Pony Jumpers- Special Edition 1- Jonty

by Kate Lattey

  Pony Jumpers

  Special Edition

  #1

  JONTY

  Kate Lattey

  1st Edition

  Copyright 2016 © by Kate Lattey

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  PART I

  -

  BECOMING

  There are moments in life that make you,

  that set the course of who you’re going to be.

  Sometimes they’re little, subtle moments.

  Sometimes they’re not.

  I’ll show you what I mean.

  - Buffy the Vampire Slayer

  TANIWHA

  Taniwha came into my life on my eleventh birthday, when we were still living in our old rental on the outskirts of town. It was just down the road from the meatworks where Dad worked, and on a hot day in summer, when the wind blew right, you could smell the slaughter pens wafting down the road. But on that day it was raining, had been raining since last night and was still pissing it down, and our blocked gutters were overflowing as usual. Mum had sent me out of the house because I couldn’t sit still, and I was driving her mad. She told me to run around the house until I was tired enough to be calm for five minutes at a time. I humoured her, running until I was out of breath, then keeping on until I collapsed, face-down in the long grass and soaked to the skin. I lay there, struggling to catch my breath and listening to the rainwater as it poured off the roof into puddles. But my mind wouldn’t stop racing, leaping backwards and forwards, struggling to grip onto a single thought for more than a few seconds.

  I heard a window open, and my mother’s voice. “Jonty?”

  I rolled over onto my back and opened my mouth as the rain got even heavier. Raindrops spattered my face and landed on my tongue. I watched the rain as it fell onto my face, blinking the water out of my eyes as I wondered where the raindrops had been, and what they had seen before they splashed onto my skin.

  “Come inside, boy, you’re getting wet.”

  I tilted my head back to look at my mother. Rainwater slid up my nostrils and trickled into the back of my throat.

  “Too late.” I lifted my arms and flopped them down by my sides again into the mud.

  Mum shook her head at me and started to close the window, then froze, staring up the road with her mouth open. I sat up, following her line of sight. My father’s blurred figure was visible through the wall of rain as he walked down the footpath towards our house, and he wasn’t alone. Trudging alongside him, head down against the rain that plastered his dark coat flat against his thin sides, was a small black pony.

  I was on my feet in seconds, running towards him, my tiredness forgotten. Dad stopped at the gate as I reached him, and the pony that he was leading stopped as well. He was nothing special to look at. Underfed and ribby, with hipbones jutting out of his shaggy black coat, he was short in the leg and long in the back, sickle-hocked and ewe-necked, with a big head and small eyes and a piece missing out of his left ear, probably a remnant from his younger days when he’d run wild in the Kaimanawa ranges. But I knew nothing about any of that at the time. All I saw was a pony, and as a kid who’d read The Black Stallion more times than I could count, he was an apparition, the physical embodiment of an impossible dream.

  Dad held out the rope that was tied to the pony’s tattered halter, and I took it from him. Even now, looking back, I can recall that first sensation of the rough rope against my hand, and the stronger, much more powerful sense of ownership and responsibility.

  “Happy birthday. Don’t say I never give you anything.”

  Dad walked away from me towards the house as the front door swung open and I heard my sisters’ excited voices, followed by my mother’s anxious one. I didn’t pay much attention to any of them, focusing only on the pony standing in front of me. I reached out to touch his dripping forelock, and he stood quietly with his head low. He was malnourished, unkempt and unloved, the furthest thing from the powerful black stallion of my dreams. But to me, he was already a thousand times better than The Black, because he was real, and he was right in front of me, and he was mine.

  I led him slowly forward, pulling gently on the rope until he was standing on our lawn in front of my family, all sheltering on the porch from the driving rain. I still couldn’t quite believe that this was happening.

  “Is he really mine?” I asked.

  “Your birthday, isn’t it?” Dad replied, before turning back to face Mum. She had one hand on her hip, the other one grasping Phoebe’s wriggling arm as my baby sister struggled to get to the pony, and her disapproval was clear to us all. “Don’t look at me like that, Nettie. Look at your son’s face instead, at how happy he is.”

  I grinned as brightly as I could at my mother to help convince her, but she ignored me.

  “How can we afford a pony?” she demanded. “We’re barely scraping by as it is.”

  “He didn’t exactly break the bank,” Dad replied, stepping up onto the porch out of the rain. “Swapped him for a couple dozen beers, didn’t I?”

  Mum shook her head, pushed my sisters inside the house and shut the door behind them before turning to face my father with her arms crossed. He sat down on the busted old porch chair and started unlacing his boots.

  “You bought him for a crate of beer?” Mum was angry, and I felt my hand tighten involuntarily on the pony’s halter rope, already sensing that I was going to have to protect this pony. And knowing that I wasn’t going to let him go without a fight.

  “Two crates,” Dad corrected her. “From Cecil, down the pub. He got given him to feed to his dogs. I went down to his place to get the boy a pup for his birthday, but I thought Jonty would rather have a pony so I talked Cec round. Right Jonty?”

  “Too right,” I told Mum, in case there was any doubt in her mind.

