Dark Horse (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 23)

by Claire Svendsen

  I wasn’t keen to run into Jess again so soon after the clinic and I couldn’t compete and keep an eye on my pony at the same time. I didn’t trust her and I didn’t want her on our farm. And the fact that we had less to organize meant that I would be able to ride all my horses and since it was going to be a home show, then technically I was allowed to win because all the riders were from Fox Run anyway. But just because it was going to be a home show, didn’t mean that the competition wasn’t going to be tough. All our boarders had entered and we literally had lesson students fighting over our available horses and ponies.

  It got so bad that Dad actually had to put student’s names into a hat and draw them out so that it was fair because otherwise students were accusing my father of giving his favorites special treatment and letting them ride the best horses. They didn’t know the truth. My father had no favorites, not even me.

  “Maybe you could let some of the more advanced students ride some of your horses,” Dad said as he hung up the phone.

  A particularly irate mother had been yelling at him because her daughter wasn’t going to get to ride her favorite lesson pony.

  “But I was going to ride them all,” I said, feeling a little grumpy about the fact that he’d even asked.

  “I thought you wanted to find Four a good home,” he said. “He was a summer project, remember? Well the summer is over now, you’ve done a decent job with him and I think it’s time to rehome him before you get bogged down with all this team stuff and don’t have time to keep up with his training.”

  “I guess,” I said because I knew he was right. “But Frankie and Dakota have first dibs on him, okay?”

  “He’s not the last ice cream cone in the freezer,” Dad said shaking his head.

  “I said I’ll let someone else ride him,” I said. “But I get to choose who it is. You know he can be temperamental.”

  “I know,” Dad said. “But he’s not a mean horse.”

  “No, he’s not,” I said.

  And I knew that we were both thinking of Nyx and how we had dodged a very dangerous bullet.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  I texted both Dakota and Frankie and figured that whoever replied first would get to ride Four in the show, if they wanted to. Of course Dakota replied within five minutes and Frankie didn’t reply at all. I told her to come out to the barn the next day to see if she was really going to be able to ride my willful Quarter Horse.

  “You’d better be nice to her,” I told Four as I groomed him. “She’s lost all of her horses. You could be her forever horse if you wanted and Dakota doesn’t really care that much about jumping so you’d just get to trail ride and play around. I know you’ll like her if you just give her a chance.”

  Dakota showed up in jeans and a purple plaid shirt, her long blonde hair in pigtails.

  “Does he go western?” were the first words out of her mouth.

  “That was all the lady we got him from did,” I said. “Not that I think she did it very well. He was kind of a wreck and he hates having his mouth touched so your hands have to be light as a feather.”

  “Well if I ride him western then he’ll probably neck rein and I won’t have to touch his mouth at all,” she said cheerfully.

  “I’ve been riding him in a hackamore,” I said. “And it’s helped. Just be careful, if you accidently grab onto his face, he’ll rear.”

  “I won’t,” Dakota said, rolling her eyes. “Besides, maybe someone taught him to rear, you know like a circus horse?”

  “I doubt that,” I said. “Just wear your helmet, okay? Because if you don’t ride him, my dad is going to put some poor unsuspecting kid up on his back at the show.”

  “You want me to ride him in the show?” Dakota said. “Are there going to be any western classes?”

  “Um, no,” I said, not wanting to point out the obvious, that this was a hunter, jumper barn.

  “Oh,” she said, looking sad.

  “But there is the costume class,” I said. “And you know how they have haunted houses? Well we’re having a haunted pumpkin patch that you can ride through.”

  “Well that sounds cool,” Dakota said. “Let’s do this Four.”

  She put her heavy western saddle on my gray horse and the hackamore. I tacked up Arion, my other gray. Together we rode out onto the trail with our two ghost horses. Four’s ears flicked back and forth as he paid attention to Dakota and I paid attention to him. I was on high alert, ready to reach out and grab his reins if he started to rear. But Dakota was used to riding western, her reins long and slack and Four seemed to like that. Maybe it had been wrong of me to try and force him to be an English riding horse after all.

  “Shall we trot?” Dakota asked.

  I nodded and we trotted through the trees and when we got to the clearing, Four began to canter. Usually by now he’d be fussing as I tried to get him up off his forehand but Dakota didn’t care. She let him canter along with his head down like a western pleasure horse and the grin on her face and the happy look on his told me that this was a match made in heaven.

  “He’s so easy to ride,” Dakota gushed as we came back to a walk. “It’s like sitting on a cloud.”

  “Not when I ride him,” I said with a grin. “But I think he likes you.”

  “I like him too,” she said, patting his neck. “And I know you want me to have him but how am I supposed to pay for him?”

  I thought for a while. Four was a summer project. A summer resale project. The money I was supposed to make from selling him would go towards another horse that I would train and then resell. I couldn’t exactly go around giving horses away for free if I wanted to make a living at it. But when it came down to it really he was a rescue. We’d pulled him out of those horrible conditions and the woman who numbered her horses instead of naming them and the fact that we had given him a better home and a better life was more important than money, even though I wasn’t quite sure Dad would see it that way.

