That was the second time I’d been called an underdog and I wasn’t exactly sure I liked it but Dan came back out to the field I had been working in and helped me arrange the poles so I let it go. We put some in a circle, some in a bending line and some in the middle of a figure of eight.
“What’s all this about then?” he asked as he lugged the heavy poles from one end of the field to the other.
“Exercises,” I said. “To help Fury not rush.”
“Did Miguel tell you to do them?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Miguel hasn’t told me to do anything. He’s letting me stay but I don’t think he cares what I do. Whatever I do I can’t make the team if I don’t have a horse who will jump but that doesn’t matter now. I’m here and I might as well put my time to good use helping Fury.”
“You’re a good kid,” he slapped me on the back.
Not only was I the underdog but now I felt like one of the grooms instead of one of the riders. It wasn’t exactly where I’d expected to be this time around but life was funny like that. Every time you thought you were heading in one direction, it usually spun you around and sent you in the other.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Becka spent lunch telling me how Rufus was like a new horse now that he’d had his hair cut. In fact the general consensus was that all the horses were performing better now that they weren’t sweating to death.
“Maybe I should have picked up all his hair and stuck it on Fury then to calm her down,” I said.
It wasn’t hard to feel jealous that Becka and everyone else were getting top notch instruction from a world class rider while I was out in the field by myself going round in circles.
“Do you think she’ll be ready to come back in the ring soon?” Becka asked, sounding hopeful.
But I just shook my head. Taking Fury in there to work was just going to set her back again. I wanted Miguel to see me but not at Fury’s expense.
That afternoon I took her back to the field and let her investigate the poles on the ground. She sniffed and snorted and got all excited but I just walked her around until she realized that I wasn’t going to make her jump and then we walked over them on a loose rein.
“See,” I said. “You can be quiet.”
Only when I asked her to trot, she took that as a cue to go ballistic and jump over the ground poles. It took me the rest of the session to calm her back down and get her to the point where she was walking calmly over them again.
When we were done, I let her wander back up to the ring to watch the others. Miguel had them jumping a gymnastic line of four fences. The horses and ponies were bouncing over the black and white poles in pretty good form, although none of them seemed to have the scope that Fury did. I watched as Becka kicked Rufus down the line and she was right, without all his hair weighing him down he did look like a real horse and his black ears were pricked as he came to the end and halted. Becka saw me and waved. I waved back and tried to smile but it was hard to watch everyone doing the things I wanted to be doing. Like when I hadn’t figured out how I was going to talk my mom into letting me ride, before I’d got up the nerve to talk to Esther, when I’d ridden my bike to the barn and sat in the brush across the street, watching girls ride and wishing that it was me. Apparently not a lot had changed.
Miguel started using the jump field in the afternoons for the group and I thought that maybe Fury would be okay at least working on the flat while they were in there but as soon as they started to jump, she got all tense and jigged about. So Miguel let me explore the property while they all jumped on the grass.
It was bigger than I had realized. Much bigger than Sand Hill was. Most of it was undeveloped land and trails ran through the trees that we explored every afternoon. Fury seemed to like it. She was happy to walk and trot on a loose rein and a couple of times she even cantered quite nicely too. Becka was right. She would probably make a good trail horse but I’d felt her power when she soared over the rail and I knew that deep down she loved to jump. It was just that somewhere along the way, someone had ruined that for her.
It was windy the next afternoon when we left the group and set off for our ride with Jess’s harsh words ringing in my ears.
“If you only care about trail riding, why did you even come here?” she snapped,
“I don’t only care about trail riding,” I said.
“Then why are you still riding that stupid, crazy pony?”
“Jess is right,” Miguel heard us talking and came over. “I should have found a different horse for you to ride.”
“But I like Fury,” I said obstinately. “She’s getting better.”
“But not soon enough,” he sighed. “It’s going to take too long to rehab her and besides, what do you think is going to happen to her when you go back home? I have no use for a pony who only lets one person ride her and gets too frantic to jump anything.”
And I knew he was right. I felt like I’d been doing something good. Making a difference. That Miguel would notice how I’d done something that even he couldn’t do and reward me for that but instead, all he’d seen me do was walk a pony round in circles. A pony that at the end of the day he would never be able to sell.
We walked out onto the trail with tears streaming down my face. Had I really been wasting my time after all?
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Fury liked the trail and so did I and as the wind dried my tears it wasn’t hard to feel glad that the pony beneath me was happy. And the trail reminded me of home. I missed Bluebird. I’d texted Esther to see how he was doing and she said that he missed me but was happy hanging out in his field. If I could have brought him to the clinic and ridden him then Miguel would have seen how great we were doing. I bet none of the others had jumped four feet with their horses. Bluebird was a superstar and I bet that Fury had once been pretty great too before she got all messed up. I felt bad for her.
