by Kate Lattey
She set a round biscuit tin on the table in front of me with a wide smile. It was half full of large chocolate chip biscuits – my favourite kind. I was impossibly full, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I took the smallest one I could see. I managed to nibble my way through it, but when Belinda offered me another one, I had to decline.
“Sure?” she asked. “Go on, take one home for a snack later on.”
“Thanks, but if I took one home my sisters would fight over it and all hell would break loose,” I told her. “Safer not to risk it.”
“How many sisters do you have?” Belinda asked.
“Three, and all younger than me. They’re a pain in the neck.”
Belinda laughed. “I’m sure they say the same thing about you.”
“Nah.” She raised her eyebrows, and I grinned. “Well, maybe sometimes.”
When we got up to leave, Belinda put the lid back on the tin of biscuits and handed it to me.
“Take these home for your sisters,” she said, while I just stared at her with my mouth open.
“You sure?”
“Of course. I can always bake more. Give Dad the tin when you’re done, and he’ll get it back to me. No worries.”
I couldn’t believe her generosity. “Thanks,” I mumbled, taking the tin and holding it close against my chest.
Belinda kissed Murray goodbye and told him to come again soon and that she didn’t see enough of him and she was glad he had such a lively companion to keep him entertained, which I thought was a weird thing to say about Sprout, but then she winked at me and I realised she meant me, which was sort of embarrassing but good as well.
I fell asleep on the way home, and only woke up when we arrived back at Murray’s. Bruce offered to drop me off at my house, so I climbed into the front seat and gave him directions.
“That’s it there,” I said, pointing at our little house. “Thanks again.”
“Thanks for your help today,” Bruce countered. “I’ve got a couple more paddocks to bale tomorrow, so I’ll bring your share over to Murray’s after we’re done.”
“Do you need me to help you again?” I asked, my muscles aching at the thought.
Bruce shook his head. “Nah, you’re all right. But you did well today. You might have a future in farming after all.”
I stood on the side of the road and watched his tail lights until they disappeared into the night, his last comment ringing in my ears. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.
SADDLE UP
I was riding Taniwha in the paddock the next day when a small truck pulled into Murray’s driveway. Probably someone delivering something for Murray, or even more likely, a courier who’d turned up to the wrong address. I could hear Sprout barking from her kennel under the tree, where she was chained up.
I had just turned Taniwha around the top of the line of bending poles when I remembered that Murray was in town with his caregiver at a doctor’s appointment, and a moment after that I recognised Bruce, leaning on the fence and watching me.
I cantered Taniwha up to the gate, leaning back as we reached it and pulling on the reins. Tani did a sliding stop, his hindquarters tucking underneath him as his unshod hooves slid across the dry, brittle grass. I’d first discovered he could do that when I’d been trying to teach him to jump, and while we hadn’t made much progress in that department, the sliding stops looked pretty impressive.
Bruce seemed impressed, anyway. “You’ve got quite the gymkhana pony there.”
I frowned. “What’s a gymkhana?”
“It’s a horse show, with mounted games and all that,” he said, motioning towards the bending poles in the paddock. “The Pony Club hold them sometimes. You should look into it.”
“Oh.” I pulled a face. “I don’t like Pony Club much.”
“No?”
“They told me I needed a saddle, and got annoyed with me for falling off,” I told him.
Bruce raised an eyebrow. “You know, we’ve got an old saddle in the shed at home. I’ll bring it over sometime and you can try it on your pony, if you like.”
I almost slid off Taniwha in surprise. “Would you really?”
“Why not? It’s no use to me. Came as part of a job lot of gear that we picked up at auction a couple of years ago. It’s not flash,” he warned me. “But if you want it, it’s yours.”
My heart was pounding, and I nodded emphatically. “Yes please!”
Bruce grinned at my excitement. “I’ll have to dig it out. Might take me a few days, but I’ll drop it into the old fella sometime. Now are you gonna come help me unload this hay or not?”