  The pony’s breath was warm on the back of my bare legs, and I turned and put an arm over his scrawny neck. She couldn’t possibly have wanted Cecil to feed the poor pony to his dogs. I shuddered at the thought, as Mum carried on complaining about the best present I’d ever had.

  “That’s all well and good, but horses cost money to feed,” she said.

  Dad scoffed. “Horses eat grass, and we’ve got plenty of that. He’s only small, he can’t eat that much. And if he needs more kai, Jonty can hire him out as a lawnmower, take him from house to house and fertilise people’s gardens at the same time. Win-win.” He pulled his other boot off and stood up, then put his hands on Mum’s hips. “You worry too much.” He traced the deepening line between her eyebrows with a fingertip, and she turned her head away. “Come on, Net. He’s Jonty’s responsibility now, and if he can’t figure out a way to feed him, nobody can. You ever meet anyone more resourceful than that boy?”

  I watched Mum start to smile, despite her anger.

  “I’ll take care of him,” I promised them both, and drew an X over my chest to make sure they knew I was serious. “Cross my heart.”

  I named the pony Taniwha, because he’d arrived looking like a monster from the deep, dripping with water from head to toe. And he quickly lived up to it, proving to be generally grumpy with sharp teeth that he used without remorse. He bit me, my parents, my sisters, the mailman…everyone was fair game. That little pony was rough as guts and wily with it, but I didn’t know any different. If someone had to
ld me then that it wasn’t normal for your pony to throw you off every time you rode him, I’d have thought they were just having me on. Dad had told me that falling off was part of learning to ride, so I accepted it as one of life’s inevitabilities. Although Dad reckoned that Tani was broke before we got him, now that I look back, I seriously doubt it. I had plenty of falls, but none of them were serious, and I kept getting back on until eventually Taniwha gave up and conceded to let me ride him.

  We went everywhere together. At first all my mates wanted to have a go too, but they could never get used to being chucked off and bitten and trampled on, so they pretty quickly stopped asking. I took my pony all over the place – up and down the roads, through parks and playgrounds, and down to the river to swim. True to his name, Taniwha loved water. He would go right under until only his nostrils, eyes and tattered ears were visible, then swim down the river for what felt like miles, with me clinging to his back and pretending that we were lost on a desert island, relying on our wits and each other to survive.

  I didn’t have a saddle or bridle, so I just rode him in his halter. None of this fazed me – if it was good enough for Alec Ramsay and The Black, it was good enough for Jonty Fisher and Taniwha. His steering and my balance were both pretty haphazard, but most of the time we ended up travelling in the same direction. Taniwha was capable of short bursts of speed, but was never a fan of the long gallop. He was also a master of the sudden stop and spin, leaving me to pick myself up out of the dirt while he took himself home, not always by the most direct route, which often led to many hours of frantic searching before I would find him in someone’s garden, threatening to kick their head in if they approached him while he was scoffing down their dahlias. He had a real thing for flowers, and he always picked the nicest gardens with the smoothest lawns and most manicured flowerbeds to venture into. If I tried to grab his halter he’d bite me, so I developed a technique of running up and vaulting onto his back while he was eating, then drumming his sides with my heels until he gave in and took me home.

  The problem was, Taniwha was always hungry. Just as Mum had predicted, it didn’t take long before he’d had eaten all of our grass down to its roots and started in on the neighbours’ taupata. They weren’t too happy about that, so I climbed onto my pony and rode him along the road, stopping in at each house to offer Tani’s services as a four-legged lawnmower. But to my surprise, nobody seemed too keen to have a pony living in their garden for a week or two, and I was starting to despair when I stumbled across a small lifestyle block on the edge of town that belonged to an old, retired farmer.

  His name was Murray.

  MURRAY

  Murray had farmed in Waipukurau his whole life, purchasing four hundred acres when he was a newly-wed and raising sheep and a family on it for the next fifty years. But his arthritis had worsened over the years, until his son-in-law had taken over the management of the property and Murray and his wife had moved onto the small holding in town, to give his daughter and her young family their own space. His wife had passed away a year later, but Murray had refused all offers of assistance, and was stubbornly going about his life in near isolation. He had a half-blind sheepdog called Sprout and a bright yellow canary that used to belong to his wife. That bird would sing its little heart out all day long, sometimes so loud it made your ears ring. Murray was always swearing at it and threatening to open its cage and let it bugger off out the window, but he never did. I think he loved it really, but he wouldn’t admit to it. He was a crusty old fella, but also he had two small fenced paddocks, and I had a pony that desperately needed grass.

  I made a decision. Don’t ask, won’t get had always been my motto, and I figured that the worst thing he could say was no. So I rode Tani up his driveway, tied him to a tree next to the house, and knocked on the door until the old man answered it.

  His thick wool jersey hung off his thin frame, and tufts of white hair grew out of the sides of his head. He scowled down at me suspiciously, then spoke in a croaking voice.

  “What the bloody hell do you want?”

  “My pony needs grass.”

  Murray squinted past me at Tani, who chose that moment to lift his tail and drop a pile of manure on Murray’s lawn.