I tried to imagine who would get picked for the team. Jess would, she’d make sure of it. Even if it meant getting her father to pay Miguel some crazy amount of money, which was what he had probably already done to ensure that she didn’t have to ride any of the crazy horses. Becka had a good chance. So did Justin and Hadley. Lindsey, the other girl who was sharing our room, seemed to have some difficulties with her position. It was all fixable but I’d heard Miguel yell at her a few times that if he gave her a correction then she should apply it, that he shouldn’t have to keep telling her. If I’d learnt one thing being in the clinics with Miguel, it was that you should be a competent enough rider to know what he was asking of you and to do it.
We got to a fork in the trail. I’d taken the right path before because it was more open and inviting but today I took the left. I needed the distraction. Here palm fronds grew across the trail and smacked me in the face as I pushed them out of the way and they sprung back. Fury didn’t seem to mind. Her ears were pricked and I could feel her alert beneath me but she wasn’t panicked. There were squirrels in the trees, jumping from branch to branch above my head and dogs off in the distance, howling at something.
Suddenly Fury stopped and snorted.
“What is it girl?” I asked her, trying to remain calm.
The last thing I needed was her freaking out and galloping back to the barn either with or without me. I scoured the overgrowth for something she could have seen. If it was a snake then I would be the one urging Fury back to the barn. There were lots of things I didn’t mind but snakes weren’t one of them.
She snorted again and started to back up. I thought about getting off to investigate but if she started twirling around then I’d never get back in the saddle. I peered down, hoping I wouldn’t see something gross and slithering.
The long grass rustled and then parted. And out lumbered a large turtle. Fury splayed her legs, her eyes practically bugging out of her head but I just started to laugh. The turtle was huge, its shell a mottled greenish gray and someone had painted the number three on its back in white paint.
“Come on number three,” I laughed. “Move it!”
But if it was a race, number three had no intention of winning. He slowly ambled across the trail, stopping every now and then to look up at us like we were annoying him by watching.
Once Fury got over the fact that the turtle might at any time decide to eat her, she watched it as curiously as I did. Finally it reached the other side and disappeared.
“That was funny, wasn’t it?” I patted her neck. She tossed her head as if to say that it was quite a possibility that the turtle might have turned into a horse eating monster at any time. Horses were funny like that.
We walked on. Fury was happy to wander out on the buckle. As the trail cleared and opened up a little, I asked her for a trot and eventually a canter. She was so relaxed and happy that I let her canter on for a while, the breeze wrapping around us and carrying us on. By the time I asked her to walk, I realized that we come a lot further than we usually did. The left fork had taken us deeper into the property whereas the right fork just circled back around. There were trees and scrubby palms and I hadn’t noticed while we were cantering but the trail had disappeared completely.
“Great,” I said. “Think you can find your way back home?”
But Fury wasn’t a blood hound. When I dropped the reins she just stood there. The only person who had ever ridden her out on the trail was me and now she was just as lost as I was.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I’ll just bring up the GPS on my phone. Then no one will ever know we got lost in the woods. Plus if the worst comes to the worst, we’ll just ask someone to come and find us.”
But my phone had no signal and even though I’d plugged it in the night before, for some reason it hadn’t charged and the battery was flashing red. It was going to die any second. The sick realization of how stupid I’d been washed over me. I never should have taken the left fork. I should have stuck to the right. It was the one Miguel told me about. He never mentioned the left one and now I knew why. It took you by the hand and led you out into the wilderness where it left you for dead. I suddenly felt horribly thirsty and more than a little scared.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
I told myself it was easy enough. We’d just follow our own hoof prints back. But the wind that had been our friend for the whole ride had now turned against us, blowing the soft sand and covering our tracks. I pointed Fury back in the direction I thought we’d come and hoped for the best. Apparently my best sucked. We walked for ages and I didn’t recognize anything. Not that there was much to recognize. Every palm tree looked the same. I would start to believe that I’d seen something before but then when I got closer, I couldn’t be sure.
I told myself that Miguel’s property wouldn’t be that big. That if we walked in the right direction then we would eventually make it back to civilization but for all I knew we were going round in circles.
A couple of times Fury picked up a trot and I thought that maybe she had some idea of where she was going but then she would stop and look around, seemingly confused. She was no help at all.
I clung to the one hope that I would spot my turtle friend. There would be no mistaking number three and at the rate he was moving, he couldn’t have gone far. If I saw him, I would know that we were heading home. But I didn’t see him anywhere.
I knew that if we didn’t make it back soon, people would start to worry but how would they find me if I couldn’t even find myself? And the sky was turning dark. The clouds up above the trees turning gray even as I looked at them. Coupled with the wind I knew what that meant. I’d lived in Florida long enough to predict a storm when I saw one.
“Come on girl, let’s pick up the pace,” I told Fury. “We don’t want to be trapped out here when it starts to rain, right?”
