by Kate Lattey
Pony Jumpers
#5
FIVE STRIDE LINE
Kate Lattey
1st Edition
Copyright 2015 © 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, 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.
* * *
“A horse doesn’t care how much you know
until he knows how much you care.”
– Pat Parelli
* * *
CHAPTER ONE
I sat back in the saddle and steadied Squib’s stride as he raced towards the next jump. I could feel the adrenalin pumping through his veins, his enthusiasm infecting me as he took off and I folded my body forward over the fence. Landing and looking left, making the tight turn that I’d walked with Katy, because she’d been out right before me and nailed it on Puppet. And anything Puppet could do, Squib could do better.
Except this time. Because where Puppet had made the turn effortlessly, slicing the final vertical and racing through the flags to stop the clock two seconds ahead of the field, Squib slipped. His hindquarters skidded out from underneath him and I felt his whole back end go down. I got a flash of grass and mud and then my foot was on the ground and Squib was sliding towards the jump, and there was nothing I could do to stop any of it.
“I’ve told you already what the problem is, so there’s no point muttering and complaining about being unlucky.” Katy swished the towel around in the bucket of hot water, then pulled it out and handed it to me. “Squeeze the water out of that until it’s just damp, then put it over his loins.”
I frowned at her as I wrung the towel out as much as I could into the bucket, my hands still tingling from the liniment I’d been rubbing on Squib’s strained hindquarters.
“So you’re saying just put shoes on him and all my problems will be solved?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Give him some studs so he can grip onto the ground and he doesn’t skid over on his arse whenever you cut a corner, and you’ll be firing on all cylinders and ready for Grand Prix in no time. That’s good, now drape it over his loins and cover it with the black plastic bag.” Katy lifted the rubbish bag in question and Squib rolled his eyes and leapt sideways in pretend terror.
“Easy buddy,” I told him, taking the bag from my friend and letting Squib sniff it with great suspicion before laying it over top of the towel. “What exactly is this supposed to do?”
“Hot compress. Draws the heat out and makes him feel better, like a heat pack,” Katy told me. “Black plastic holds the heat in. Now chuck this wool rug on top for insulation.” She watched approvingly as I added the heavy wool blanket to Squib’s back. “That’s the way. But I told you, it’s only going to happen again if you don’t do something to help him.”
“Maybe.”
Katy rolled her eyes. “It’s common sense, AJ. If you want to jump decent fences, you need studs. It’s not fair on Squib otherwise.” She stepped back and looked at her watch. “Give him ten minutes then check the towel, see how warm it is. If it’s cooled down too much, do it again. The farrier’s coming on Wednesday,” she continued seamlessly. “If you want to get Squib shod.”
I looked at my pony’s bare hooves, still unconvinced. I preferred the healthy look of his hooves without shoes nailed to them, and I’d read a lot of information on the internet about the evils of shoeing horses and all of the adverse effects it could have. But my reservations fell on deaf ears. I’d tried to have the conversation with Katy once before and she’d shrugged it off.
“You can believe what you read, or you can believe what years of experience have taught me and Mum,” she’d replied. “If you’re jumping off grass, especially the dodgy surfaces we have here, you need studs. It’s all very well if you’re competing overseas on groomed arenas with superb footing, but it’s different in New Zealand.”
Robin leaned over the stall next door and sniffed noses with Squib, who started enthusiastically licking Robin’s face in his usual peculiar way.
“Are you a pony or a dog?” I asked Squib as Katy wandered off to rug Lucas up for the night.
Robin nudged my elbow and I rubbed his cheek. He’d been a successful show hunter pony until he’d succumbed to navicular symptoms, which had been caused by poor shoeing. Katy had immediately changed farriers after his diagnosis, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that if he hadn’t been shod, he’d probably still be fine. I liked her new farrier Rick, because he’d agreed with me that Squib had good hooves and had never pressured me to put shoes on him, but I wondered what he’d say if I asked him directly whether Squib needed studs to jump high fences.
I knew that all the top riders used studs, but they worried me. I’d seen my brother Aidan hobbling around the house for months on crutches after he’d got a sprig caught during a rugby game once and had torn a ligament in his knee, and the thought of something like that happening to Squib terrified me. Something similar had happened to Lucas, Katy’s other currently injured pony who was recovering from a ligament strain incurred on a show jumping course. As far as I was concerned, those were both excellent reasons not to risk shoeing Squib, not to mention the fact he could get pricked by a nail, or be shod badly, or pull a shoe half off and stand on it, embedding it into his hoof or the back of his fetlock (I’d seen pictures online, and they were horrific).
Then again, I thought as Squib turned to look curiously at the hot towel treatment on his back, maybe the status quo wasn’t working anymore either.
* * *
“Fourteen days to go!” Katy greeted me at school the following morning.
“Thirteen and a half, actually.”
“Fine, if you want to be pedantic.”