I slid off Tani and removed his bridle, setting him free. He promptly spun around and trotted away in case I changed my mind, then dropped to the ground in his favourite dirt patch and rolled.
“I don’t even know why I bother brushing you,” I muttered before following Bruce back to the truck.
He unhooked the canvas sides and rolled them out of the way to reveal bales of golden hay. They smelled like summer and sunshine and hard work, and I stepped closer and breathed it in. Bruce grabbed the nearest bale and hauled it to the edge, then dropped it on the ground at my feet. I picked it up, the twine digging into my hands as he pulled another bale off the truck, then looked around.
“Where are we putting it?”
I led him to the back of the garage, where Murray and I had prepared a space a few days ago. We’d cleared the area, swept out the cobwebs and put down a couple of old wooden pallets on the floor, because Murray said that hay needed airflow and if you stacked it directly onto the floor it would go mouldy. Bruce seemed to approve, and we set to work stacking the hay. He could carry two bales at a time, one in each hand, while I struggled along behind him with just one. I kept silent count in my head as we worked. Two bales, then three made five, and another three made eight. Bruce kept going back and getting more, and I was afraid to say anything in case he realised he’d made a mistake, so I stayed quiet until we’d taken twenty bales out of the truck and put them in the garage.
“Reckon that’ll do you for the winter?” Bruce asked me as we surveyed the tidy stack.
“Yeah, that’s heaps!” I looked at him suspiciously, wondering what the catch was. “Did I earn all that yesterday?”
Bruce laughed. “Well, you did work pretty hard,” he said. “But to be honest, I’d have just given the old man as much hay as he asked for, whether you’d come along or not.”
“Oh.” I felt suddenly deflated, and Bruce clapped me on the shoulder.
“Don’t feel bad. You worked hard for a kid, and earned yourself about half of them.”
“Well if there’s anything else I can help you with, just let Murray know,” I told him earnestly.
“I’ll do that.” Bruce walked out of the garage and back towards his truck, stopping halfway to look around the garden. “Looks like the old man hired a gardener at last.” He glanced at me, and his eyes narrowed. “Or was that all you?”
I nodded. “I’m earning Taniwha’s keep,” I explained.
Bruce put a large hand on the top of my head and ruffled my hair, like I was a dog that’d done well.
“You’re a good kid. Murray be home soon, d’you know?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. He only left about an hour ago.”
“All right. Well, I’ll see him another time. Tell him I said hi.”
“I will.” I followed him back to his truck and watched him climb into the cab. “You won’t forget about the saddle, eh?”
“Not if you don’t forget about my wife’s biscuit tin,” he said with a wink. “I’ll bring the saddle round on the weekend sometime, how’s that?”
I grinned and nodded, and he waved to me as he started the truck, then backed down the driveway and drove off. I went back to the garage and climbed up onto the top of the hay pile, lay face down on the prickly bales and breathed in the sweet smell of success.
GYMKHANA
Bruce brought the saddle
around a couple of days later, and it fit Taniwha like a glove. I went into town and spent some of my savings on a bright red saddle blanket to go under it, and found a pair of low riding boots in the second-hand section of the shop. I hadn’t realised that section was even there until the shop assistant had seen me looking morosely at the prices of new boots and steered me in that direction. It was tucked into the back corner, half-hidden behind a curtain, as though the proprietors were ashamed to sell anything that wasn’t brand new, but it became my regular haunt. Pretty soon the staff knew to keep anything that might suit me off to the side, and often told me to just make an offer of what I could afford. I became quite good at bargaining, and ended up with a lot more gear than I would’ve ever been able to afford new, including a pony-sized bridle and a well-worn pair of jodhs.