So we cantered on for a while, only I didn’t even know if we were cantering in the right direction. For all I knew, we could be cantering away from the barn, not towards it. I made Fury stand while I checked my phone again. This time the battery was completely dead. I was an idiot. I went out on the trail alone without a working cell phone. I hadn’t thought they went that deep. I didn’t know I was going to get lost but regrets weren’t going to get me back. Only I could do that. But as the first fat drops of rain started to fall, I knew that I was in deep trouble.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
I had no idea if Fury liked the rain or even tolerated it. Some horses couldn’t care less but others completely freaked out. I sat there, gently stroking her neck and hoping I could keep her calm. It worked out pretty well until the thunder started rumbling. Then I knew we were both in trouble. With thunder came lightening and the last place you wanted to be in a thunderstorm was in the woods on the back of a horse.
I did the only thing I could. I urged Fury on. Even if I wasn’t going in the right direction, eventually I had to hit some kind of fence and then I could follow it around until I found something or someone. The rain was light, for now. I knew it wouldn’t last. It would turn heavy and nasty, a white wall of wet that would engulf us and I didn’t know how long I could hold everything together. If the worst came to the worst, I could always pull Fury’s tack and set her loose. She’d probably fair better on her own anyway. But it was the thought of her getting hurt, galloping through the woods in a frenzy and falling, that kept me on her back. And the fear of being alone. While I was with her, we had each other and I had a job. To keep her safe. Without that I feared I may fall apart.
The rain was light but the thunder got louder until it shook the earth and lightening lit up the sky, cracking like a circus whip. Fury spun in circles. I felt her body tense and knew she wanted to run but to gallop through the storm would be madness. It would only feed into her fear and mine. We had to find a safe place to shelter instead. But there wasn’t much choice. Then I saw it.
“Come on,” I urged her on.
It must have been a building at some point. A house or perhaps an old barn. But it had fallen down a long time ago, leaving behind a pile of rubble and a chimney that stretched up crookedly to the sky. Half a wall remained standing, only just higher than Fury’s back, it would provide us some shelter until the storm passed.
The ground was uneven, filled with bricks that had once been walls and the vines that now consumed them. We picked our way across them until we reached the wall and then I got off, finding my legs much shakier than I had expected.
I ran up my stirrups and threaded the leathers through them so that if Fury got loose, they wouldn’t hang down and snag on a tree. Then I pulled the reins over her head and tried to stay calm.
She was being really good. In fact she seemed resigned to the fact that she was going to have to weather out the storm with me in the woods. She turned her butt to the rain and put her head down. I crouched down too, trying to shield my face from the worst of it.
The weather had been warm earlier but the rain had brought with it a cold wind and I shivered in my wet clothes as the sky fell down around us. Every now and then lightening would strike and Fury would jump but she made no move to run off and for that I was grateful. I wasn’t completely delusional. I knew if she really freaked out then I would have to let her go.
As the storm raged on, I told Fury about Sand Hill and Esther. How it was such a nice, quiet place to ride and train. Then I told her about Bluebird. The way I had rescued him from a kill auction and how Jess used to own him and had messed him up. I talked about how glad I was that I had picked her name from the bucket and that she hadn’t ended up with Jess or someone else who didn’t understand her. Then it would have been easy for Miguel to dismiss her as unridable. I was pretty sure he wasn’t the kind of person who would send a pony to auction but I didn’t think he would keep her if she couldn’t be ridden. I wasn’t even sure he would keep her now. He already knew she wasn’t going to be any good if other people couldn’t ride her but he’d seen her jump. He had to know that counted for something.
And just as I was trying to figure out a way to buy Fury from
Miguel, the rain started to let up.
“See?” I told her. “We made it.”
She shook her mane and water flew everywhere but she picked her head up and looked around like I had at the wet world. Everything was completely drenched, including both of us and the tack.
“What do you think?” I asked, rubbing her face. “Think we might be able to find our way back home now?”
We’d survived the storm but that didn’t mean we were any closer to being rescued. At least people would be really worried now. They’d know that we wouldn’t have stayed out in the storm unless something was wrong.
“They’ll come looking for us soon,” I told her as I mounted. “We won’t have to spend the night out here.”
At least I hoped we wouldn’t. I didn’t fancy the idea of curling up on the wet ground while snakes and bugs crawled all over me. I swung up into the saddle, gathered up the reins and was about to ask Fury to start picking her way out of the ruins when a lingering lightning bolt struck a tree just across from us. Fury reared up. For a moment I was blinded by the flash of light. I grabbed her mane as she fought the sky and then settled back down. But the scent of something lingered on. Burning. The tree was on fire. And it was starting to fall.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
The tree was already dead. Had probably been for a long time. Strands of Spanish moss draped from its branches like laundry hung out to dry. Only now it smoked and sparked. Flames licked at the dead branches. Part of the tree had cracked in half and it was coming down. There wasn’t time to do anything but hope that it fell away from us.
It came down with a swoosh and a bang. Fury reared again. Smoke filled the air around us and now we were trapped. The tree had fallen across the only way out of the ruins.
I tried not to panic but it pretty much felt like we were going to die. The tree was on fire, the wall we had taken shelter by too tall to jump over what with all the debris that littered the ground. The flames were still small but soon they would engulf the whole tree. Once it was really blazing, we would be in big trouble. I could already feel the heat from some of the bigger flames.
Last Chance (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 6) Page 8