We were counting down the days until school got out for Christmas, which couldn’t come soon enough for either of us. Not just because we would get almost six weeks of holidays, or because of the inevitable presents on Christmas Day itself, but because as soon as school was out we would be packing up the ponies and heading to the Taupo Christmas Classic for four days of show jumping, and I couldn’t wait.
“How’s Squib this morning?” I asked Katy, wishing that my pony lived outside my bedroom window instead of hers. But my family lived on a small section in the middle of town, and there was no chance of keeping Squib in the backyard. Having him at Katy’s was much better than grazing him on the Pony Club grounds, which I’d done until recently, because she was always there to look after him, and her mum Deb was a walking encyclopaedia of horse care. I’d learned more about riding, training and caring for Squib during the past three months than in the whole year prior to meeting them, even though we didn’t always see eye to eye. Like on the shoeing debate, which Katy picked up again as we lined up for Monday morning assembly.
“He’s fine. Looks better, and he’s moving more freely. Give him a couple more days off and he should be fine for Manfeild this weekend. Did you decide yet whether you want Rick to shoe him?”
I shook my head, shuffling forward as the line of students edged into the auditorium. “I was going to talk to him on Wednesday,” I explained. “See what he thinks.”
“You’ll have to do it before that,” Katy replied. “He’s got his book to organise and if he’s just trimming it’ll take him twenty minutes, but if he’s got to stick shoes on and tap stud holes then it’ll be more like an hour. More, if Squib decides to be an idiot. Which we both know is highly lik
ely.”
I jabbed her in the side with my elbow, and she winced. “Ow!”
“That’s what you get for not having any meat on your bones. If you were a pony I’d have you on two feeds a day, fatten you up a bit.”
“Mum’s been trying to fatten me for years, but it hasn’t worked yet,” Katy replied as we shuffled our way into the auditorium, the line ahead of us still moving without much purpose.
“Has she tried adding a cup of oil to your feed?” I asked Katy, and she pulled a face.
“Yuck. Don’t go giving her any ideas!”
We finally sat down, and I crossed my legs and looked down at them. Squib and I had the same equivalent build – solid and strong, slightly curvier than entirely necessary, but with more muscle than fat. We were also both reasonably fit and getting fitter, although I wasn’t ever going to keep up with Katy, who ate like a sparrow on a diet and ran five kilometres every morning before school. How she had the energy to get through the day – let alone keep several ponies in work and compete every weekend – I had no idea.
“Are studs expensive?” I asked Katy, trying to remember how much money was left in my bank account after I’d bought Squib’s new jumping boots.
“Nah. And I’ve got loads, you can borrow some. The shoes’ll set you back though, so be prepared for that.”
I asked her how much, and my eyes boggled at the cost. “Seriously?”
“You get what you pay for,” Katy shrugged. “You want your pony to stay sound and be able to jump Grand Prix someday? You pay for shoes and studs. If you want to keep pottering around at a metre-ten, do whatever you like.”
My mind wandered as our high school principal stepped up to the lectern and started reminding us about final exams and assessments and how we had to strive to set ourselves up for next year and what we should be thinking about for our futures. The whole school was packed into the auditorium, and most of what she was saying was irrelevant to my year anyway, so I zoned out and stopped listening.
Three rows ahead of me, a girl was sitting up straight in her chair, a long blonde ponytail hanging between her shoulder blades. Unlike me, her attention was intently focused on the speaker, and I watched my sister as she nodded along with the principal’s comments, clearly agreeing with everything being said. She raised one hand to a lock of hair that was hanging forward of her ponytail and started twisting it rapidly around her fingers, a nervous tic she’d had for years and had never quite broken free of.
I was about to shift my gaze when I noticed something. One of the boys sitting in the row behind her was twirling his own finger around next to his ear, mimicking my sister’s movements but turning it into that global gesture for ‘crazy person’. I glared at the back of the kid’s dark head, but he clearly didn’t feel my death ray vision because he carried on, as his mates snickered and giggled at his terrible sense of humour. I was too far away to do anything about it, but now I couldn’t stop staring. Alexia was oblivious, of course, because she barely noticed what was going on around her at the best of times, but my blood was rising and I was getting madder and madder as I watched.
As soon as assembly was dismissed, I was on my feet and determined to give those boys a piece of my mind. But I got held up by the slowpokes sitting next to me, who were too busy gossiping to notice that I was trying to climb over them, and they gave me filthy looks as I shoved my way past. I could hear Katy telling me to wait up, but I ignored her, figuring that she’d catch up with me soon enough.
Outside in the warm morning air, students were congregating in clusters, moving even more slowly out of the building than they had been going in, because getting to first period was never high on anyone’s priority list. I looked around for Lexi, but I couldn’t see her. She was probably the only student who did care about being on time to class, and she absolutely hated being in a crush of people. She’d have booked it out of there as quick as she could, and would be long gone. The boys mocking her had melted into the crowd and become unidentifiable once more.