  “Well how about a free lease for now?” I said. “You pay for his upkeep like you did with Lucy but you won’t have to pay me anything. And maybe your grandparents will come into some money and then you can buy him.”

  “What, like if they win the lottery?” Dakota said. “Fat chance of that.”

  I was thinking more along the lines of her father’s life insurance money but I didn’t tell her that. I knew he was in some experimental cancer trial and at first the results had been good but then they hadn’t been so good. He was hanging on but from what I’d heard it didn’t really seem like he was going to spontaneously recover. I felt sorry for Dakota. That was why I’d wanted to help her and the money would come one way or another but at least Four would have a good home where someone would ride him and love him and I’d have more time to ride my other horses without feeling guilty.

  “Do you think there are bears out here?” she said as we made our way back to the barn.

  “No, why?” I replied, wondering if Mickey had been talking even though I’d made her promise not to.

  “Didn’t you hear about the bear hunt?” Dakota said. “My uncle got a license.”

  “To shoot bears?” I said, feeling sick. “That’s horrible.”

  “Why?” she said. “There are too many of them. They have to cull the population.”

  “But they are not hurting anyone,” I said. “They deserve to be left alone.”

  “In Texas we went hunting all the time,” she said. “Deer and wild hogs and birds. I shot a turkey once and we ate it for Thanksgiving.”

  “Can you just stop talking now,” I said, feeling distinctly like I was going to throw up.

  “It’s a part of life.” Dakota shrugged. “You eat meat, don’t you?”

  “Yes but I don’t like to think about the fact that someone actually killed it while I’m eating it.”

  “Maybe you should be a vegetarian then,” she said.

  “Maybe I should.”

  Because all I could see in my mind was the momma bea
r and her baby cubs and some big burly man walking up to them with a shotgun, spitting into the long, dry grass and shooting them in cold blood when they hadn’t even done anything wrong. And now that I knew Dakota thought that was okay I wanted to take back every word I’d said about letting her have Four.

  But later, as she gave him a carrot and hugged his neck when she thought no one was looking, I knew that her opinion on hunting didn’t have any reflection on her love of horses and how she cared for them. At least I hoped that it didn’t. And Four was staying at Fox Run anyway so I’d be keeping a close eye on him and if Dakota’s uncle came snooping around I was going to tell him to buzz right off. There was nothing for him to see here. There was no way that I was going to let anyone walk into my woods and kill my bears. It just wasn’t going to happen. I had to keep them safe and that meant the less people who knew about them the better.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  The next morning I tacked up Hashtag and took him out on the trail. I had to check on the bears and besides, he needed the work. Of all my horses, he was the one who had been the most neglected and now that Dakota would be riding Four, I had more time in my schedule for the once fabulous jumper that used to belong to Jess.

  The big bay horse seemed happy to step out into the cool morning. The sun was bright and the leaves were dripping with dew. He walked eagerly forward and I patted his neck, feeling the thick hair beneath my fingers.

  “I need to clip you when we get back to the barn, you woolly monster,” I told him.

  His ears flicked back as he listened to my voice. He was a willing horse and seemed to have settled back into life at Fox Run as though he’d never left but just like I’d done with Nyx, I felt curious about his life away from us. What had Jess done to make the horse refuse to jump? How had she ruined him so horribly? At least he was starting to trust me again. We’d jumped in the ring and the field and even though I’d been jumping him in the hackamore, today I had his regular bridle and bit on, knowing that if something spooked him out on the trail, I’d need a decent set of brakes. After all I hadn’t brought him out here much other than to jump and we hadn’t been very deep into the woods so I didn’t know if he was going to behave or if seeing the bears would blow his mind. If we saw them at all.

  I’d spent the previous night doing research on the bear hunt instead of school work. It wasn’t fair. There were over a million alligators but there were only three thousand black bears in Florida. It was hardly like they were lurking around every corner. And over three thousand people had paid one hundred dollars to get a license. What if they all shot one? There were supposed to be limits but the hunters were on the honor system. What if some of them had no honor? Then there would be no more bears. And it started this weekend. Maybe I could set up camp in the woods and protect the bears.

  Hashtag and I crossed the clearing and turned left, away from the usual path and down the one that was less trodden. I looked behind, worried that I was leaving tracks for bear murderers to follow. When we reached the hollow, the bears weren’t there. I could see claw marks on the tree that the bear cubs had played around and was sure that up above was the branch where the momma had hung out watching us.

  We stood there for a while and I listened for anything. A rustling in the bushes. The sound of a bear coming towards us. Hashtag looked around too, his ears swiveling back and forth but then he got bored and tried to pull his head down to eat the grass and I pulled it back up and turned for home.

  “Please stay safe,” I whispered to the bears. “Hide yourselves this weekend. Don’t come out and play.”

  Back at the barn Dad was already setting up stuff for the show.

  “Where were you?” he said.

  “Out on the trail,” I replied.

