to pick her own way down, lost in my own memories of Pop, and the way he’d scoop me up onto his bony lap and tell me stories about what life was like on the farm when he was my age. How he’d get up before the sun to milk the house cow every morning, and would step in steaming cowpats to warm his bare feet on the way to school in the winter. How he’d had to ride his half-broke pony bareback, because his parents couldn’t afford a saddle, and about the time he’d decided to enter the show jumping at the A&P show, and had hitched a ride in a cattle truck. He’d chuckled at the memory of his pony’s head poking out the top as they drove, and how his legs and belly had been splattered in cow muck when they unloaded him at the other end.

  Pop always used to bring that story up when Hayley would start going on about how she needed another show jacket because hers was last season’s colour, and wanting to know why couldn’t we go to Pukekohe this weekend because seven hours each way wasn’t all that far really. Pop and I would roll our eyes at each other and he would snuggle me closer and whisper in my ear that I was his favourite granddaughter. He might have said the same thing to Hayley when I wasn’t around – I couldn’t be sure. But I was almost certain that he hadn’t.

  I was so swept up in reminiscing that I didn’t realise that Rory had deviated from our usual route until we were too far down the track to turn around. Instead of going back along the bottom of the gully like I’d planned, she’d taken the more direct route towards home and was now striding towards the road gate with her ears pricked firmly forward. We were now right opposite the farm cottage, and I winced as Taniwha lifted his head and whinnied a welcome to my pony. But it was still early, and there was nobody about. Faded clothes flapped on the line strung between two trees in the front yard, and a scraggly goat was wandering around on the lawn, trailing a piece of rope tied around its neck.

  I considered riding back up the hill, but we were almost home now and Rory had her heart set on going this way. Besides, Mum wanted me to help her get lunch made for everyone who had come to help with the drenching, and we both knew that Hayley was next to useless at coking, even when she wasn’t faking a migraine. So I leaned down and unlatched the gate, then nudged Rory through it, pivoted her around my leg, and hitched it back up.

  Colin had already crossed the road and was sniffing noses with Taniwha, who was leaning his broad chest against the sagging wire fence and peering down at my dog. Rory flickered an ear in the gelding’s direction, but didn’t pay him any more mind than that. She was never the most sociable of ponies, which I was grateful for. If I was riding Misty, he’d have already dragged me across the road and tried to start a fight with Taniwha through the fence.

  “Good thing you’re the sensible one,” I told Rory as I turned her towards home and let her trot on.

  We’d gone a little way before I realised that Colin wasn’t with us, and I raised the dog whistle that I wore around my neck to my mouth, and gave it a sharp blast. A motley blur leapt off the front steps of the cottage and came racing towards me, and I looked over my shoulder and watched him come. Then I realised why he’d been on the steps in the first place.

  Jonty was standing in the doorframe of the cottage, staring at me. He was dressed only in a faded pair of rugby shorts, and he lifted his hand in a brief wave when he saw me notice him. My cheeks burned red as I dropped the whistle from my mouth. It bounced against my chest as Colin reached my side, and I looked down at my dog, pretending not to have seen Jonty. I wondered if he was still staring at me, but I refused to look back, in case he was.

  “Let’s go home,” I told Colin, and kicked Rory into a canter.

  I’d expected Hayley to still be in bed, but I found Hayley at the stables, flinging a saddle onto Misty’s broad back.

  “There you are,” she said, sounding annoyed. “Take forever, why don’t you? I was about to give up waiting for you and ride Misty myself, but since you’re here I’ll give you a lesson.”

  My insides clenched up as I kicked my leg over the back of Rory’s saddle and slid to the ground.

  “You can ride him,” I mumbled, but Hayley wasn’t having it.

  “You said last night that you’d ride him. You promised. And if you think I’m going to let you convince Mum and Dad to sell him, you’ve got another think coming. It’s never happening, so you better harden up and get on with it. It’s not that hard Tess, you just have to have a bit of gumption.”

  I scowled at her from underneath Rory’s saddle flap. Gumption was one of Pop’s words, and I didn’t like hearing her use it. She knew that it riled me up too – it was why she’d said it. Hayley smirked at me as she slipped Misty’s bridle on, and he tossed his head and chomped at the bit. I could feel the strength draining out of my arms as I pulled Rory’s saddle off her back and slung it over the railing, then flipped her damp saddle blanket upside do
wn on top of it. My pony was fit, but we’d had a steep hill ride and it was a warm enough day to make her sweat heavily from her exertion. Not to mention the fact we’d cantered most of the way home.

  I took her bridle off and led her out to the hose that was coiled up at the end of the building. Rory twitched and shivered her muscles as I directed the cold spray onto her back. Usually I liked to take my time over hosing her off, getting all of the sweat out of her coat before scraping off the excess water and rubbing her down with a dry towel. But I could feel Hayley’s eyes boring into me, so I just ran the spray over Rory’s back and girth area, between her back legs and across her neck and chest, then shut it off.

  “Get a move on Tess,” Hayley grumbled as I searched around for a scraper. “Just let her drip dry – she’s a horse, not a freakin’ miniature poodle. She’s not going to start shivering and falling down if you don’t scrape every bit of water off her. Just bung her in the paddock and come get on this magnificent beast.”

  She clapped Misty’s neck, and the magnificent beast tossed his head and pawed at the ground. They were both as impatient as each other, and I reluctantly turned Rory out into the house paddock to roll, then walked over to Hayley’s side. Might as well get it over and done with, because there was no arguing with her. Never had been, never would be.

  Hayley grabbed my calf and hoisted me into the saddle before I even had a chance to say hello to Misty, and I shoved my feet quickly into the stirrups. They were set to her length, which was several holes too long for me, and I struggled to adjust them as Misty followed my sister over to the flat paddock that we used for schooling. Hayley had been bugging our parents for years to put in a proper arena, but so far that was one battle she hadn’t won, although it was only a matter of time.