“Jeez AJ, where’s the fire?” Katy was red-faced, having been forced to shove her way through the thick mass of students to get to me. “Anyone would think you were desperate to get to English this morning, but I know that can’t be the case.”
“I was looking for Lexi,” I told her, filling her in on what I’d seen. She pulled a face.
“They sound like idiots. Was she upset?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think she even noticed.”
“Well then.” Katy shrugged, and started walking in the direction of our English classroom. “I wouldn’t freak out too much.”
“Why? Just because she didn’t realise she was being made fun of doesn’t mean it’s okay for someone to be doing it,” I replied. “I’m worried about her, that’s all.”
Katy nodded sympathetically, but I knew that she didn’t really understand. She was an only child, and had no idea what it was like to live with siblings, let alone one with special needs. It was being labelled ASD now – Autism Spectrum Disorder, formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome – but whatever you wanted to call it, it amounted to the fact that Lexi wasn’t quite like everyone else. Her lack of social skills and occasional frustrated outbursts had always made her an easy target for bullies, and for years my brothers and I had been vigilant against them. But we couldn’t be there all the time, and even though Lexi was sixteen now, I still felt protective of her. And I couldn’t help being concerned. When Lexi got upset, she snapped, and although she was academically a very good student, she didn’t need any more disruptive episodes on her school record. My parents were already struggling to keep up with the extra outside tuition they paid for each week, because whoever was in charge of the school funding had decided that Lexi’s high test scores meant she didn’t require a teacher aide any longer, which hadn’t been the case at all and had led to one disaster after another. It had been a long year, but it was almost over, and we were all looking forward to the break.
Katy nudged me as we walked, then nodded at a group of older boys over to our right, standing around and trying to look cool. The tallest, blondest one in the group was my brother Anders, who Katy was more than slightly obsessed with, on account of his annoyingly good looks and somewhat charming personality (although I still maintained that he was harder to live with than he was to look at).
“Yes, Anders is still alive,” I reassured her without stopping.
“Don’t you want to tell him what happened?” Katy asked, her interest level in Lexi’s situation skyrocketing when it meant an excuse to talk to Anders. He must’ve felt her eyes on him because he looked in our direction, and she waved.
“Nah, we’ll be late for class,” I told Katy, grabbing her arm and dragging her past him. “I’ll fill him in tonight at home.”
“Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug, pulling her arm free of my grip as we stepped into the shadows of the school building.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully, and my mind was full of Squib when I climbed onto the bus, wishing I was going to Katy’s to see him instead of straight home to study. But it was Monday, which was my designated homework day. Now that I was away competing with Katy most weekends, my parents wanted to be sure that I was staying on top of my schoolwork, so they’d decreed Monday as a horse-free day, no exceptions. I hadn’t exactly been in a position to bargain with them, given that unlike Katy’s mother, my parents couldn’t care less whether I ever went to a show again in my life. But I had to admit that so far, their plan was working. I got more done on Mondays than the entire rest of the week put together, because by the time I dragged myself home after riding Squib (and usually one other of Katy’s ponies to help her out) every other week day, I was too tired and hungry to get much homework done. And despite my best intentions, studying while we were at shows had never been successful at all.
The most inconvenient thing about having to study on Mondays was that Anders had rugby training, so I couldn’t bug him for a ride home to avoid
the bus. Well I could have, but by the time I’d sat around waiting for him to finish training and get changed and drive home, I’d wasted almost two hours of potential study time, which was definitely not worth it.
I sat down on the bus and pulled out a textbook, flipping through the pages of notes and trying to get a jumpstart on studying so that I’d have some free time to research the benefits and perils of shoeing horses on the internet tonight when I was done. The bus was noisy and full, and just before we started moving off a large girl sat down next to me, pinning me into my seat. I forced myself to concentrate on my book, but found myself reading the same lines of text over and over without comprehension. Then I heard my sister’s voice from a couple of rows back.
“Don’t do that!”
If I’d been a pony, my ears would’ve swivelled backwards at the sound and my head would’ve shot up. I couldn’t move my ears, but I shifted sideways in my seat as much as possible and craned my neck, looking behind me. I could just see the side of Lexi’s head, her long ponytail swishing from side to side.
“I didn’t do anything,” a boy’s voice said earnestly, his attempt at integrity shattered by his friends’ sniggering laughter.
“Yes you did. You kicked my seat,” Lexi told him angrily.
“No he didn’t,” said another one. “You must’ve imagined it.”
“Yeah, maybe you dreamed it,” interjected a third.
I could sense Lexi’s frustration building. It drove her crazy when people lied to her. She wasn’t really any good at reading people’s expressions or body language, and she didn’t always get sarcasm, but she lost the plot when she knew that she was being blatantly lied to.
The bus slowed down, and I hoped the boys would get off at this stop, but they didn’t. Neither did the girl pinning me against the window, so I was trapped there, helpless as the doors slid closed again and the taunting continued.