But getting a saddle was my biggest triumph, and it completely revolutionised my riding, because Tani could no longer get me off any time he felt like it. Even during one of his tantrums, I found that I could stick on him, and he soon gave up trying and we started working as a team. At last I had a pony that would go forward when was told to, and not stop until I asked him to. I’d vowed never to use a stick on him again, and I stuck to that promise, but with the increased security of the saddle – and the invaluable addition of a set of short spurs – I tried again to teach Taniwha to jump, and this time my efforts were far more successful. When he could no longer get me off just by refusing, he gave jumping a shot, and discovered that he actually liked it.
Soon my pony and I were jumping bravely around the course of jumps that I’d built in Murray’s flattest paddock. During a trip out to the farm one day, Bruce had given me access to one of his old sheds, and I’d filled a trailer with oil drums, tyres, broken fence posts and wooden pallets to make jumps from. Murray had found a tin of pale yellow paint in the garden shed, and I’d painted some of the poles with what was left of it. I ended up with a course of six jumps that could go up to just over a metre high, although I was always experimenting with how big I could convince Tani to jump. Once I convinced him to attempt a fence that was almost as tall as I was, although we’d had several refusals at first and he’d knocked it down when he eventually went over it. But I figured he just hadn’t had enough practice yet, so settled for jumping lower jumps until he got bolder. It never occurred to me that Tani’s poor conformation made jumping high almost physically impossible for him – but it didn’t seem to occur to Tani either, and he routinely jumped boldly around fences far higher than he had any business clearing.
Then school went back, and my restlessness returned. In desperation, Mum enrolled me in the local Scout group, hoping they’d take me away on weekend camps to get me out of her hair. But the camps and the uniform cost more money than she’d expected, so my career in Scouts didn’t last long, although I did get to go on a couple of camps with them, which only reaffirmed my love for being outdoors. I was never happier than when I was outside, whether it was sleeping under the stars, or climbing to the top of a big hill and staring out over a wide, expansive world. The four walls of my classroom at school and our house at home became more and more oppressive, and in summer I took to sleeping on our back lawn at night, or on the back porch whenever it rained.
Mum had eventually given in to my teachers and had taken me to the doctor to get those pills that were supposed to help me focus at school. Although the teachers were happy with the effects, I hated taking them. They always made me feel like I was only half there, and I still couldn’t concentrate properly, only now it was because I was in a permanent brain fog. Schoolwork had always come easily enough to me – except spelling, which I’ve always been rubbish at – but soon I was struggling to keep up.
Taniwha was my saving grace, the only thing that kept me sane. When I was with him, I didn’t feel like I was going stir-crazy. Now that he was stronger and fitter, his whole outlook had changed, and he was as eager to run and jump as I was. He no longer tried to throw me off, and he often met me at the gate to the paddock, excited to go on new adventures. He was, in many ways, the perfect boy’s pony, and I loved him with fierce devotion.
But as much as my pony improved, I couldn’t shake the nagging voice that reminded me that I was the only one who thought Tani was any good. All those Pony Club people had dismissed him as useless, but I knew they’d been wrong, and I wanted nothing more than to prove it to them. So when I saw an advertisement pinned to the wall in the tack shop for a local Pony Club gymkhana, I decided to enter. I practiced relentlessly until Taniwha was as good at bending as Hayley’s pony had been, until he would fly over all the jumps in the paddock without blinking an eyelid, until he would spin on a dime and had perfected his sliding stops.
On the morning of the show, I got up early and walked through dimly-lit streets, past people staggering home from a night on the booze. I felt sorry for them, knowing they’d spend the day nursing hangovers, and weren’t about to go and ride in a gymkhana. I felt like the luckiest kid on earth, and they had no idea how jealous they should have been.
Taniwha let me catch him without any fuss, and I groomed him until he gleamed, then stood back to admire his glossy coat and well-rounded sides. His ribs were no longer visible, his flanks no longer dipped in below protruding hipbones, and his neck wasn’t upside-down and pencil thin any more. He looked as well cared for as any other pony, and I proudly tacked him up with his new red saddle blanket, which matched the red t-shirt I’d chosen to wear. It was late March, almost April, but the sun was reluctant to come out from behind the looming grey clouds, so I grabbed my old windbreaker and tied it around my waist, just in case it rained. Not that it was much use, since the waterproofing had worn off a long time ago, but I’d learned through experience that adults didn’t like to see you running around with bare arms in the rain. I’d never been able to work out why they thought it was better to wear a soaking wet jacket, but it was something else I’d learned not to argue about.