  “Too blimmin’ right he does. You starving that poor bugger?”

  “He’s fatter than he was when I got him,” I said defensively.

  It was true. Admittedly, you could still see each of Tani’s ribs, but his hollow sides had filled out some, and his eye was brighter than it had been.

  “Don’t be too proud of yourself if you’re riding him around the place looking like a bloody scarecrow,” Murray rasped. “I suppose you want to put him in my paddocks, feed him on my grass. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, pleased that he’d understood so quickly. “Yes.”

  “Bugger off.”

  He started to shut the door in my face, but I put my hand out and held it open. I was only a kid and pretty skinny myself, but the arthritis that riddled Murray’s body had made him feeble, and he couldn’t resist me for long.

  “But you’ve got all that grass and no animals to eat it,” I pointed out to him. “What’s the point in having paddocks if you don’t have any stock?”

  Murray scowled down at me. “Do I look like I’m capable of looking after stock?” He held up a gnarled hand, the fingers bent in on themselves. “I’m selling those paddocks anyway.”

  “Well you shouldn’t,” I told him. “They’ll just build houses on them and then you’ll have heaps of neighbours staring at you all day.” I was guessing by the tall trees bordering each side of his property that he liked his privacy, and I was right.

  “You’ve got a smart mouth, boy.”

  “Sorry. It runs away on me all the time. It’d just be for a week or two,” I added quickly as he attempted to close the door again. “I can pick up all his poo and put it on your garden, if you want.”

  Murray frowned. “Anything that comes out of that old nag will be full of parasites and will probably kill my roses.” He looked at my stricken face, and relented at last. “Bring the pony over here then, let’s have a look at him.”

  I half-expected the old man to slam the door as soon as I walked away, but he didn’t. I untied Taniwha from the tree and led him to the front door, begging him in a whisper to make a good impression as Murray limped down off his front step.

  “Ugly little thing, isn’t he?” Tani laid his ears back and swished his tail, as though to say that he didn’t think much of Murray’s looks either. “He’s underweight, and his hooves need trimming. They’re far too long, look how badly they’re chipping.”

  “I know,” I admitted. “I’m saving up for the farrier.” Just another of the many expenses that Dad had completely overlooked when he’d bought me a pony. But first things first – Tani needed grass.

  “Don’t need to pay a farrier for something you can do yourself,” Murray grumbled. “Not if you know how.”

  I looked at him hopefully. “Do you know?”

  “Yeah, of course I do. But I already told you that I’m bloody useless these days.” He waved his gnarled hand in front of me again, but I barely noticed.

  “Can you show me?”

  “It’s not as easy as it looks,” Murray replied. “Not like cutting your fingernails. You’d have to put your back into it.”

  “I’ll give it a go,” I said eagerly. “If you’ll show me how.”

  It took me almost an hour and a half to do that first trim. Tani was uncooperative, Murray was as ornery as hell, and the work was a lot harder than I’d anticipated, but I got it done in the end. I wiped the sweat off my forehead as I set Tani’s final hoof down at last and proudly surveyed my handiwork. Murray’s dog Sprout lay on her stomach nearby, chewing enthusiastically on one of Tani’s discarded hoof trimmings.

  “Looks like crap,” Murray said, always brutally honest. “But you’ll get better at it with practice.”

  He got up from the
seat he’d had me bring out for him, and rested his arm against the garage wall for a moment as he regained his balance.

  “Do you need some help?” I asked.

  Murray’s perpetual scowl deepened. “No I don’t. I’m not a bloody invalid.”

  He pushed himself away from the wall with an effort, and started shuffling towards the house.

  “Thank you,” I said, and Murray slowly turned back to face me. “For showing me how to trim his feet.”

  “Hooves,” Murray corrected me. “Horses have hooves. Humans have feet.” He coughed twice, then glared at me. “So are you going to put him in the paddock or not?”

  Murray ended up teaching me a lot more than just how to trim Tani’s hooves. When I turned up to ride the next day, I spent over an hour trying to catch my pony, but he wouldn’t have a bar of me. Murray came out and laughed at us for a while before fetching a long rope and helping me chase Tani into a corner of the paddock, then strung the rope across in front of him.

  “Now go get him, but be quick about it,” Murray snapped, and I hurried forward, leaving him holding the end of the rope shakily in his gnarled hand. Tani looked at me suspiciously as I approached him with the halter, snorted, spun around and jumped over the rope. As he took off across the paddock with his tail in the air, I remember turning to Murray with my mouth open.

  “He can jump!”

  Murray had been swearing at Taniwha’s backside as he romped off across the paddock, and he turned around and gave me an odd look.

  “I suppose that’s one way to look at it.”

  It took us another hour and a half to finally catch Taniwha. After that, I left his halter on in the paddock, although there were still plenty of days when I couldn’t catch him, halter or not. Murray helped out by bribing him with kitchen scraps, training him to come to get them whenever he whistled. Once I’d learned to whistle – it didn’t come naturally and took heaps of practice – it made the catching process a lot quicker.