  “Well I don’t want you wandering out there this weekend,” he said. “You know that there will be hunters around.”

  “It’s private property,” I said. “They can’t just come on and shoot things, can they?”

  “Its miles and miles of natural trails and woods. How would we even know if they did?” Dad said.

  “But can’t we stop them?” I said desperately.

  “Look, we have enough to focus on without you flipping out about this,” Dad said. “Do you want our Halloween show to be a success or not because it’s kind of important that it is. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but with Missy leaving, things are kind of falling apart here.”

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked up at me. There was desperation in his eyes. I hadn’t seen it there before. He was worried and I should have seen it all along. Missy had a big following of hunter riders who trained with her and now she was gone they were left hanging in limbo until Missy came back or we hired someone else. And they weren’t going to hang out forever. Soon they’d move to other barns.

  “What do you want me to do?” I jumped off Hashtag and ran up my stirrups.

  “Help me,” he said. “With everything.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  Mickey came out and we spent the day dragging poles and standards around and decorating everything with spiders and cobwebs.

  “You know,” Mickey said, rubbing her back after lugging a particularly heavy pumpkin. “If you’d just not cleaned for a month then we would have only had to do half the work.”

  “Yes, I’m sure the boarders would have been thrilled that actual spiders were trailing real cobwebs across their horse’s stalls and laying eggs that millions of baby spiders might spring out of at any second.”

  “Ewww, that’s gross,” Mickey said.

  “So what do you think?” I said. “Does it look haunted enough?”

  We’d set up the pumpkin patch in a corner of the jump field and made it a sort of obstacle course. In the evening we would light the pumpkins and people could make their way over a tarp that had a skeleton sticking out from under it, ride through hanging noodles filled with cobwebs and spiders and then try to coax their horse through a maze of cones that had plastic body parts sticking out the top of them with fake blood. There was a foot that was particularly realistic.

  “If anyone gets their horse through this alive, it will be a miracle,” Mickey said, shaking her head.

  “You think it’s too much?” I said, flinging a spider at her.

  “I think you’re too much,” she shrieked as it hit her in the head and got tangled in her hair.

  “So I take it you won’t be bringing Hampton through then?” I said.

  “No way.” She shook her head.

  “Don’t you want to know what the prize is?” I said.

  “Wait, what? There is a prize? What is it?”

  “Let’s just say it’s something you’ll really want.”

  “Oh that’s not fair,” Mickey said, slumping down on the giant pumpkin. “If I’d known there was going to be a prize, I would have practiced.”

  “If you’d practiced then that would have been cheating,” I said. “And we wouldn’t have been allowed to let you enter.”

  “I suppose,” Mickey said.

  But I caught her taking Hampton out of his stall later in the day, walking him over to the haunted pumpkin patch and showing him the horrors that waited for him within. In fact a lot of people were.

  “Shouldn’t we stop them?” I asked Dad as we watched three people ride their ponies over to the noodles. They snorted and spooked and one girl was almost unseated. She clung off the side for a moment before finally scrabbling back into the saddle again.

  “I think it’s too late for that,” Dad said. “Besides, it’s all in good fun. That’s the point, remember?”

  The point may have been to have fun and celebrate Halloween at the barn in a way that helped us to forget all the real horrors that were unfolding around us but there was also the point of winning. I had entered Bluebird, Socks and Arion in the open jumper class. I wasn’t sure if my off the track Thoroughbred had it in him but lately he’d been jumping really well. In fact a couple of times he’d almo
st jumped me out of the tack and had proved that he could tackle the height. Now he just had to prove that he could tackle the course as a whole. Plus he’d been really good out on the cross country course. Of course I didn’t expect him to win and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to anyway. I wanted Bluebird to win. To prove to everyone that he was back on top. He needed that win and I needed it for him.

  Later, as I ran my clippers over Hashtag’s rich, dark coat, I told him that I wasn’t expecting him to jump tomorrow.

  “You’re getting there,” I told him. “But you’re not quite ready. You won’t be disappointed if you don’t jump, will you?”

  He stood there still as a statue as his thick fluffy hair fell to the ground.

  “But don’t worry,” I whispered. “I have another plan for you. And it is going to be super awesome.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  The truth was that I had a school assignment that was going to fit in perfectly with the Halloween costume I had planned for Hashtag and it wasn’t even really a costume. It was an exhibition of sorts.

  That evening I snuck down to the barn with my horse anatomy book and some non-toxic paint. And under the lights while everyone else was braiding or cleaning their tack, I painted bones and muscles and tendons on Hashtag like he was inside out. It took forever. I had to keep checking the book to make sure that I’d got everything right but by the time I was done, he looked like a real skeleton horse and I’d be able to take pictures for my anatomy assignment and get two jobs done at once. Maybe later Dad would even be able to take a video of me jumping him because that would look really cool and impress my teacher, who was pretty hard to impress in the first place.

  “Wow,” Faith said as she pressed her face against the bars. “He looks amazing.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “How is your costume coming along?”