It took me almost an hour to ride Tani through town to the Pony Club grounds, but I left in plenty of time and arrived with twenty minutes to spare. There were people and ponies all over the place, way more than there had been at the rally, and they were all wearing Pony Club uniforms in various colours. But I rode through the gate with my head held high, feeling like a completely different person from the kid who’d turned up without a saddle, a helmet or a clue only a few months earlier.
Entries were being taken from the back of a horse truck, and I rode Tani up to the ramp and handed over my $20 entry fee – a vast sum of money for me, at that stage in my life. The woman taking entries looked at me sideways, but she wrote down my name and took my money.
“Where do I go?” I asked her, and she pointed vaguely in the direction of some kids warming up their ponies on the other side of the grounds.
I recognised Hayley right away, still on the fiery little strawberry roan pony, galloping up and down the fence line while her sister trotted sedately around in circles. Taniwha was already pretty well warmed-up from the ride over, but I gave him a bit of a gallop up the fence line as well so that he knew we meant business. He bucked a couple of times, but nothing big enough to get me off. I was cantering back down again when Hayley went tearing past me. I urged Tani on, but Pink left him in the dust, and I heard Hayley laughing as she pulled up, narrowly missing a kid on the lead-rein, who screeched in alarm at the sight of Hayley’s frothing pony bearing down on her.
Someone started yelling at us to get into our age groups, so I rode towards the woman with her hand in the air that was calling out “Eleven to thirteen! Eleven to thirteen-year-olds over here please!”
I’d been expecting to be riding against Tess, so I wasn’t surprised when she trotted over to our group, but I was disappointed to realise that Hayley was still thirteen, and that I was going to have to race against her as well. I was confident that Taniwha could beat Tess’s pony, and the other ones I’d already ridden against at Pony Club, but Pink was in a league of her own, and I knew
Hayley would be a fierce competitor.
Bring it on, I thought as we lined up in front of the judge. I’d gone there to prove myself, and what better way to do that than to compete against the best?
The first class was Care and Attention, and they made us all stand in a line and be inspected by a grey-haired judge. All of the other riders had plaited their ponies’ manes, were wearing correct Pony Club uniform, and had clean, well-fitting gear. The judge barely glanced at Taniwha, and I wasn’t surprised when the ribbons were handed out to other competitors.
I shrugged that one off, ready to get on with the games and not worry about looking good, because I knew that the odds were stacked against me and Tani there anyway. But the next class was Best Rider, and I found myself trotting Taniwha around in circle after circle behind Tess’s steady bay pony. Now that I had a saddle, I’d managed to teach myself how to rise to the trot, but I wasn’t exactly your classically correct rider, and Tani didn’t help me out by bucking when I asked him to canter. I didn’t fall off, but I was caught off guard the first time and lost both of my stirrups, so that was that. Tess won the class, and Hayley was second. I could tell that Hayley didn’t like being beaten by her sister, and Tess seemed more embarrassed than pleased about her win.
But then it was time for the Bending race, and I started to feel confident again. There were twelve people in our group, so the judge decided to run four heats of three, and the winners of each heat would go again to decide on the ribbons. Oblivious to any kind of strategy, I rode Taniwha over and lined up next to Hayley for the first heat. She looked over at me as her pony jibbed on the spot, eager to get started, and frowned.
“You can’t wear spurs in the games,” she told me, then called out to the judge. “He’s wearing spurs!”
“No whips or spurs allowed,” the judge told me. “Take them off.”
I pulled my leg up and started unbuckling the spur, but the straps were old and stiff and hard to get undone.
